I gave up... What a wuss part 2: the train

Sitting in the 4-person sleeping compartment, having perfected leaping up onto the top bunk with ninja-like stealth, both me and Alex were silently contemplating who/what we were going to be sharing a room with. First to my mind was a couple of shaven-headed Russian Mafia goons with a bag o'knives. Second to pop up were a couple of blonde Swedish girls. At this point a couple of blonde Swedish girls walked in, realised it was the wrong compartment and moved to the one next door. Weeeeelll, we though, that would have been too good to be true really. Then a couple of Danish girls walked in and it was the right compartment so... there you go.

Not that anything happened... there was normal talking about stuff, and they ate lots of mackerel in tomato sauce, and we listened to eachothers music (they rejected talking heads!! And Alex dismissed them as "the worst kind of 80s rubbish" or something... I died a little inside) but mostly it was just too insanely hot to sleep. Surreal that it was about -30 degrees outside and what felt like about 40 inside, seriously at times it was hard to breathe. But we survived! We even went to the buffet car, where there was a very VERY English chap, the sort you only find abroad, who seemed to speak every language and was very shy and basically the stereotypical sweet old man. The food, however, was garlic. The upside was that I recovered from the death in Moscow, but also spent 7 days on a train doing nothing apart from occasionally buying sausages from the locals. Oh and my birthday happened. I got a card from Alex.

During this train journey I discovered pineapple juice, realised the cups I bought along were woefully inadequate, stole all of Alex's gameboy advance games, discovered an unfortunately coloured piece of mound on my sheet, spent an interesting period wandering around the border trying to spot the train being fitted with a new undercarriage, bought a knife and fork (now rusty) and used Alex as a bureau de change on legs. We also talked and realised that we both wanted nearly opposite things from the trip... which was interesting... and found out that one of our roommates was from Iceland! SUCH a cool place. I read most of Jonathan strange and Alex read some of war and peace (what with being in Russia and all), and we all kept visits to the toilet to an absolute minimum. We used a small amount of time to learn the bare minimum Chinese to not quite get by, and realised that we won't have any way on navigating ourselves once we were away from western script signs.

There was a period where we were passing through some beautiful scenery just before and after going past an absolutely massive lake. That was nice. The rest was either empty or we were asleep. But it was very nice. All small-villagey and windy. And the massive lake was all frozen, there was a car out there doing doughnuts at one point.

So after the week on the train we arrived in Harbin.