Siberia, At Last

We crossed the border into Siberia overnight last night, and according to our guidebook we’ve spent the day travelling over basically frozen swamplands. All I know is there have been lots of pretty snowy plains and birch trees.

We’ve passed by quite a few towns and villages, and the occasional city. The Russian countryside has some pretty neat-looking cottages.

Our provisions of bread, jam, tea, juice, and oatmeal made for quite a satisfying breakfast. We slept late so ended up combining lunch and dinner, after supplementing our supplies from the platform vendors at one of our stops. We found a wheel of assorted cheesy spreads (our dictionary seemed to indicate that it was butter, but it was definitely more of the cheese variety).

And Cale was particularly pleased with the sausage we purchased, which combined with the cheesy spread made for pretty good sandwich fixings.

Our instant mashed potatoes were also a success. Thankfully we didn’t have to measure anything – just fill to the line with hot water and stir. They certainly weren’t my mom’s homemade garlic mashed potatoes, but not bad for instant food.

Every compartment is outfitted with the ever-crucial bottle opener, installed on the underside of the table.

Late in the day we caught a glimpse of the front of the train as we were going round a bend.

Right around sunset, we had a 50 minute stop in Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city, so we putzed around the platform for a bit taking pictures.

That’s our train behind us. We were trying to get the name in the picture but cut off the last letter. In English, it’s Yenisey, named after the river in Krasnoyarsk, our next destination.

Oh, and we actually crossed two time zones (I think I said we were only crossing one), so with daylight savings now we’re +11 hours from the US East coast. Here’s a one-minute video showing a pretty good snapshot of what’s been passing by our window.