On the train

June 25, Tuesday. Today will be spent entirely on the train, a welcome day of rest after so many long and eventful days of adventure. Everyone is looking forward to doing almost nothing for awhile. 

Riding through the countryside continues with only minor changes in the scenery outside our window. As we travel west, the land has become somewhat more populated, the forest somewhat less dense with more open areas of grass.  The houses are still mostly wooden because that is the building material most easily obtained here, except in the cities where concrete, stucco, and stone are more common. Nearly everything suffers from dilapidation to one degree or another, however. Russia has come a long way from the days of serfdom and even from communist times, but still many Russians, and especially Siberians, live in conditions most westerners would find primitive.  Serfdom and communism share at least one attribute--the lack of reward for hard work. During communist times there was a saying, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” I think the Russian people who have managed to rise to the middle class have overcome that to a greater degree, but it seems to me that a very large number of people are content to get by, subsisting rather than thriving because it doesn’t seem possible to them that there is another way. Even in our brief exposure, we’ve seen many instances of what appear to be too many people standing around not quite doing the job that seems to be waiting for them. That said, it is also true that here you can very rarely judge the inside by the outside. When we have the chance to see how people really live, indoors their surroundings are warm, interesting, and usually filled with treasured objects they have collected through the generations. The shabbiness or downright ugliness we see from the street is often just the shell and bears little resemblance to what is inside. Nevertheless, their quarters are usually small, cramped, and not very modern by our standards, despite the age of their civilization, and I continue to attribute that to their long history of the few elites having everything while the masses had nothing and no hope for change or reward for effort. 

Were we leaving Irkutsk?  Arriving somewhere else?  Some city from the train.  Irkutsk, I think.

Open woods and meadows with fewer conifers have replaced the dense taiga forest

Wooden houses still are common

 John is a happy camper.  Tim Littler, the owner, founder, CEO of this train, came on board at Ulan Ude and today John managed to arrange for us to have lunch with him. Very interesting guy who was a train lover as a child, arranged train excursions as a college student, spent thirty years as a wine merchant, and then got the idea to start this luxury train across Siberia. We are glad he did.