When I dreamed of taking the Trans-Siberian Railway, it was of a shapeless, formless route through a very large expanse of nothingness, with few landmarks and merely the awareness that Moscow was at one end and Vladivostok at the other.
In practice, this was not far off.
Although the line is a single route, with a couple of variations at either end, there are multiple ways to take the Trans-Siberian railway. Deborah Manley’s brilliant Trans-Siberian anthology (given to me by a lovely colleague) draws together many of these accounts. Early explorers in the 1900s traversed the entire route solo, or in pairs, with woollen underwear and a piano room for accompaniment. Today’s Western tourists seem most commonly to do it in groups, more or less in a single run (perhaps with one or two stops); not entirely a bad idea since exploring Russian cities solo with only a few hours to spare is trickier than one might anticipate. Hardy budget travellers go third class, armed with packs of cards, pot noodles, and chocolate for bartering.
Whilst in London, preemptively buying tickets, I had repeatedly hit a wall whilst attempting to get from Warsaw to Moscow, thanks entirely to the first half of the journey. Minsk-Moscow? No problem. Tickets booked. But Warsaw-Minsk? Impossible. Most websites seemed reluctant to admit that such a route even existed.
So immediately upon arriving in Poland, we bought our onward tickets to Minsk (from the only woman in the entirety of Warsaw’s central station who spoke English) and on the train discovered that the bloody thing went the whole way to Moscow. Thanks a lot, Bahn.de – the palava meant we had had to buy transit visas through Belarus and accommodation in Minsk and our first train arrived at the spectacularly inhospitable hour of 2:09am.
Now I don’t generally hold with past-life stuff but during my one previous visit to Warsaw, I had stepped off the plane to the strangest sense that I’d been there before. Wistfully recalling my late-1990s visit to Peter, I described old houses and classic trams, quiet squares, and buildings which still bore shrapnel wounds.
This time around we exited the train station to several glass and steel behemoths, a Costa coffee, and a giant sign for H&M. The connection was gone. Putting aside the question as to why I’d felt it originally (one too many faux-medieval town squares, perhaps? A romantic notion of my family history? My 14-year-old self desperate to forge a connection with anywhere other than Kingston-upon-Thames?), one thing was clear: Warsaw was not the dainty backwater with an identity crisis that I’d developed in my mind. This is a city that’s going places.
Berlin only warranted a short visit since it’s so close to London (and so supremely accessible). Sure, it took me 30 years to visit in the first place but we figured we could return at any time. Three word assessment? Cool and laid-back. (Is that two words or three?) Nobody blinked at my walking boots or make-up-less face, even in the super hip districts of Neukolln and Kreuzberg. Take that Hackney, you and your judgey judgementalness.
How to spend limited time in a nearby city? Abandon what everyone thinks you should visit and spend your precious moments at places which give off an irresistible pull, however unexpected. So, we did away with Brandenburg Tor, museums and palaces, and instead spent an afternoon at the Jewish Museum.
My father is (technically) Jewish. He was bar mitzvah’d, and he’s a chartered accountant, but then he also told me the wrong word for a kippah, and was unceremoniously chucked out of his Jewish boy scouts troop for taking pork sausages to a picnic. So it goes without saying that my siblings and I were not steeped in religious dogma whilst growing up, and as such I know little of my Hebrew heritage.
“We shall be travelling overland as far as we possibly can” we announced smugly when plans were made and friends and families informed. “Arrival in Moscow in a week or so, via various European capitals”.
We plotted our itinerary and people nodded, with awe, we assumed. Two days before departure my friend Abi asked “But why don’t you just fly to Berlin?”
A pregnant pause. A cough. A throat cleared.
“Because – we don’t – because – THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE DOING ABI, STOP ASKING QUESTIONS”.
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