Exodus Group Day 4 (16th Aug- Wed)

Spent the day in the train. We have a total of 4 nights on the train. Frank woke up at 20 mins to 10am and felt it was time for everyone else to get up. Of cos, the rest of us resumed in our beds. Catherine gave us a timetable of stops and how long each stop went for. All the trains operated at Moscow time, regardless of which area we were. We are actually traveling through 5 different timezones in the train journey.


We were also told that trains lock the train toilets before and after each stop because the contents in the toilet go right down on the train tracks. But in times of emergency, we can use a key Catherine has to unlock the toilet doors. The same key was also used to lock our berths when we go down for stops.

We tried to look for breakfast in the morning once we were awake. Frank and Eugene said the dining car had a fabulous breakfast. When we went there, they all shoke our heads at us. It was booked by a tour group and wouldn't be serving food for the others. We had to settle for the food we carried with us.


The first stop for us (at a decent day time, which in effect was the 6th stop) didn't have much food. It was mostly soft toys. We were looking forward to the next stop. The stop after that, Perm2 was a good stop with lots of local food. There was fresh bread, buns with fillings like cheese, onions, mashed potato. That was quite popular with our group.

We went to the dining car again with Matt and Allison. They had a Lager each. But we had problems ordering anything else since we couldn't communicate with them. In the end, each of us had a meat soup but for a while, we weren't sure whether the order was made since we were left alone for quite a while. It was another hassle getting the bill.

We had lots of chatting session with the people in the group. Frank was telling us about his highly successful business. He's awfully proud of his daughter (best thing that ever happened to him). Shown us photos of his daughter in his palm, at different ages. He also told us about revamping (down-sizing) the pond , his investments and the tree house he built for his daughter.

I discovered that Catherine didn’t like HongKong too and we loved coming together and bitching about HongKong. She disliked the shallowness of the people, the fact that the locals kowtow to the Kway Lohs. When she was there, the locals always tried to curry favour with her, thinking that she has power over them. She said of the foreigners who learnt Cantonese over there, most left after they understood what was said about the Kway Lohs. She disliked the weather and its humidity. I basically just disliked the people there.

Ross got on very well with everyone in the group. He even got to talk to Keith and found out that his father is seriously sick and has been a nursing home for 5 years. He had been touch and go a few times for the past few years. His parents previously owned farms and had sold their farms a long time ago.

I got carried away too with the sharing and showed Clare, Matt and Alison the wedding photos and gave Frank and Catherine a separate viewing. Matt and Catherine both remarked that they preferred my short hair. It was quite exciting to find out too that we could charge our electronic gadgets on the train. There were 2 sockets along the aisle meant for shavers.

We had another good rest that night.