Lubas story

Luba is in charge of our compartment in the train and speaks enough English for us to understand her and to ask her things we need help with.
She lives just outside Moscow and with a job on Train Number 2 is quite high up in the hierarchy of people who work on the trans Siberian trains.  Trains number 1 and 2 travel between Moscow and Vladivostok. The lower the number the better the train. Even numbers like ours travel west to east and odd numbers travel east to west.

Luba has an assistant which means she can sleep for a few hours at night and she has a compartment much like ours.

At each stop she dresses in her smart coat, scarf and hat to oversee comings and goings in her compartment

When the train stops she tells us how long we will be staying at the stop for and this has varied from 2 - 39 minutes. Grandpa and his friends played leapfrog on some of the platforms but readers who know is will realise that this would not come naturally to us.  Brisk walking up and down the platform has been the order of the day with Luba watching anxiously to ensure we don't wander too far.

Luba tells us that her work consists of being on the train from Moscow to Vladivostok, leaving Moscow as we did late at night on a Wednesday and getting to Vladivostok on a Tuesday. She then has two days off before returning to Moscow. She seems to have a few days back in Moscow before starting all over again.

Not for her the brisk walking up and down the platform.

She told us she holidays in Egypt or Tunisia. Andrea said that Russians traditionally have just two weeks holiday each year so always go somewhere hot.

This trip was a quiet one for her.  She had us and Andrea and no other passengers who travelled all the way to Irkutsk. During part of the trip she had three other sets of passengers but they did not stay on for more than one or two nights.

Luba seemed to watch telly and do Sudoku a lot. But she also hoovered, and kept everything clean. On Luba's train the loos do not smell!

In the early mornings she would be about in her nightie which seemed to be regulation colours of the railway and one day she appeared from another carriage with her hair in a towel having obviously had a shower.  We had been told that the staff had a shower but that it was not available to passengers.

Luba however said that we could have a shower if we wished. Wonderful lady.

Luba, like Tatiana made life so much better for us. She does not have an email address so won't read this but thank you Luba.