Leaving Warsaw was quite upsetting. I'd just begun to get used to the shush-shush of Polish and to the pronunciation of words when it was time to leave. The first sign of ill-portent was the hunt for stamps. No one in Poland sells stamps- only the office will help you. Then the ticket displayed the departure time of the train as MOSCOW TIME. This is an urban myth- there is no such thing.. the train leaves at the displyed time but it is, as one might logically expect, the time of the country the train is actually in. After running at a million miles per hour to catch our train to Moscow, we arrived at the station on ly to fid that we were two hours early! So the only thing left to do was to have a cup of coffee. We sat upstairs to while away the minutes, attempting to drink pseudo-non filtered coffee in glass mugs. These are served preferably at approximately the temperature of the sun so you're simultaneously straining coffee grains with your teeth and enjoying the sensation of the top layer of your tongue melting away. If anything, coffee makes you look forward to a 24 hour train ride even more when your digestive system is noticeably more roasted.
After being serenaded by a man playing a chair for coins and promising that I'd be back in 2010 for chopin's bicentennary festival, I waved goodbye to Warsaw and stepped on the train for Belarus.
The mysterious feature about leaving European railways for easterly travel is that the wheels have to be changed. The tracks are narrower in Russia which requires a complicated parking system, lifting the carriage on enormous hydraulic jacks and attaching a new set of wheels to the base. This whole process takes 3 hours during which you move forwards about a mile, then the train reverses, stops, moves forward again, reverses a little, starts, stops, starts. People get on- mostly middle aged ladies trying to convince you to buy 120% proof vodka from tattered plastic bags. Apparently it's your last chance to buy piwo, wodka etc.. before Russia. Belarus is on the wagon- presumably not one which needs its wheels changed.
With only a Lonely Planet guide to russian to guide us, Charlie and I tried to translate two complicated registration documents and a customs declaration which beat us in its complexity. None of it was in our limited dictionary- apart from 'baggage' and 'citizen' and bizarrely, 'many children'. One interesting point to note is that as friendly as Poland was, it mis-prepared us for Belarus (and indeed, Russia). The people on this side of the border are horrifically unfriendly. My attempts at saying hello, thank you etc.. in (probably incorrectly pronounced) Russian was met with steely glares and unrecognition. The only person who proved to be slightly friendly was the overly drunk man in the next door cabin who came up to us, talked at us in Russian and upon my attempts to find the phrase I wanted to convey incomprehension in my phrasebook, laughed and said something along the lines of "don't look it up, feel the Russian, understand the Russian in your head". Easier said than done.. He spoke louder and clearer just in case parodying a Brit communicating with 'them foreigners' would help but alas the 'beat the person with the volume of your voice' technique doesn't work for Russian either. As Charlie and I sat there in miserable incomprehension, he kept swaying towards us, breathing 'Prost' and 'Nishe' on us, peppering our faces with beer tinged spittle hoping perhaps, that we'd been enlightened since his last attempt at communication. I'd reached the point of desperate boredom of this game when his jolly friend came along to rescue us and physically drag him back to his own cabin.
Our first night sleeping on the train passed remarkably well. It did feel like what I'd imagine trying to sleep on a bucking bronco with whooping cough might be like but snatches of sleep aren't a complete impossibility. With two hours before Minsk, we looked out of our darkened carriage into the pitch black Belarussian countryside to be met with a heavy blanket of stars, the plough, draco and auriga were clearly visible and if you really squished your face against the window- even cassiopeia could be seen, an extra bright cluster in the velvet blackness.
Tired from all our days adventures and from the stress of potential altercations, we decided to sleep once we reached Minsk. Which, from the train, is disappointingly nothing to write home about. Clambering up to the top bunk and wrapping myself in the scratchy wool blanket 1st class offers you, I settled down to sleep. Tomorrow will be Moscow, and then a further adventure still.
