железная дорога (2002 – 2006)

Yes, I realize I’m fudging the alphabet a little here because this should technically be under the letter Z, but since the Cyrillic letter looks like an X, let’s just go with it. This post is the Railroad!

While You Are There: You can do everything on a train. A train is a world unto itself. You can

• meet locals you can’t communicate with in words but still enjoy the company of and eat all the food they offer you
• meet interesting tourists, like an older Italian lady and her boy-toy, because the conductor forced you to sit in a tourist car because he doesn’t think it’s safe for foreign women to be travelling alone
• get woken up on the overnight car by soldiers coming onto the train and locking it down so you can travel through a particularly dangerous area, all while a Buddhist monk sleeps across from you, making you feel like nothing bad could possibly happen
• ride in the conductor’s berth because the train was sold out but you really need to get home the next day and he feels bad for you so he lets you share his space
• buy delicious snacks from independent vendors at the stations
• pretend you don’t speak any Russian in order to stonewall Russian guards who want to “fine” you for not having the correct permission to live in Moscow as you are trying to get to Finland for a flight to Spain, and laugh when they finally give up because they don’t speak English and no one else stepped in to help translate
• get in trouble because your university laminated your rail pass and that’s against the rules and then you get fined and then the town finds out and the local paper publishes an apology to the foreign students for the “rude” treatment they suffered from train personnel for something that wasn’t their fault
• go on an epic cross-country journey, lose track of what day it is, get on your train on the wrong day, get woken up in the night by the person whose berth you are in, watch as mass confusion ensues while a helpful local runs into the station to buy you a ticket valid for that day, and then be eternally grateful to that person even though you spend the rest of the night in overcrowded sitting-only car

Why It’s On My List: I love train travel, for all the true stories enumerated above and more. I only posted pictures from Russian train trips I took, but I’ve also taken the train in India, the US, and Western Europe.

For this year’s A-Z Blog Challenge, I’ve decided to showcase 26 of my favorite places in the world. I’ve only been to 22 of the 196 countries, so I’ve got some more travelling to do, but these places are well worth a visit.