FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Crossing Belarus

As soon as I saw the train I felt it was going to be a good journey. My room mates were an Asian-looking Russian guy whose name I always forgot and a fairly young Russian woman who was called Xena. He spoke some English and she seemed to understand most of what we said. It was a strange compartment, having only three beds and a big area close to the roof which I initially thought was my bed as all the beds hadn’t yet been unfolded. This really tickled the Russian guy and it broke the ice as he explained where I’d be sleeping. Soon into the journey they got out the Vodka and I drunk extremely strong Vodka and cokes with them with seemed to roughly followed a 1:1 ratio. A space physics university professor from the next compartment also invited me for Vodka with his room mates who were folk musicians, and gave me a special tape entitled “For Friends”. The pressure applied by the guitarist to drink more and more Vodka was a little worrying. Maybe only my falling over unconscious, or better still dead, would satisfy him.
I put my watch back two hours as Warsaw, and indeed the rest of Europe until I arrived in England, was two hours behind.

I woke up with a sharp hangover, even though I had followed the advice of the university professor the night before and had continually eaten during the drinking of Vodka. Very few Russians drink Vodka without food. Whereas back home such advice would be to potentially lessen a hangover, I couldn’t help but wonder if such advice in Russia is to simply stop you from dying from the stuff. Perhaps it is the constant eating while drinking that makes Russians such big burley people. Either way, I once again felt like a complete lightweight. Maybe it was the beer just before going to bed that did it for me. Either way I felt lousy. It was then about 7am. My body was still on Moscow time. You’d think that train travel across the world wouldn’t allow for any jet-lag but there must be such a thing as train-lag because I had it.
Suddenly the guitarist came into my compartment with a glass of beer for me, which he insisted I drink. I bypassed my initially shock and disgust and forced myself to drink it to please him. Jesus I though, how far do I have to go for this guy?! It tasted awful, it being first thing in the morning, as the warm lager went down but almost immediately it took the edge of my hangover. I felt tired for the rest of the journey but was unable to sleep. The time passed uneventfully apart from the drunk guitarist whose drinking knew no boundaries. A few days previous I had arranged for a globalfreeloader to meet me at Warsaw station so I could stay at his place for the night. I had no information about him other than the fact that his name was Machiek and he was extremely tall, therefore easy to spot.