The duration of the overnight train journey was ten hours. At first, Monna, Sven and I anticipated taking a five hour "express" train early in the morning. As it turns out that train didn't exist so we had to leave the night before, much to Claudio's chagrin (He wasn't scheduled to fly out until the next morning). So we said goodbye to Claudio at the hostel and headed to the train station.
We left St. Petersburg as the thunder clapped, the rain poured and the lightening lit up the heavens. Typical.
We decided to celebrate our first Russian overnight train journey with nothing other than Finnish Lonkero.
It was a good decision given what was in store for us.
We boarded the train and settled into our separate cabins (Sven in one and Monna and I in the other). The other people in Sven's cabin (four per cabin) did not speak any English. Neither did the two Russians in our cabin. Sven was only able to communicate with his group through sign language. And the only sign language they understood was the sign for taking a shot. Four shots of cognac later, I happened to walk in to his cabin. Now I was forced to "engage" in the conversation with them!!!
Needless to say the party ended up in Monna and my cabin. Again typical. :) We hosted about half the train til around 2am.
By three, after Russian folk music and debauchery, we all called it quits.
6:00 AM: A.k.a. not time to get up. Suddenly I am wide awake. Not sure why, I turn over to get out of my bed. Wrong move. Two of the Russians from the evening had decided that they would enjoy fornicating in our cabin. Thus making the noises that inevitably woke me up. Awesome.
We arrived in Moscow with a hangover, not a whole lot of sleep, and 32 degrees Celsius. Ouch.
Now obviously this is only the outlined version. Like I said before , the full version can only be found inside the heads of Sven, Monna and myself. Which is probably a good thing! :)
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