The Great Journey: Just Because the Ride’s Long Doesn’t Mean It’s Boring

In the months leading up to my great Trans-Siberian Railway journey, I thought of how boring the six-day ride would be, given the colossal 8,000-kilometer track between Beijing and Moscow. It may seem usual but the things I thought I must do on the train would be: write a day-to-day journal and read a book, aside of course from looking at the changing scenery from the window.

But perhaps the most unusual thing I did must have been not setting an expectation. “Don’t expect,” I always tell myself. Okay, so if I expect, the level should be as deep as Marianas trench — so that I’ll float on the surface whatever the result will be. In this case, I only read a few things about the Trans-Siberian Railway, save from some budget planning, of course.

It was during a quick research on Yahoo! (and yes, I’m still using that, since our office blocks Google) when I saw this CNN article about the centenary of the Trans-Siberian Railway (or TSR, henceforth). I was dumbfounded at this, er, coincidence? I mean, this frigging train route is 100 years old seriously?! How special is that, right? Here, then, I found myself daydreaming, thinking of how previous travelers endured days on the train. And my questions were: Was the ride six days then? Have any other Filipinos taken the ride? Why was TSR set up in the first place?

The Chinese spy (or was he?)

I tried to keep my travel a secret — perhaps an open one. I only told a handful of my officemates that I would be going on a holiday, and an even smaller-and-closer group that I’d be taking a six-day train ride. A couple of weeks before the trip, I talked to a Chinese officemate, whom I shall call “Unique.” Her family is near the border between China and North Korea. When she knew I would take the train, she told me a story of her grandfather who used to ride it many years back.

Actually I forgot the meat of her story so I had to ask her again about some details. Her grandpa apparently worked for the Chinese government as a senior engineer. He was dispatched to Russia to learn aircraft technology. “So China can catch up,” Unique said when I asked her why. “I suspect my grandpa worked as a spy for China,” I remember her telling me this, but she retracted it in a message, saying she was just joking. But I can remember how amazed I was when she first mentioned that to me. A spy from China? “Getting info” about aircraft technology? Magnificent stuff, I thought.

Unique couldn’t remember how many times did her grandpa take TSR. “He took plane some times, but got sick when flying [sic],” she told me on WeChat. “Yeah, he loves train, not bumpy, with beautiful sight [sic].”

Input: Learn Russian

At that time, I was salivating at the thought of riding TSR. As this would be my third major travel (the first one was Thailand in 2013, the next was China for work in 2015), I thought of learning some words, to help me survive in case I won’t meet any English-speaking people there (which was sort of likely). Again, there was no Google so Yahoo helped me look for a website about learning Russian.

I inputted: learn Russian. The search results were boring, but I stumbled upon this website which promised readers they can learn the Russian (or Cyrillic) alphabet in just two hours. The website looked incredibly 1990s, but presented the alphabet in such a simple way that in just two hours, I was able to memorize 70% of the alphabet. Yes, 70%. And I’m proud of it. I even found myself opening Notepad and trying to decipher some scripts in our Russian channel.

Learning the Russian alphabet is fairly easy and a straightforward process. According to the website, there are 33 letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. Thirty-three is nothing compared to the thousands of characters one needs to memorize when learning Chinese. Not to mention that those those characters have a specific tone and a pinyin equivalent, so it’s a lot of hard work I believe. And because the Cyrillic alphabet has similar letters to the Latin alphabet, it’s quite easy to remember. And it’s certainly not terrifying compared to Thai script. Isn’t Chinese more terrifying? Yes perhaps, but the prospect of learning a new language — even at my young adult age — is definitely exciting and rewarding.

Marking the start

When the station guard opened the door to the platform, my adrenaline spiked up. I was cursing and cursing because finally I would ride a train – not for a mere eight hours but for six frigging days. Before the ride, I felt really exhausted since a lot of not-so-good things happened, and since I carried heavy bags.

I left my backpack and orange bag somewhere on the platform and quickly ran towards the train… and took a selfie with its logo. Satisfied and excited, I took an aim towards the LED screen which showed our departure time.

11:22 BJT would be the start of my great Trans-Siberian Railway ride to Moscow from Beijing.