More than 7.500 km with the Trans-Siberian Railway. From Moscow to Beijing. By train. Four stops. Feeling the vastness and wilderness of Russia. The seemingly never-ending birch woods in Siberia. Pine forests. Colourful painted wooden houses amongst the trees. Earth roads. A lake like an ocean. Clear, cold water. Steppe. Camels and horses. Beautiful blue firmament. Dust. Summer. More than two and a half months of time. Never more than 36 hours on the train. Instant soups. Samovar. Vodka. Drunk russian gangster. Sharing food. Shared compartment. Talking without words. Pravodnitsa. Orange peel for good cabin smell. Playing cards. Sleeping. Looking out of the window. Wind in your hair. Observing. Dreaming. Reading. Like a living room on wheels. Mongolian sheep ankle oracle. Pancakes with condensed milk. Buying private beer from a Chinese border official. Píjiǔ. Pinyin. Regauging at the Chinese border. Arriving. Leaving.
We went to a typical candy and sweets shop in Novosibirsk, like a big colourful kiosk. Plastic boxes filled with different kinds of individually colourful wrapped chocolates and candies. We fell in love with all of the traditional, old-fashioned illustrations you find on the wrapping papers. We couldn’t decide which of the sweets and illustrations we should pick, therefore we picked around twenty different, single candies. The sales lady at the cashier desk was rolling her eyes when she saw our bag filled with all the single candies, each of them with different prices. She had to weigh piece by piece and sometimes the pieces were so light that the scale couldn’t really display the weight. In the end we had twenty price tags on our little bag. The sales lady was laughing when she hand over our collection. We left happy and enjoyed every single piece of our yield. Yummy and candies for your eyes at the same time!
