Trans-Mongolian Railway - Part 2: Living in a train

Live on board of the Trans-Mongolian Railway had a slow start. We, for example, had to wait patiently to be able to use the bathroom. Every carriage has two toilets with a washbasin. A quick refresher with some soap works out just fine, but you can forget a shower. We also brought ready-to-use refreshment towels, which are ideal in situations like these.

Next was breakfast. There is an onboard restaurant, but that can be rather busy and is also considered expensive for what you get. Thereby, in our situation it also meant we had to cross almost the entire train to get to the restaurant. We have had one 'luxurious' breakfast in the onboard restaurant: fried egg. The rest of the days, we ate the meals we had brought with us.

Every few hours, the train will come to a stop. Where and when the train will stop is indicated in the corridor of the train. At some of these stops, the train will stay there a number of minutes, allowing you to get off the train and buy some local food. Mostly older ladies sell lots of different items. We didn't see any vodka, but because we were in Russia, we felt we were obliged to buy some. After asking around, one of the ladies ran off, and came back with a bottle of vodka two minutes later. That night, we enjoyed our own Russian vodka :)

During the Trans-Mongolian Railway, we passed several time zones. However, on board of the train, the time zone of Moscow is used. Therefore, we lost complete sense of the actual time. Especially because you are just relaxing the entire day: a bit of reading, staring outside, chatting with other tourists. We also chattered with one of the provodniks (conductor). He even learned us some Chinese, which was great fun.