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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Ah, shame. It's in the wrong direction for me. I did the Trans-Siberian a few years ago, but heading from east to west.

This really captures the feel of the thing. It's just like sitting on a train, except for an entire week.

Of course, for the full experience, you'll need some Russian businessmen who don't speak any English (but understand a little German+) filling you with inexhaustible quantities of really good vodka and crushing you at chess, and you'll need to step outside for ten minutes each day to buy potato cakes and liter bottles of beer (to dillute the vodka).

Highly recommended!

(+ Evidently when a group of people keeps repeatedly showing up in your country uninvited every few dozen years, you eventually get to know their language. Hence you can get by pretty much anywhere in Russia if you speak German.)

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Their knowledge of German would be more likely to be a result of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. Likewise people that went to school in the former GDR all speak a basic or even advanced level of Russian.

Foreign language was a mandatory class in all Soviet schools. Vast majority of schools taught English, few schools had German and even smaller fraction had French.

Can't speak for Soviet era, but in Tsarist Russia, French was the status language of the upper classes.

The allusions to French influence are everywhere in "Fathers and Sons". The novel itself is a meditation on Russian society at the time, specially the two leading intellectual camps, the established landed gentry and the young nihilists who rejected the status quo. Turgenev subtly highlights their shared francophile elements, both types usually educated in France or French schools, or taught themselves French to absorb Western culture for subversive reasons.

I think that remained true at least until the early twentieth century. My high-school Russian teacher said this was because wealthy Russian families often employed French nannies, who taught some French to the children.

You can see this in the film Burnt by the Sun, which is fictional, but perhaps historically accurate in this respect. It's set in 1930's Russia. A respected Soviet military officer is eating by himself while his wife's upper-class family converses in the other room. The maid asks why, and he responds, "I can't speak French." The purpose of this scene is clear: the inability of high-status Russians to speak French is a sign of broader social change.

It's still a mandatory class, but most people treat it as another mandatory class, so the majority of people you'll meet don't speak a foreign language well. However, learning English has been seen as useful for career advancement, and many people take classes later in life. The classes taught in public schools aren't enough to teach a language with no extra practice.

Did you do it just because you could, or was there some actual reason to take the train?

I had actually intended to take the train from Moscow to Beijing as part of an overland round-the-world trip that I started in South Africa in 2003, but I didn't have a Russian Visa before I left and you can only get one in your country of residence.

So I flew home from Germany, worked a 3 month contract, then flew one-way to Bangkok and started attacking the problem from the other end. Bussed, trained and ferried my way as far as Norway before dropping down into Europe and thinking about heading home.

It was still pretty cool going the other direction, and I got a week in Mongolia out of the deal (because c'mon, how often are you in Mongolia? You gotta stop.) The only downside is that I unwrapped my round-the-world "string" by doing the second lap east to west, leaving me with a net zero circumnavigations.

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