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As usual I was flattened by jet lag.
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- The first day back in
Moscow from Seattle I felt like roadkill -- totally limp, and without brain function. I slept when it was night time in Seattle, then slept again when it was bed time in Moscow. My only hours of alertness were the few of overlapping wakefulness normal to both cities, early morning Seattle/ early evening Moscow, and early evening Moscow/ early morning Seattle. The time zone differences were 13 hours by the way we flew, but my husband, Slava, pointed out that it would have been only 11 hours if we had flown west instead of east. Either way, it was too much for me.
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- It would have
been a physical impossibility for me to have done all that Slava
did on our first day in Moscow. He deposited my carcass in the
hotel, then went out on errands hither, thither and yon. Since
it was such a beautiful day, he was gone for hours, and on his
way back he decided not to take the subway the last two stops,
but to walk a couple of miles instead.
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- I'm deeply grateful
that he's tolerant of my against-the-book way of dealing with
jet lag. You are supposed to fight it, not give in to it. I can
go along with that when the difference in departure and arrival
times is only a few hours. But when night is day and day is night,
I'm lost.
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- On Saturday we
boarded the fabled Trans-Siberian Railroad train for Yekaterinburg, our home city in the Ural Mountains,
right on the western edge of Siberia.
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- Slava told me he was worried that the weight
of our luggage would exceed the allowance for train travel. Even
in my addled state of mind, I started worrying, too, because
the tonnage of what we were bringing back was awesome.
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- We were lucky that, flying over,
Delta just counted the number of pieces of luggage. Some airline
baggage handler probably badly aggravated his hernia lifting
one of our suitcases in particular--loaded with books and papers.
But, as it later so logically appeared, of course the railroad
doesn't care much about tonnage anyway. We had a private compartment
and could stuff in as much as we wanted.
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- In the compartment next to us was a young Danish woman and her 10-year-old
son. They were taking this Russian version of the Orient Express
all the way to Vladivostok, just for the adventure of it all.
The woman was conversant in Russian and English (and probably
French, German and Spanish, too). The company would have been
more lively for her if she had booked second class seats, so
that she might meet a cross-section of travelers. People in private
compartments keep to themselves most of the time. That's what
Slava and I did--we take the train to rest and relax. The rhythm
of the rails is soothing and conducive to sleep.
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