Entry 5: Cecilia, You're Breakin' My Heart!

So, the night after our orientation, I didn't sleep at all. I just remember that by the time we had finished our orientation and telling each other stories, the sun was already on its way back up... which is not to say that we had been staying up the whole night -- during the summer, the sun stays up 'til about 10 and then starts rising again at 3 (which is not particularly late for young, out-of-sync adventure-seekers). It's quite the opposite of the end of our semester in St. Petersburg, where the sky would still be black when I went to classes and black again by the time I got out at 4. At that time, I would've given anything to have 19 hours of daylight, but when you've been traveling for days from the other side of the world, endless sunlight can only throw you off all the more. No matter, we passed the time with more story-telling until about 8 or 9, when the dining car (which we hadn't yet explored) was finally open (our stomachs had been pretty out-of-sync as well).
There was this one woman on the train who worked for the dining car and would come around each day selling various comestibles (pirozhki - little pies with potato or cabbage filling, pigs-in-a-blanket, drinks, chocolate, yogurt, etc.). We liked her because, though likely somewhere around 50, she always wore a pleather skirt with fishnets and had the most ridiculous mouth full of gold caps -- also, she was the only worker on the train who ever smiled at us (instead of yelling). One time, she came around and was offering pirozhki and pigs in a blanket. Wilson tried to order a pirozhok s sosiskoy (a pie with a hot dog), but he tripped over a syllable, and it came out as pirozhok so siskoy, which means something more like "a hot dog with a tit", and the train lady had to try really hard to contain her laughter. I think her name was Cecilia, but after that, we eternally dubbed her sosiski (hot-dogs).
So anyway, Sosiski came by one morning, and, apart from chiding us for not coming to the discotheque they had set up for her birthday party the previous night (to which we had all been invited but hadn't gone to because our orientation went so late -- one of those deep regrets I may carry all the way to the grave), invited us to all follow her down to the dining car. We, having kept vigil all night, were all terribly hungry and thus agreed. We had to walk through about 7 train cars to get there, but it wasn't too terribly inconvenient, so long as you weren't the last person in line (that meant you were the one to close all the doors behind us) -- plus, it reminded me a lot of one of those levels in Goldeneye (either that one on a Russian train, or that one in the Aztec temple). We followed Cecilia until we finally got to the dining car, which actually turned out to be pretty nice, as it was the only car on the train where you could have an unobstructed view on both sides of the car at the same time (provided you were cross-eyed, I suppose) -- a particular treat, as we had just started heading through the birch-covered steppe around Omsk.
So we (six out of seven of us) sat down and started pouring over the menu. I was particularly excited about the prospect of eating my first vegetable in days (not counting airplane pickles) and ordered a salad -- without mayonnaise, which didn’t take (in fact, the salad turned out to have almost none of the ingredients promised, though the fact that it contained some sort of vegetative matter was enough to please my now less-than-finicky palate). Having successfully evaded a drunkard’s furtive ass-grabbery (from one of the two middle-aged men splitting a bottle of wine at 9 AM), Sosiski came up to say hi to us, at which point Wilson decided to put her on the spot: “Which one of us is your favorite?” he asks. Sosiski glances around carefully, looking everyone over, and then suddenly comes over and hugs me, messing my hair affectionately, at which point I blush completely. Apparently, if 50-something Russian train conductresses with gold teeth, bleached hair, pleather skirts, fishnet stockings, and smoker’s breath have a type, it looks something like me...