Уарославская Бокзал was under restoration when we departed Moscow. The imposing dirty beige façade rose high above the street among the triad of train stations entrenching the huge boulevard. Kazanskaya Vokzal was across the street and Leningradskaya Vokzal was hiding next door. When we walked into Yaroslavskaya Vokzal we found the main hall inaccessible. Tall brown wooden planks had been erected to hide the refurbishing inside. Lining the wooden wall was aging metal benches with babushkas of every variety. All of them were wearing blue, red, black and grey scarves. Large plaid plastic fiber canvass handled bags rested at their feet. Large jackets of like colors bundled around the corpulent women as they waited for their train to take them out of the city. The babushkas cascaded from the door, filling the meager waiting room to the left of the station.

The contracted waiting area of the station was full past capacity so Anna and I turned right to the Bufet and procured a table. There was a shallow, blackish puddle in the corner so I positioned our bags away from the moisture. The table next to us was full of soon to be babushkas wearing large fur coats over their less than desirable frames. Their faces were rosy from the konyak spiked tea and occasional nip of vodka. They sat drinking their tea and blurting away. Every fifteen minutes another of the babushkas-in-waiting would escort a middle-aged Russian man to the table. He would make a selection and a chubby-cheeked fur coat would disappear for about twenty-minutes. At the same time, an extremely garbled Russian voice sounded over head with information about the departing trains. It was unintelligible to us. Judiciously, to avoid missing our train, we had arrived at the station two hours early.

We fetched a pair of .6 liter Becks and open-faced salami sandwiches from the Bufet. As we ate our nibble, we nonplussedly watched Ivan after Ivan come and go. After imbibing the German beer, I left Anna to guard our bags and read her book whilst I found our train. There were no reader boards in the whole station to indicate where and when the trains left. Unable to find any helpful information in the station, even from the information desk, I wandered outside. I opened the large wooden and glass door and stepped onto the ice encased black sidewalk. The bitter cold hit me. It was -21C with a strong wind blowing from the north, but no snow was falling. I turned left and proceeded around the side of the station, my breath making large clouds before my face and my eyes squinting in an attempt to stave off the cold.

The large, oblong grey square was vacant accept for a few travelers rushing to and fro with a large statue of a forgotten Soviet centering it. I espied a set of platforms behind the station and shuffled along the ice towards them. Finally, I found a reader board that gave me the information I needed, outside and behind the station. About 15 platforms lined the rear of the station headed with kiosks selling pastry coated sausages, various white roots and cabbages, a myriad of vodkas, good water, Stary Melnik and Nevskoe beer, white and black bread, and sausages spiced with paprika. Our platform was number twelve and boarding would begin at 21.12, in thirty minutes. Having had enough of the biting cold, I hastily returned to the Bufet and Anna where I purchased two more Becks’ to fill the time.

After we drained the bottles, we positioned our rucksacks on our backs and proceeded out into the cold and to our train. Hand in hand, we stepped out of the mediocre warmth of the station into the inauspicious cold of the hard Muscovite world. Leather and fur coat clad malchiks and dyevushkas shuffled past smoking cigarettes and bracing themselves against the freezing temperatures. As we turned around the side of the station and proceeded towards our train, zeal escalated in my mind. Since I was twelve-years-old, I had 1onged to travel on the Trans-Siberian. And, now, I was approaching the train I had fantasized about for so many years. As we passed the kiosks and stepped foot on the icy grey concrete platform, I found it difficult not to run to our car in the excitement, or maybe it was to just a desire to find warmth from the cold.

Our car was near the middle of the long dirty green train curving along the platform, fading into the darkness. Each car was indistinguishable. They were lined with windows, goldenly illuminated from within, framed by the backs of drapes. Each car had a white placard in the center indicating the route in Russian, Mongolian and Chinese—Moscow-Ulaan Baatar-Beijing, Beijing-Ulaan Baatar-Moscow with the Chinese crest beneath. The window in the center of every car had the car’s number dangling from the top. Our car conductor was a middle-aged Chinese man in a dark green tunic, pants and peaked cap. He was diligently standing guard at the entrance to the car. He took our tickets and welcomed us onto the train with an affable smile and bow of his head as his left hand invited us to board. Looking up at the iced night sky then back towards the frozen square surrounded by blunted twinkling lights of red, blue, and yellow, I bode farewell to Moscow and stepped my shod foot upon the small dirty grey metal grate and stepped into car number nine.

Once inside, we made our way to our cabin, three doors from the passageway from the next car. The grey-almond colored walls were illuminated with golden light forming triangles from the ceiling to the brown-grey carpeted floor leading forward to an open closet housing a samovar. Dark brown curtains hung from each window. Our cabin door slid open to reveal our home for the next eight days.

We quickly stored our gear under my designated cot and above the door. Then we sat on the dark orange bench which was to be my bed and absorbed the cabin. There was a large window with the same dark brown curtains hanging on either side and a solid grey blind waiting at the top of the brown, dirt covered windowpane. Four dark orange upholstered cots, two up and two down and barely as wide as my shoulders, fringed the cabin. A grey rectangular table, no larger than a meter-and-half square, was directly under our window. It was propped by a single, forward-centered leg opposite the cabin’s sliding door. The walls were a grey-almond color as the passageway outside the door. It was clean.

As we sat, absorbing our surroundings, we waited for someone to stop outside our cabin door and enter. We anticipated that we would have to share the cabin with two other people. We hoped these people would be amiable and make the voyage passable. We worried that it would be a dubious, albutaphobic babushka or a sketchy old Russian man who smoked more than a factory stack. The first cabin mate arrived. It was a petite young Mongolian girl, university age. I helped her stow here belongings and she settled in. She spoke excellent English and bode us hello and thanked us for assisting her. As we settled more into our new home, I fetched my bottle of Sovietskoe Champanskoe to open as the train departed the station.

As the minutes passed, the three of us waited for another to join us in the cabin. Then with a gentle tug, the train moved forward. I popped the cork from the tepid champagne and the three of us shared the bottle. In the dark of a bitterly cold February night, Anna and I escaped from a conurbation standing furtively on a vast Russian plain. We were leaving behind the staggering clubs and bars, cheap frenzied vodka, bottles of champagne walking the streets on Friday nights, little soviet flats with abstract wallpaper, the men, women and children twirling into a frenetic chaos of a life lived in absentia, the militisia whipping their vicious dogs at the entrance of metro stations, kartoshkas, the eternal bacchanalia that was life, and our instigation. We were heading east into the frozen unknown of the Russian taiga and tundra, to Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi, and China.

About twenty minutes after we departed the conductor appeared at the cabin with four sets of bed clothing which comprised a small pillow, white cotton sheet, white cotton duvet cover, and a thick orange wool blanket. We were on our way. With unbridled ardor in my psyche, our train wound through the glinting yellow and orange lights of the city as we drank our champagne then made our beds. Then the lights withered and we were shrouded in darkness and ice. We had left Moscow. We were speeding east on cold rail as faint black silhouetted trees stood against a pallid and star-filled cobalt night sky—commencing mine and Anna’s first adventure together...