sofasurfers

So I’m now on my train journey from Novosibirsk to Ulan Ude - we left at 1am, it’s now 3am and we arrive on the afternoon of the 24th - it’s a good 1,000 miles.. I say ‘we’ for I have made some new friends. So I walk into my berth to find two burly middle-aged russkis on the bottom bunk - Ollie and I have been travelling second class (4-berth), taking the top bunks so our nickables are less nickable. I enter my first solo journey a bit anxious. But the signs are not all bad. There’s no vodka on the little table for starters - just a box of Lipton Taste of London teabags and some sugar cubes. ‘Chai?’, says one, gruffly. ‘Da!’ And so begins a most unlikely yet cockle-warming friendship. Exchanging my increasingly clammy dictionary between us, from top bunk to bottom bunk, I learn that Sacha (the Defender, as he calls himself) drives a truck and comes from Dikson, a port on Russia’s north coast. Does my mother not worry about me? Well, I explain, she’s off on her own adventure, to Antarctica. It’s in our genes. How long are you away? Do you have a Kazakh dictionary? I’ll buy one. Do I like the countryside? Would I like to be a visitor touristski to Dikson? Da! In summer maybe. You get the picture - that cultural curiosity and a genuine sense of humanity keeps us up long past bedtime. Perhaps I’m being naïve? Possibly, but given the earnestness of dictionary examination, and the long considered pauses before asking, ‘but what about…?, this feels more like fatherly concern (have you eaten? Have these wafers! No thanks. Have these wafers! Ok!).
If nothing else, being on my own has seen me speak more Russian. In two hours than in the rest of the trip put together. Off to bed now, feeling not so alone.*

* That I am so puzzled by my berth buddies’ instinctive hospitality strikes me that it’s me (a sorry product of London) who is uncivilised here; Londoners don’t behave like this because it’s each man for himself.