Countdown to Russia: Day 26 - we finally have our first train tickets.

Am working in the now-empty house. There's been some confusion with regard to the house inspection, and the agency's representative is coming tomorrow instead, so I'm spending another night here.

Call from my sister. We finally have our train tickets! Turns out that she'd gotten mother to call the relevant bank in Russia to find out why the transaction wasn't going through and they told her that they did not deal with Barclays bank. Why, of course that's the most logical explanation. Gosh, I wonder why it didn't occur to me. Why not Barclays? Because they're trying to combat fraud, apparently. Mind you, it's mutual antagonism, since Barclays block any Russia-related transactions. The bank is happy to deal with Lloyds bank, though, so the problem is solved. I can now write in the guide that you can avoid the middlemen and book the train tickets directly with Russian rail, provided you a) read Russian and b) do not hold an account with Barclays. I don't think they accept American credit cards either.

Mother comments that one of the reasons we'd left all those years ago is so that we wouldn't have to deal with absurdity, and yet here we are, willingly getting back into it all.

Never mind. We're over the first hurdle, and allegedly have tickets for the same air-conditioned compartment; two bottom bunks and one top one, so we'll just have to flip a coin to see who gets to clamber up to the top, using any hand- and footholds available every night, since there are usually no ladders. I hope it's not me; last time I had the top bunk on the Riga-Moscow train, my friends had to literally shove me up in a very undignified fashion on account of my having short legs. I shall lie awake, wondering if I'll roll right off the top bunk in my sleep. I won't be surprised if we're told upon arrival that the air-con's not working. Now all we have to decide is whether we risk using the reference number given to print our tickets out at the train station right before departure or register online so that the IDs used to book the tickets become our tickets.

There's so much to do around Lake Baikal, and I could easily spend a couple of weeks there, but Steve and my sister cannot; he's only got three weeks off work and needs to get as far as Beijing, and my sister needs to fly back from Ulan-Ude. Actually, I only have nine weeks to cover 35 destinations, with three of them - Lake Baikal, Ulaanbaatar and Beijing - warranting a week each, plus my wanting to spend a little time in Vietnam also, which won't leave me much room for error or much time for any single city. I hope that the inter-city transport is frequent. I need to finish up in Moscow by October 7th, the date of the Leonard Cohen gig, which would be a spectacular way of finishing off the trans-Siberian gig before moving on to Lithuania.