The Trans-Siberian Railway, cont.

To answer some questions I've received:
-There are two bathrooms in each carriage. They're not disgusting, but not someplace you'd want to linger either. They are locked for about 20 minutes both before and after you enter a station. The reason is that when you flush the toilet you can see the ground beneath the train. It flushes straight out the bottom.
-Each carriage has at least one attendant, or provodnik. (I think that's the male form of the word.) They collect tickets, hand out bedclothes, vacuum the floor, clean the bathrooms, let you know when to get on and off at whistlestops, etc.
-Music is piped into all the compartments. The provodnik also gets to choose what type of music to listen to. It's usually pretty awful. Russian pop music all sounds like it's from the soundtrack of an 80s teen movie. What many don't know is that you don't have to listen. There's a volume knob over the window. The Fun Couple and I had a running battle over the music volume. I usually lost.
-There is a samovar in each car, which is a device for producing hot water. So there's a ready supply for making instant coffee or instant noodles.

One quirk of Russian trains is that they all run on Moscow time. Russia spans 10 time zones, but all train times are on Moscow time. I traveled to Irkutsk, which is five hours ahead of Moscow, so I had to know that when it said the train will arrive at 4:07 a.m. it really meant 4:07 Moscow time plus five hours.

It's one of those things that makes perfect sense to Russians but causes infinite distress for foreigners. I met one couple who paid for a night at a hostel they didn't need because they arrived six hours later than they expected.

It gets really goofy if you're traveling between two cities when neither of them is in Moscow. To travel from Novosobirsk to Chita you need to know that you're leaving at Moscow time plus three hours and arriving at Moscow time plus six hours.