At the beginning

Ok, we are now in Mongolia, we is me and Iohanna, my partner in the adventure and owner of most of (but not all!) the pics. We’ve already been 2 weeks traveling since we flew from Israel and we have taken 4 ½ days of trans-Siberian trains  through Siberia and ½ a day  bus to Ulan Batar, capital of Mongolia. We’re investigating now how to  visit the country side, and after we visit it, we are travelling to  China with the trans-Mongolian train and then eventually we’ll get to India. But now I’m hesitating about writing in my broken non-native English or my broken native Argentinean Spanish. I’ll try in English  for the time being, but let’s start from the beginning...

At Ben Gurion Airport in Israel on May 14th
We started our journey at the airport, as any long journey that starts in Israel should begin. Since Israel and her neighbours don’t have the best relationship there’s no way but to fly over most of the countries that surround Israel. No train or bus can go very far from Israel...
Our first stop was going to be Moscow. At 3:30am on the morning we discovered that even though we need no visa to enter to Russia (both as Israelis and as Argentineans), we needed a ticket out that we didn’t have (since we weren’t supposed to left Russia by air). So 2 hours and a half before our flight, we ran downstairs where some flight agencies work and we managed to buy a ticket that my parents cancelled 2 days later.




Moscow
At 6am we get to a rainy Moscow, and a couple of hours later we get to a stinky hostel: the Trans-Siberian Hostel. Not so much to tell about Moscow. But  thanks to Eduardo and Tatiana, who are friends of a friend, Yana, we had a pleasant time. But the weather didn’t help much, neither  the expensive prices of everything, neither the fact that the Kremlin was closed the day we intended to visit it...  We did do sightseeing, space museum, gallery arts, walkings but I’d describe Moscow as a city as expensive as Paris and London, but not being neither Paris nor London... Anyway, we bought there our tickets for the first journey on the train to Irkutsk and after 2 nights at the hostel we left the city.

Raining...

Metro

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture

3 ¾ days on a a kupe -second class wagon-  on the first trans-sibierian train.
Looking back on what we did, I think we over reacted. Almost 4 days on a train! In Moscow we felt  “Let’s get out of here! It’s cold and rainy and expensive and rather uninteresting, let’s go as fast as possible to Asia” (I know that Siberia is also in Asia, but c’mon!) When we got to Irkutsk, we felt, well, this is nice, we could have stopped before and visited another town on our way!
Anyway, on the train, we spent most of the time sleeping, planing what to eat, playing cards, reading. We both thought it’ll be inspiring, that we’d be able to write or draw, I don’t know... But the movement has more of an intoxicating effect, we felt kind of drunk...

The kupe has room for 4 people, but most of the time, we were alone. We didn’t have much interaction with the people on the train. We learnt the numbers and some words in Russian from one of the passengers that spent  one day with us, we tried to avoid a drunk teenager who was obsessed with us and with red eyes and spiting kept following us and repeating something about Finland!, and we held our breath whenever a really stinking family was near us. But most of our travel fellows didn’t know a word of English, and we just kept to ourselves.

The Finland-obsessed spiting drunken Russian "comunicating" with me.

More pics at Iohi's picasa site