Brief Thoughts On The Train In Departure

We're(1) in the dining car on the Trans-Siberian Railway sometime after midnight and the Dutchman sitting across from me does that thing that frustrated Europeans sometimes do to make themselves feel better when he says, "The problem with Americans is they are all stupid" and then he sort of waves his hand around his cigarette and says, "No offense, yeah?"

In response I do the thing guilty Americans do by welcoming the criticism and in fact thanking him for his acuity and letting him know I'm certainly open to more if he would like to keep going and ultimately shouldering the blame for Imperialism In All Its Forms and he thanks me for listening because Americans can't do that, either.

"I'm trying to do my part," I say.

He says, "It's not good enough", but in a way that implies We're All In This Together and orders his eleventh beer in the three short hours since we pulled away from Moscow and stuffs another only-just-smoked-cigarette into an ashtray choked with cigarettes he's been forgetting to smoke all night because of the eleven beers/three hours thing.

There are sacrifices to be made on this train, for sure - in terms of space, and comportment, and nutrition, and, you know, odor. It's not a little alarming to consider the implications of the hole at the bottom of the toilet bowl that looks directly down to the tracks; it's probably best not to work your way through some math here - to calculate the number of cars on this train and as such the total number of toilets (+/- 12); or the number of people on this train (+/- 200); or the length of this track (+/- 5500 miles) or the length of time people have been going to the bathroom all over it (+/-120 years). But 12 hours in - sitting, now, at a station in Balizino where all +/-200 of us have disembarked and bought food and stretched our legs and nodded at each other in recognition of passing our first night together - it's exactly those small sacrifices that earn you the communal generosity of your thrilled-to-be-here-too coupe neighbors, and the few shared beers in the galley, and the loose conversation around the samovar, and even the opportunity to be called stupid - no offense intended - by a kindly drunk Dutchmen just after midnight somewhere in Siberia.

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(1) A note on format: I'm writing this on an iPhone in the Notes app in the middle of Siberia where Internet access is extraordinarily expensive.  Apologies for: brevity, lack of clarity, and extreme sloppiness in presentation/typography).