Day 328 revisited – Sat Sept 26 – “I wish they’d taken my wallet” or Why the Russia posts have no pictures

Considering how long our trip is, we have done a great job keeping track of our things. I lose more in Canada in an average year than I've lost on this trip - so far, our losses have amounted to small things: one bank card, one neck-cooling gadget called a Cobber, a pair of underwear, various pens. It's not much of a breadcrumb-trail - we packed well, we packed light and when repacking to leaving a place we can quickly scan a room and tell when something's missing. We watch our wallets in crowds, watch each other's backs in uncertain situations and know the quickest way to travel through a busy sidewalk is to split up and meet on the other side.

On day 328, we do the latter. We're in front of the Kazan Cathedral, a typical Sunday, working our away around the bus shelters and pedestrians. Busses pull up, unload, reload and leave. I find the quickest way through the crowd and stop to wait for Pierre on the other side.

I'm used to killing time waiting for Pierre - we spend a lot of time waiting and getting just the right shot - so at first I'm not surprised when he doesn't appear at first. I wait 10 seconds, 20 seconds, let my mind wander and then find I've been waiting a lot longer than usual. I flicker through my file-o-fax of reactions: irritated (what could possibly be so interesting to photograph?), curious (could it really be that good?), confused (is he waiting for me further ahead?)... Eventually, Pierre strides out of the crowd and for a split second it's hard to read his face: it's a cross between teenage-temper-tantrum and the expression on my brothers' toddler faces in our family's beloved we-just-kicked-our-favourite-ball-into-the-ocean photo.

He flashes the empty bag on his hip toward me. "They got the camera."

The pickpockets are long gone, but we walk around to see if there's anything we can do. Every fifth person in St. Petersburg seems to wear a uniform - soldiers, sailors, police officers - and the meanings of these uniforms are a mystery to us. We have no idea who to talk to on the street.

We speak to a couple of men in uniform that seem to be responsible for the Kazan Cathedral. Pierre explains the situation: 3 guys in black jackets (at least 2 in front, 1 to his right) stop walking in front of Pierre in the crowd, which blocks him from going forward (guys in black jackets), left (bus stop booth) or left (guy in black jacket).

At first it seems like an 'oops, pardon me' sort of situation but after a few seconds he starts to get suspicious, then the camera bag jostles...and when he reaches back the bag is already empty. It takes only a few seconds but the camera is nowhere in sight, probably already passed off to someone else like a sneak pass in football. Pierre looks at the thugs, the thugs look back, no one's holding anything and there's no one to get mad at. Players in the scene include “innocent bystander” who tells Pierre in English that the thief ran the other way down the street. Moments later, everyone's dispersed onto buses and into crowds and it's over.

The guys in uniform listen to our story, but they can't help us - it's not the type of thing they're responsible for, it seems. We hurry here and there, hoping we'll see someone that Pierre recognizes, or see our camera. We ask people directions to the nearest police station. A couple of non-uniformed employees come out from behind the counter and talk to us in the lobby. Can you tell us what happened? Did you see the men? Do you have insurance? They write us a letter that we could give to an insurance company if we had insurance on our camera. They see this almost every day.

Losing the camera is not our biggest problem - our problem is that we haven't backed up the pictures since leaving Huizhou. We've just lost Beijing and all of Russia, which works out to several hundred photos and approximately 2 months of our trip. We have a grip on reality - we realize we haven't lost a person or each other, and we're both safe and healthy.

Still, it blows.

We feel pretty stupid. This pretty stupid feeling lasts for quite a while and shows no sign of stopping once we get home. It's pretty constant the first night, only slightly less so the next few days and still kicks us in the ass every so often a months later. We feel stupid... for not having backed up the pictures...for losing the camera on a day when we didn't use it...for having extra water in our bags that we didn't drink which kept us from storing it in the pack like we often do at the end of a day... And so on.

On top of that, we think of specific pictures that we'll never see again. This happens every few minutes in the beginning : "Remember the one of the guard in front of the Forbidden Palace?" "Remember the mountain valley in Arshan?" We cringe again, and feel stupid.

After the 5th or 6th time this happens, I decide we need to be more proactive - we sit down and spend an hour or so writing down every photo that we can remember and that we're really sad to lose. We think of a picture, feel bad about it, then think of a new one and feel bad about it too. The mosaics in the cathedral, the Lenin head in Ulan Ude...Not a fun way to spend our time but we get most of the feeling sorry for ourselves out of the way, and are then able to simply deal with feeling stupid and angry. Plus, that way we have a list of pictures to retake someday when we come back.

We put up a poster near the place the camera was swiped - all we want is our memory card back:


We only have a few days to re-take photos of St.Petersburg. Pierre takes out our little point-and-shoot Canon Powershot to get a few photos of our apartment building...

...the view from the kitchen (the Neva river is just behind this white building)...

...as well as our cozy, furnished, and usually messy bedroom...


...and the kitchen:

He gets a few photos of the pillars of the Kazan Cathedral...


...the Church of the Spilled Blood where Pierre had originally gotten gorgeous pictures of the interior's floor-to-cathedral-ceiling mosaics.

Damn.

He reshoots the exterior of the Isaac Cathedral...

...various street scenes...



... and tries a few shots of the canals that carve rings through the interior of the city:

He even gets a little of his sense of humour back.


For me, most of the sting fades over the next few weeks - it still bothers Pierre months later, usually when we see a picture of a landmark in Beijing or Russia.

He looks, assesses and humphs. "Ours was better."

Days 323 to 332 – Mon Sept 21 to Wed Sept 30 – Week 4+ in St. P

Week four brings more lessons at the school, this time ending off with a certificate awarded for my time there (lower intermediate!). We say goodbye and thank you to all of the staff, and take a few more days to explore the city. Pierre does a lot of exploring on his own as well and visits the museum across from the Hermitage (which is not of the Hermitage, but one of a family of Hermitage museums - confusing) to check out the exhibits - as always, it's very large, very impressive.

Together we travel to Peterhof and make a point to hunt down each of the fountains that sound interesting - a few are activated by trick rocks. You walk by it, accidentally triggering a sensor, and a few seconds later it goes off. It doesn't really catch tourists unaware since the spots are pretty popular and the soaked stones and screaming kids give it away. During my last visit, these trick fountains were covered in tiny children running around in their bathing suits - their parents had brought them to the park to enjoy the fountains and cool off from the summer heat.

This time, it's teenagers who can't get enough of it. They walk past us, dripping with water as they head away to meet their school groups or as they head back to the trick fountain for another dousing. The inside of the palace itself is smaller than I remember, and very oddly organized. There are two rooms where we are not allowed to stop and look - we are shuffled through by the "gatekeeper" before we realize this, and then aren't allowed to walk back through the room to look. Pierre sneaks back in anyway and does his best to look until he's done looking. The gatekeeper is not amused.

Within St. P, we take time to see the Yusupov Palace, which is infamous for being the place where Prince Yusupov tried to kill (several times in a row) Rasputin before he finally succeeded. The house of one of the only former private residence that we visit, and it's beautiful, from top to bottom. It was not destroyed during the war and was kept in pretty good shape during the Soviet years, and so it's all original work, and not a reconstruction. The wealth of the family is pretty obvious in every detail (including the miniature Baroque-type theater in the basement, complete with tiny orchestra pit) - they might have been even wealthier than the Tsar's family at the time. The place is a bit more bare-bones than it was during its glory years (the art collection of paintings and tapestries now belongs to the Hermitage) but the detailing that couldn't be removed - the woodwork, the plaster work and carvings - are really impressive. (there's a site with great photos of the interior here)

After a few false starts (closed for renos and holidays), we finally visit the Zoological Museum and get to see the collection of mummified mammoth carcasses:


They're one of the many really unique things that only St. P seems to have, which is why we've been so stubborn about trying to make it to the museum. The mammoths (4 in total) are a little leathery but in good shape - the rest of the exhibit is good, but some of the displays are a bit bizarre. What's best described as Vultures Eating Man's Best Friend is a personal favourite...


...as well as the displays of house pets...

...though the cat mummies behind the stuffed house cats are pretty cool.


We have a few final visit with our hosts, Tatiana and Viktor and later get together with Sergey and his friend Grigor for drinks at Loft Proekt Etazhi - a series of galleries and restaurants hosted in what used to be a bread factory (as far as I know). It's a suitably funky last night for the arty city of St. P. At the end of the night, we head home for the last time, and do some final packing.

Days 316 to 322 – Mon Sept 14 to Sun Sept 20 – Week 3 in St. P

Pierre's been in the country now for about 6 weeks and has a good grasp of the Russian alphabet. Reading signs is one of his favourite pastimes. More often than not, it's trendy for signs to use "international" words that are common in English. It's not unusual to hear Pierre sound something out ("Kom. Pyoo. Terr") only to discover it's not really Russian. ("Kompyooterr. Oh - computer"). Some of them crack us up. "Business lunch" sounds like biznes lanch. "Snack" is snek.

During my class days this week, Pierre stays in and works at home or goes to the islands in the north of St. P to explore. Together we visit the Kunstkamera which is infamous for its babies- in-formaldehyde-in-jars exhibit, but which really should be best known for its ethnographic exhibits (in my opinion), especially the one on the Inuit. 100 year old waterproof jackets sewn from the intestines of whales are by far some of the coolest things I've ever seen. We also take a trip to the Russian Museum, which is a lot less sprawling than the Hermitage, but still huge. We make it through about half of it one afternoon and never make it back for the second half. The wing with the art from the 1900s is under renovation during our visit, unfortunately, so Pierre doesn't get to see the amazing collection of Soviet art. Next time.

The main event, when it comes to museums, is still the Hermitage. With several hundred exhibit halls (approx 400) it covers prehistoric time, the ancient world and carries on through to the start of the 19th century. It's very overwhelming and very easy to get disoriented in its halls. You can spot the tourists that have only enough time on their bus tour to drop by for an hour or so, because they look very impressed and exhausted all at once. Pierre makes a point of visiting every hall at least once, even if it's only to walk through it. By his 5th visit, he almost knows how to find his way around without the map. Almost.

Days 309 to 315 – Mon Sept 7 to Sun Sept 13 – Week 2 in St. P

By week 2 we're pretty well set up in St. Petersburg. We know where to find a good, cheap lunch in the main parts of town. We have a room of our own in an apartment in the southeast of St. Petersburg - a retired couple whose daughter lives abroad are renting their extra room by the week, and we're lucky enough to find it. It's near a major transit line, and across the street from the grocery store. Breakfast is usually porridge at home, lunch is usually in the city at a restaurant and we share the kitchen with Tatiana and Viktor in the evenings when we have our last meal of the day.

We've been lucky enough to get our hands on a couple of student cards - my comes legitimately with my language course, while Pierre (the non-student) receives his courtesy of someone-who -shall-not-be-named-because-it-could-theoretically-get-them-into-trouble's generosity. It really is a generous gift - museum prices have gone up since the last time I was here. A trip to the Hermitage costs about 12 CAN$ a visit each - with this card, each visit is free. Other museums are anywhere from one-half to one-fifth the regular foreign-tourist price.

St. Petersburg has a staggering number of museums - some are small, like the Museum of Bread (which we don't get a chance to visit). Some are larger, like the Museum of the History of the Political Police and the State Photography Centre. Apartments of famous people have been turned into museums, and we visit Pushkin's last apartment where he died after his duel.

Some of the women working the front cashes ("kassa") and the tour guides are old school Russians, not so much about coddling the tourists, and not afraid to take down a tourist a peg or two if they use a camera flash at the wrong moment or fall behind the pack or try to walk backwards through the exhibit. Others are milder and friendlier, and ply guests with photocopies of English guides to the exhibits which they later collect at the end of the tour.

Many are even gracious when they find themselves hosting us unexpectedly. Pierre and I walk into the Pushkin Children's Library (or, as their website says, "Central Children's library by the name of Pushkin") on a whim, and are greeted by one of the head librarians. I explain that we're just tourists in town and that I really love libraries and was just curious to see the inside of theirs. She takes us on a short tour of their reading halls and multimedia rooms, and arranges us a private visit to the rare books collection.

They are a Pushkin museum - if we hadn't figured that our from the plaque out front then we would have probably guessed it from a) the collection of first-edition Pushkin printings that they have, as well as books owned by Pushkin and b) the outward appearance of the rare book curator. He's a small man, in his late 30s, with porkshop-style sideburns and a slightly frizzy styling to his balding head that is very definitely an homage to Mr. P himself. He gives us a set of white cotton gloves to protect the pages from the natural oils on our fingers and lets us flip through some of the miniature books. The ones that stick out are the the earring books (with tiny tiny pages you can actually turn) and, our favourite, the book that looks to be simply a 1"x1" white notebook with blank pages...until the curator shines a black light on it, illuminating the text and illustrations: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.

Outside in the rest of the city, St. Petersburg has changed in some good ways. People seem less desperately poor, though there are clearly some that are still finding it harder than others. Fashion-wise, the streets don't look like something from an early 80s movie, and people come across as healthier and happier. There are more food stores and they shelves are well-stocked. The stray animal problem is under control - there are not many homeless dogs loose in the city and we don't come across any of the packs that were common in the mid-90s. Most importantly, the social safety net seems more firmly in in place for the orphans and homeless kids - no more groups of hungry, neglected tweens eating out of trash cans and trying not to bring too much attention to themselves.

The kids we do meet are extremely polite. A couple of 10 year old boys stop to talk to us while Pierre tries to get a shot of a WWII plaque from an odd angle on the ground. "What is he doing?" I explain to them in broken Russian the type of shot he's trying to get. "Oh - would it be ok if we looked?" Pierre shows them the screen. "It's really beautiful. Thanks for showing us." And they're on their way.

Another day, on a crowded bus, we stand next to a small boy of maybe kindergarten age is sitting on his mother's lap. At one point he leans over to us: "Excuse me," he says in Russian, "could you please let us pass? We need to get off at the next stop. Thank you so much." He bumps us lightly as he's stepping down. "Oh! Excuse me, I'm sorry," he says and continues to the door. Pierre has no idea what the kid is saying, but even he can tell that the kid is incredibly articulate. He says every sound and letter perfectly. His mother doesn't seem like she's coaching him at all - in fact, she barely seems to notice how precocious her kid is. Pierre and I vote him, hands down, the politest, smallest, most self-possessed kid we've ever met.

Class starts on Day 309 and my schooldays tend to all follow a similar pattern. I catch the metro at 8 am, then transfer to the green line after a few stops, walk through Sadovaya market then over and along a canal until I reach the courtyard of my school at 9:15. I set up in my classroom and my teacher and I work together until 1:00 when I eat my sandwich, study in the resource room until around 3 or 5, and either meet Pierre for sightseeing or head home on the metro. Most travelling is saved for days when I have no lessons.

This week, our big tour is to the town of Pushkin (also known as Tsarskoe Selo, or the Tzar's Village) which has the large and lovely Catherine Palace - sky-blue and white on the outside with gilded detailing and extensive grounds. Palaces in Russia are a bit odd to visit because, along with the staggeringly rich rooms and portraits are often photos of the rubble that was all that remained of the palace after World War II. It seems as though the art and furniture was hidden or saved as much as possible, but the building itself has often been rebuilt almost from scratch. It was a matter of pride for the Russians, a kind of a big eff-you to the Nazis - in fact, Stalin destroyed one of the palaces himself just so that the Nazis couldn't crow over being the ones to destroy it.

The Room To See here is the Amber Room - it "disappeared" for years and it's fate wasn't known until decades later - apparently it was moved elsewhere, at which time it was burned in a fire by accident. The people responsible for taking care of the room were terrified of being punished by Stalin for it and so made up a story about it "disappearing," most likely due to theft. (Presumably they lived.) A lot of time and effort has gone into recreating the room - it's definitely impressive but it's not our favourite room. It's a bit gaudy.

When we're not at school or sightseeing, we hang out at our place and work. Pierre plays guitar, I study, and we relax with episodes of the American TV show known in Russia as Shpyonka - we translate this into "Spy Girl" (more commonly known in North America as "Alias"). I consider this a kind of studying - Pierre and I watch the dubbed version and turn on the English subtitles. Jennifer Garner looks very Russian when dubbed in Russian.

Days 304 to 308 – Wed Sept 2 to Sun Sept 6 – Week 1 in St. P

We're couchsurfing for our first few days in St. Petersburg, and we manage to find our way to Sergey's house fairly easily. With all of our bags, it's a bit of a slog and the lack of sleep from the night before makes us less than our usual charming selves, but we have a chance to meet everyone and settle in before heading out for the day. Sergey's daughter is small and sweet and doesn't say much to us, but she curates a little museum exhibition for us, one piece at a time, running back and forth to where she keeps her treasures. Here is my sticker, here is my book. This is my paper star.

Our first day outside in the city finds us crossing off items on our now-familiar first-day list. Walked too much - check. Ate lunch at deceptively expensive bistro - check. Discovered that many sites are closed on Mondays - check.

Our next few days are much more fruitful - Sergey generously agrees to register our passports for the entire month of September, and so we have 4 glorious, paperwork-free weeks ahead of us. After the hour-long form filling session is finished at the post office, we walk over to the Peter and Paul Fortress for a whirlwind tour. Originally built to defend St. Petersburg against Sweden back in the 1700s, its walls now house an odd mishmash of printmaking workshops, art galleries, space museums and such. Along the south wall, we walk past people sunbathing on the bank of the Neva in the cool September air, and we weave through the remains of a sand sculpture competition.

A second couchsurfing guest, Alex from France, arrives a day later and Pierre and I join him and Sergey for a bit of exploring. We have a drink at the Literary Cafe where Pushkin had his last meal before being killed in a duel. Afterwards, we work our way to a bar called Fish Fabrique - I remember this bar from my first trip to St. P. At that time, it was a small dingy student bar in a more or less abandoned building where if you still had a drink when the metro closed down and the bridges went up, you could sleep there, sitting at a table, until the city woke up again and you could go on your way. Now, it's changed - the spirit seems to have stayed the same, though the Fish Fabrique club has moved from an upper floor to a lower one. The decor is still a jumble of wooden benches with a scuffed up stage in one corner for a small band to play on. The rest of the building has taken off and been developed artsy-style - now, rather than being a derelict empty building, it's a kind of anti-establishment artist's collective: sculptures in the courtyards, galleries, thrift-store decorated coffee shops and bars on every floor. Kind of like what you'd get if you took a funky/art-student neighbourhood in Montreal and tipped it on its side to make it an apartment building.

We wander up a few floors, poking our heads in here and there, until we find a cafe the size of a very small apartment with flowery wall paper on the walls, a jumble of couches and kitchen chairs. Here we can order herbal tea and a few pints of draft and sit and play chess and checkers and talk. Most of the patrons are early university age, very earnest, be-goateed and wearing thin sweaters. The four of us visit amongst ourselves and make plans for the next day.

We decide to make one more stop that night at the other end of town, in another underground bar with a bit of live music. The spot is famous for being a spot where Viktor Tsoi worked and played when he lived in St. Petersburg in the 80s. His band Kino - and he himself especially - seem to hold a cult status with young Russians the way a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain would be to a young North American (minus the drugs and suicide: Tsoi died in a car accident).

A couple of young Russian girls find us - they have just moved to St Petersburg from Siberia for university, and they are drunk with beer and drunk with love for their new home. Everywhere they go in this city there's art, music and life. They are everywhere in the bar - they take photos with the people on stage, they take photos with us, they laugh when they say a word wrong in English, and laugh harder when they say it right. They are so happy, as if they just got out of some monochrome crazy house and are living in technicolor. They are so happy to be out. I can relate to them a little. I grew up in an isolated, small-small town well before the Internet reached it, so I can understand their giddiness. Trust me, it's there even when they're not drunk.

They invite me to stand in the doorway of a side room with them where we listen to a couple of musicians play some Victor Tsoi. Pierre and Alex don't quite know what to make of them, and get a bit nervous when the girls start yelling (in Russian) at the musicians while they're playing on stage. The musicians yell back, the girls yell back more... to Pierre and Alex it probably sounds like the musicians are trying to shut the girls up, but I translate the little I understand and tell them it's more like a shouty conversation. Like shouting Amen or Hallelujah in a church while a preacher's shouting. The girls are sweet, two kittens with an endless ball of string (string!). Tomorrow they will be very hung over kittens. We say goodbye, and Pierre and I leave well before the last metro - we want a bit of sleep before we start all over again the next day.

Alex has only a few days to see St. Petersburg, and so he and Sergey have planned a whirlwind tour of several sites the next day. I use the word whirlwind with Sergey a lot, and it's not because I can't be bothered to use a thesaurus. Sergey thinks fast, talks fast, moves fast, in several languages, all without ever giving the impression of being frantic. He gets a lot done in a day, whether he's working or taking people on a walking tour. There is no 0 to 60 - there is only 60 and up.

We hit the ground running at 9 o'clock when we all meet near the Finlandsky Station to catch a boat to Kronshtadt which is about a half an hour away. While waiting for the boat, we look around - nearby in the middle of the square they seem to be doing renovations of some sort,

"What's with the crate?" I ask and point to a box high up in the middle of the square.

"Someone hit the Lenin statue with a rocket launcher," Sergey says. "The statue is hollow so it went through. They won't repair it." I think he's less surprised that it happened than that it took so long for someone to do it.

The boat comes - we enjoy the view from the windows and the deck. In Kronshtadt, we take a roundabout tour of the city and have a quick breakfast in a local snack shop, then wander around the naval museum for a short while before heading back to the pier (with stops in a few local shops for bread, fish, and second hand store) to catch the boat to Oranienbaum which is, in turn, a bus ride away from Peterhof, the imperial palace of Peter the Great. Alex goes into the Peterhof grounds for a quick look around - Pierre and I decide to wait for a day when we can take our time. Then we drop into a church on the way to the bus stop and look around inside before catching the bus back to St. Petersburg, at which point we all catch a metro home. The day's a bit of a blur and by the end we're all pretty tired (except Sergey, I think, who I think finds us to be slowpokes at times). We wish Alex a safe rest of his round-the-world trip and promise to keep in touch.

Other than sightseeing, we take time in our first few days to visit the school where I'll be studying. It's a quiet time of year with all of the summer students gone - the school has only a few handfuls of Japanese students on group courses, and a few others doing individual classes like me. I love the school - it's small, clean, central enough and very well organized. The staff are helpful and friendly, and has a great study room. We set up my schedule - three mornings a week for three weeks - and head home.

Days 302 to 303 – Tue Sept 1 – Train to St. Petersburg

Pierre’s a funny guy. He’s not so much a tell-a-funny-joke person – I don’t think I’ve ever heard him tell a pre-told joke - he’s often more the kind of person who has funny trains of thought. His gems can too easily get drowned out when he’s around much louder me and his humour flickers in and out of conversations, sometime accidentally.

“Hey, do you know a tree whose name uses all the vowels?”

He’s been doing a multiple choice questionnaire about health that includes a section on testing your mental acuity. “Sequoia,” I say immediately.

“Oh. That’s what the book said.” He looks thoughtful for a second. “I came up with Adirondack Spruce.”

This makes me laugh. “I only know ‘sequoia’ because I heard it ages and ages ago as part of a quiz. I didn’t even know what a sequoia was at the time or how to pronounce it, so I certainly didn’t know the name of a tree that contained all the vowels.”

“Well,” he says seriously, “now you know two.”

These kinds of conversations are useful on long trips from A to B, and keep us occupied when we’re not occupying ourselves with books or music or just staring out the window. The train trip to St. Petersburg is an overnight, starting a short while before midnight, so we only chat for a short while before everyone organizes their bed sheets and starts to settle in for the night.

Pierre and I have what were probably the last inexpensive tickets available for this train when we bought them. We’re in the last of the low-fare sleeping wagons, which means that rather than small cabins with four bunks to a room, the wagon is open with around 56 bunks laid out neatly. With the wrong group of people, this situation can be pretty tedious – children, drinkers, shouters, loud snorers and so on would ensure that no one got as much sleep as they wanted. It’s possible to travel for 7 days across Russia this way on the Trans-Siberian and, after that many days of travel, I imagine that even the nicest group of people can probably wear on the nerves.

The group travelling tonight seems pretty good. No small children, no loud talkers. Even the young soldiers a few bunks over are noticeably vodka-less and eager for sleep. Everyone tonight seems to be simply travelling from A to B and hoping to get some rest before the train pulls into the St. Petersburg station at 6 am.

The only problem we see, in fact, is that we have some of the worst bunks in the wagon. We have some indication of this when the man checking our ticket at the doors looks at our seat numbers and says that it’s possible to upgrade to a private cabin. This is double the price, and for an overnight we’re not willing to pay out so much money. We decline, but they ask again later once we’ve started to set up our beds and prepare to sleep. We decline again, but this time it’s an educated decision because now we have officially met The Door.

The Door is directly next to our bunks and leads to washroom area and the passage way to other wagons. It’s not like there’s a bad smell or anything, and people are pretty considerate about not talking as they pass, but the door itself is badly designed. It swings shut with a loud bang and a click - and opens with a bang and a click - every single time a person passes through the door. This happens a lot. This happens all night.

We aren’t the only ones whose rest is seriously disturbed by the noise. Even before the lights officially go out, the man in the bunk perpendicular to us, across the aisle, lifts his head every so often to give the door the stink eye. I estimate that the ideal distance to be away from this door is somewhere around the middle of the cabin. The people sleeping there have probably learned from experience to stay the hell away from the edges.

Pierre and I are really light sleepers. Even with the ear plugs, the sound is sharp and impossible to imagine away. Traffic passing by? I can easily imagine that away as being waves on a beach. Sound of construction outside? I can pretend a factory worker on a really long shift and have been able to sneak a few hours of sleep away in a nearby storeroom. I can usually imagine myself into a frame of mind where I’m so glad for any kind of horizontal sleep that noises don’t bother me too much.

But even my last resort, tried-and-true trick of imagining that I’m on a long long flight to Australia, and have already been sitting for over 15 hours and have somehow been lucky enough to be given a first class cot to sleep in for a few hours… even imagining that doesn’t work.

Pierre manages to get a few hours of sleep. I get 45 minutes. We’re both tired and humourless when the train pulls into St. Petersburg.