Siberia in My Rear-View Mirror, Figuratively

The trek across Siberia to its Western edge was not particularly painful though I am happy to finally be here in the Urals, in Ekaterinburg. I hope to see some more of this intriguing city before my energy supplies run too low as I'm feeling a bit tapped out at the moment. And dreadfully homesick, for someone to speak English with, for some good music, for my friends and family. For my overworked empty life back home.

Slogging across vast Russia by train invokes a full ophthalmic-olfactive-aural inwardness that I cannot fully untangle. Chugging, rhythmic sounds, gutteral almost sensual, Russians yelling and talking, laughing and cursing. Living. The constancy of motion while nothing in your immediacy moves, save for a swinging baggage strap or a flower tippling in a vase. The greenery and the suburuban post-Soviet blight take turns whipping by the window. The smells, oh yes, the smells, of fish and beer and meat and coal and sweat. Of humanity. There is serious time bending, hours scream by and creep coetaneously. You look down at your watch, or cell phone, and whatever number pops up digitally is both nonsensical and easily swallowed. The mind shifts down into some other brainwave, like being in an isolation tank. Nightmares are more lucid and crazy and, for the first time, I found myself speaking Russian in my dreams.

My cabinmates were Katya, a very sweet twentysomething from Khabarovsk, on her way to a new job in Perm, though what she did I could not fully comphrehend, just nodding Da when there were words close to what I already knew. I taught her some new words in English and she taught me some in Russian (the word for "bat", for example, translates as "flying mouse" -- when the movie Batman came out here, they called it "Flying Mouse-Man", not the fear-inspiring dread that the directors were aiming for).
In Omsk, Yuri the jurist (pronounced "yur-eest") climbed on, took off all his clothes except his boxers (not an uncommon occurence), and told us dirty jokes, cackling loudly, wild hands gesturing. Of course I understood zero but I laughed, partly at the comedy of the situation but mostly because I did not want to endure the stretched out explanation that kills any joke, no matter what the base language. He could speak no English but we did converse in German, badly. Didn't make the jokes any funnier. After two hours he climbed up into his bunk, passed out, never to be heard from again, except for some funny-to-him noctural outbursts about Americans, requiring him to periodically nudge me with his barefoot, for reasons I never understood.