Perm

Второй день на Транссибе (Day two on the Trans-Siberian)

Crossing the Urals (Welcome to Siberia)

03/09/2017: Trans-Siberian Day Two - 917-2,104km

Today is our first full day on the train. Our friend Sasha left just after lunch when we got to his home town of Perm. We didn’t manage to communicate much with Sasha as he spoke no English and we spoke no Russian but we managed to figure out where each other were from. We gave him a postcard of NZ and in exchange he made a mad dash when we got to Perm to go buy us a magnet from one of the souvenir stores on the platform so we would have something of his home town too.

We have now crossed into a new time zone which is Moscow Time (MT) +2. It is very important to remember that all the train times are in Moscow time, so even as we try to keep our body clocks adjusting to the new time table, we have to keep watches in the old time so that we know how long we have at stops.

Today we cross the Urals (the mountains that separate Europe from Siberia) though they are not really mountains, more gently sloping hills. Everything here is very flat and wide, it’s easy to think things are much closer than actually are. We are passing many little towns, but the thing they all have in common is that every town has a church with a gold dome, even the smallest of towns.

We have a couple of long stops today -

List of entertainment consumed on the train thus far: