Day spent shuttling back and forth between the old house and new. Furniture dismantled, assembled, carried up and down stairs. My new room is a dump. Bags everywhere. Staying in the old house overnight because there's no internet at the new house yet and I must work.
Book my flight to Moscow. I'm off on the June 30th, which means that I've lost a day in terms of Peru/Chile writeup and will have to revise my workload accordingly.
Steve, my sister and I have a crisis meeting about the trans-Siberian trip; Steve's coming with me as far as Beijing, and my sister's coming to Lake Baikal. Try to impress upon them that I have to spend some time in various towns and villages around the lake. Unfortunately, I can't stop by the southern half on the way back because it would mean a massive detour, so I need to make sure I've covered Irkutsk, Okhon Island, Listvyanka and other places of interest. A week no longer seems like enough, though I'd have to seriously plan my travels, day-by-day, in order to work out just how much time I can afford to spend in each place. Nor can I just go on to Mongolia from Irkutsk; I have to stop over in Ulan-Ude for a day at least, since it's the centre of Buryat culture and it's one of the few places in Russia to have a Buddhist monestery.
We manage to decide on a departure date from Moscow: August 1st. Steve and I are keen to travel 3rd class because it's significantly cheaper than 2nd class. Out of the four trains, the only one which has third class carriages arrives in Irkutsk at a crazy time of 3am. We doublecheck that it's 3am actual time, rather than Moscow time, since the Russian railway website has the annoying habit of posting all arrival times in Moscow time - never mind that Russia stretches across eight time zones.
We're trying to book our tickets via the railway website (in Russian only) to avoid the 20-30% markup charged by various middle companies, but it remains to be seen whether it'll accept our credit cards. I'd warned my sister that we'll probably need ID numbers to book tickets on the Russian railway website, and she was very dismissive of my prophecies of doom. Ha. I'm right, of course, and we either have to give our Russian passport numbers (which we do not have) or our birth certificate numbers (mine's at the new house, and my sister's boyfriend can't work out which bit of her certificate is the serial number). We call it a night.
Must sit down tomorrow and figure out when I'm getting visas, not to mention planning the trip, day by day. And do seven Peruvian pages.
Manage to complete the 'drinks' section in Peruvian 'Food and Drink', and get a start on 'Dangers and Annoyances'.
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