Of Travels and Tourism

I've just found a grey hair, and pullled it out.
As such, I'm going to tell a story of the days when I was young and hip, decidedly grubby and found the idea of hitchhiking across a couple of continents rather appealing.
Yeah, it's been a while.
And I've just come off the phone to some friends I made when I was scraping my way through India, and they demanded to know when I was going back.
Our door's always open for you!

While doing the whole travelling on the cheap thing, I spent many a night sleeping on trains, buses and in airports- and on many a roof and two bathroom floors, but that's not the point here. If I'd tried the roof trick in Russia I'd have caught hypothermia and died. And, of course, probably rolled off the roof into a snowdrift, or such like.
Now, I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I hate having things on my feet. I may simply adore shoes, but not indoors.
Curled up in my seat on the Trans-Siberian, bare feet revelling in their escape from the confines of thick socks and hiking boots, I fell asleep. Waking, I found a group of Russian vendors gathered around the window, jostling one another as they crowded round the gap.
It took me slightly longer to work out where I was, and.. "hang on, aren't we still moving?"
Nothing gets past me.

The guy on the seat opposite, a fellow traveller but somewhat more of a native (he clearly knew what he was doing; he even brought a cloth-on-a-stick to scrape the layers of caked on dirt from the window pane) was leaning out of the window bartering with the vendors in Russian.
My Russian is extremely limited; I decided not to spend too muich time at all in Russia after spending two years studying Russian history at A-level.
Communism? Good in theory, a complete disaster in practice.

This being so, I didn't quite realise what he was doing.
Where are my boots?

He turned back to me with a big smile and gave me a handful of roubles.
Is good price, buy you better shoes, he said.