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These girls live in Ekaterinburg, the
town where Tsar Nicholas and his family were executed
during the Russian revolution. Elya, Ania, Marina,
and Tanya were returning with their high school group
from a two-week camping excursion at Lake Baikal.
A few minutes after I settled into my little suite on the train
at the Irkutsk station, Tanya approached me and started
talking. Soon she came back with her friend Marina to haul
me to their compartment a few cars away. Sean witnessed all this
and said to his parents, "Did you see that? Those girls just
kidnapped Lowell."
I spent an hour or more talking with them. They bombarded me with questions about America while offering me tea and some cookies they called pechenie. Their nine-day camping trip had cost 3000 rubles each (around $21). A lot of money for Russian parents, I would suppose. |
| I invited the girls to visit me and Jim's family later on
in the evening. They dropped by around 8:30. A man from Germany
joined in the conversation, and we used three languages -- Russian to
English to German and back. I hadn't spoken German for years
but it all came back to me.
It didn't take long, however, for the provodnik to tell the girls to leave. I didn't know what to make of that. Barbara suggested that maybe the provodnik thought the girls were disturbing me. |
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Time didn't have much meaning on the train. First of all, the train schedule is based on Moscow time. Midnight is still daylight. I eventually set my watch to the Moscow standard and didn't worry about the time anymore. Whenever I got hungry and saw people walking to the restaurant car, I knew it was meal time |
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