Day 4, Sun, 7/26
Irkutsk, Russia.
Although I had set my alarm at 2PM, I ended up waking up at 9 in the morning after just four hours of sleep. I felt like I’d slept for much longer and I couldn’t go back to bed. Everyone had left except Alexei’s laptop was still sitting on my desk. I went to the proctor’s compartment to see if Anton was there, but his girlfriend was on duty and she told me that he was still asleep. Alexei was up though, and we chatted in my room for about three hours, talking about New York steak and traveling. He also showed me hundreds of pictures of him and his “woman” when they were traveling in Germany.
Anton woke up at around noon and helped me pack up. There’s no doubt that my compartment was the dirtiest one of them all; after Oliya left I had the entire four-person compartment to myself, taking advantage of it by spreading out my food and trash on all four beds. It took two hours to pack, vacuum and replace the sheets, and I was almost sad to see place so clean and remote.
Suddenly, two shirtless guys named Artur and Alec came in my compartment, their breaths reeking of beer. It was pretty clear that they wanted to steal my belongings, as they pointed at items such as my camera or my laptop and asking, “Present me?” I shook my head, and Alec pulled out a deck of cards and asked if I wanted to bet at all. I shook my head again and tried to refrain from planting my fist in both of their faces. How dare they rummage through my stuff like that? Instead, I kept a smile on my face and let Artur play my guitar for a few minutes.
Artur (Thief #1)
Alec (Thief #2)
The train was scheduled to arrive in Irkutsk at 5:20PM. By around four, Anton, Leila and I were pressing our faces against the window, too depressed to talk about anything. At 5:15, I pulled out two pairs of cheap wooden chopsticks (the ones you throw away after just one use) and two Korean 100 won coins. “Ssahnk you,” they said. We exchanged phone numbers and wrapped our arms around each other for the final five minutes, swaying to the motion of the train.
Russian village
Fortunately, our train conductor sucked at his job, so we didn’t arrive until nearly 6. It also meant that I had to face an angry driver who I had asked to come pick me up at the station by 5.
We exchanged our last hugs and I slung my unnecessarily heavy - but slightly lighter - bag over my poor back. I stepped down the train and onto Irkutskian(?) soil, almost wishing that I had left something on my bed so I had an excuse to go back for a few minutes. I walked out about a dozen steps and turned around to wave goodbye, but Anton and Leila were already flooded with a horde of passengers shoving tickets in their faces, and couldn’t see me. Sad face L.
At the station I was again accosted by a series of enormous ugly Russian taxi drivers eager to rip me off. That reminds me; here are two more characteristics I learned about Russians:
1) They try to have a staring contest with you all the time. They simply won’t stop looking at you and it gets pretty creepy. Sometimes I feel like they want to eat me. The one nice thing though is that the girls are never shy to show that they’re checking you out, as in they don’t look away when you look back at them. Russian girls also have some of the nice curves, which come as no surprise since they are best known for their ballet and gymnastics.
2) They wear nearly nothing. Fully grown men walk around shirtless, or in a button-up without buttoning anything. Women wear spandex or jeans as tight and short as possible without the slightest care for what they’re exposing. It’s as if Russia is one huge beach.
Once I evaded the scary people, I met my driver along with a fellow solo Korean traveler, Jeong Woo (I’ll refer to him as JW). Apparently he was on the same train as me the whole time, just in a different vehicle. As we drove to a Korean home-stay called 예지네집 (Yaeji’s house), I found out that JW was a balling partying 20-year-old piano major from Hanyang University with hands the size of my face.
The moment I arrived in my room I ripped my clothes off like Superman would from his office wear and had the most satisfying shower of my life. 3 days worth of transsiberian grime washed away. I wish it’d never ended. But I also shed about a fourth of my hair from malnutrition, which wasn’t very pretty.
After a nice Korean dinner (our first normal meal in days) JW and I headed out to see the surrounding neighborhood and the sunset. Our home-stay is located at the top of a rustic hillside and the air had a kind of crisp that felt like a nice clean shower compared to Korea’s sticky, goopy atmosphere.
View from veranda
What struck me most about the houses were the colors. The view looked like a mosaic. Enough with the words, let the pictures do the talking:
After about an hour, JW and I became hungry again and dropped by our rooms to pick up some money. Suddenly a short kid named Gyu, the house owner’s nephew, came up to us while we were leaving. I seriously thought he was in middle school with that height and voice, but he was a year older than me and going into law school in September. He told us that he was bored and had nothing to do until midnight the next day, which was when his plane left for Korea. Jackpot. With the exception of one year - when he schooled in Texas as an exchange student - this guy had lived in Russia for a lot of his life. The point is that when you have someone who is fluent in Russian and has nothing to do, you make him your tour guide.
For as scrawny as he was, he seemed to know literally half the people in Irkutsk. During the half hour it took for us to walk to the supermarket, we spent about twenty of it shaking hands with his friends that we ran into. Then JW and I would try to converse awkwardly with them in a mix of Russian and English (Ringlish). The Russian friends asked Gyu to invite us “newcomers” to go get a taste of Russian clubs, but I was a minor. I told Gyu and JW that it was perfectly fine to go without me but they insisted that it was okay because we had to wake up early tomorrow to tour Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. I felt like a party pooper.
The one unusual thing about the supermarket was that the fruits, vegetables, cheeses and yogurt were all located in a separate room at the temperature of a refrigerator. It was pretty amusing to watch people push their carts down the aisles with their teeth chattering violently. That should teach them a lesson to put some more clothes on.
Another shocking discovery I made about the Russians were their unique taste buds. In the snack aisle I ran into my favorite Lays potato chips, only to find out that they were either crab-flavored or fish egg-flavored. As much as I liked to try out new things, I had to pass on this one.
Crab
Fish egg
It was around 11 when we began walking back, and Gyu told us never ever to walk around at night without someone who could speak Russian. That didn’t sound too good. He explained that Russian teenagers spend their free time cornering and robbing tourists. Even the police are corrupt here; since their wages are so low, they tend to make a significant portion of their income by pestering foreigners and pointing out fictional problems with their Russian visas, and demanding up to $100 at a time.
The path in which Gyu led us back home was a shortcut, but I would’ve rather walked back the longer way. We had to maneuver through a forest in the complete darkness, and we all had our cell phones out to light the way. I complained and said that this sucked.
“Hey,” Gyu said. “Would you rather come this way or walk past a huge whorehouse-warehouse thing that’s full of thieves, murderers, drug addicts and AIDS? Besides, there aren’t any bears here, just some ticks.” Great. I was the only one wearing shorts. “And I think I saw a ghost once,” Gyu added.
Suddenly, JW’s bag ripped under the weight of his beers. We all screamed, thinking maybe an animal was jumping out to attack us. Then Gyu and I started yelling at JW, half mad and half crying because we were so shaken.
We reached our dwelling at 11:10, only to be scolded at by Gyu’s aunt for being out at night.
Although Gyu and JW had not ditched me to go clubbing because they wanted to wake up early tomorrow, we ended up eating several bags of chips and shortbread cookies, listening to music, playing guitar and discussing life, religion and politics until sunrise, which was our planned wake-up time. Uh oh. None of us were tired by then, so we eventually had to force ourselves to go to sleep, setting the alarm at 8:30.
Well… no one heard any of the alarms, even though JW had set up ten, each a minute apart starting from 8:21 to 8:30. Gyu shook all of us awake at 10:30 instead. Well there goes most of our morning.
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