Another night on the train and tomorrow we’ll be in Moscow and I’ll get to sleep in my own bed!

Most of today was spent packing. Meredith had to pack up all her belongings because she’s reached the end of her time in Izhevsk while Hannah had to gather everything for a trip to Moscow, then America, then Mexico, then back to America (briefly), Moscow (briefly), across Siberia, back to Moscow, then to Nizhny Novogorod, and finally back to Izhevsk. That’s a lot of trips to plan for and she had plenty of souvenirs to pack.

One University employee who was very close to Meredith insisted that she would drive us to the train station although Hannah and Meredith warned that we would have a lot of luggage (even I, only here for two and a half days, brought a guitar). Well, she arrived at the dorm a little early and hid her shock at our pile of luggage well. Her friend, who had been riding in the front seat, stepped out and said she’d take public transport to wherever she was going. Somehow, everything was packed into the small car. I honestly don’t know how it happened because I was sitting in the car having things packed around me.

The drive was a little nerve-racking. Trains leave on time and there’s no where to make up time if you arrive at the train station late (at the airport you can at least hope check in or security lines will be shorter than normal and you’ll gain back some of the time you’ve lost). So, when we hit a large traffic jam, we could sense the tension mount in the air, what little there was of it left in the Lada.

Somehow, we made it to the station on time, barely, and we had a crew to see us off. Meredith said a hasty goodbye to her faithful translators and we thanked the woman who’d driven us. Then they left the compartment and we gathered around the window to wave. That’s one of the best things about train travel—the goodbye is enforced by the conductor, out of everyone’s control. At the airport, goodbye means the person traveling walks over to the security line and the person seeing them off can either stand for the next forty minutes and watch them crawl through the line until they are out of sight, or they can leave themselves. It’s just not right. The person not leaving is supposed to wait until the person leaving is gone. But, anyway, if someone argued well enough I might concede that our nation’s security is more important than that moment of parting and the principle of waiting for the departing to depart.