Nate and Kara Buchanan are on day 3 of the Trans-Siberian Railway with spotty phone service and no Wi-Fi. They grab 22 minutes at a station stop, eat borscht for $6 in the eight-table restaurant car, and use dry shampoo and Epic Wipes to stay clean. They disembark tomorrow at 7am.
Questions this video answers
12:56 with a 22-minute stop.
Beets, pork, cabbage, potatoes, onions, carrots, tomato paste, and spices — priced at $6.
About $12 for soup and potatoes.
Eight tables (single restaurant car on the train).
They will get off at 7am the next morning for two whole days off the train.
Chapters
Thank you.
Good morning. It is day three on the Trans Siberian Railway. I'm on my second cup of coffee. I have not showered yet and I'm wearing all the same clothes. But that is going to change today. It's a beautiful, beautiful day outside. We're seeing the blue sky for the first time in three days and some of the trees are starting to change colors. So it's a lot prettier today. And we have our first stop in about an hour.
Also, while we're just riding, I thought I would take a minute to explain one of the big questions that I had before we got on the train, which was are we going to have any type of connection to the outside world? So there's no WI fi on the train. So phone, sir, Phone. Phone service is the only thing that you're left with. And surprisingly we've had service the majority of the time. It hasn't always been great. It goes from like extended to no service to 3G to LTE. It just all depends on the towns that you're passing through. So if you're passing through a big town, maybe you'll have 3G or LTE, which none of it's ever been very fast. The most we've been able to do is like check email and maybe load a web page if you're really patient. But you do have some sort of connection. So you're not just completely off the grid for a few days, which has been nice to be able to keep up with email and stuff.
It is 12:56. We have a 22 minute stop at our first stop of the day. But there's been a tragedy. We are out of instant noodles and instant potatoes. So we're on a mission to find some lunch. Gotta get some exercise to get some food.
This is the furthest, this is the furthest we've ventured from the train. Makes me a little nervous. I don't want it to be out of my sight.
Down the shop.
Hey, success. We still have about 15 minutes but we're heading to our train because we are not chancing it leaving us.
We have not showered since we've been on the train because we can't. So I thought I would explain some ways that I've attempted to try to stay presentable and feeling fresh. The first one being my powdered dry shampoo. I've talked about this before, but I don't know what I would have done without it. I've been putting it on every morning and some makeup wipes. So every day I just kind of wipe and do my hair and wash my face and brush my teeth. You could change your clothes. That would probably help. We haven't done that yet, but there's something I've been saving all summer long to use that I'm really excited about. The Epic Wipe. So over the summer, when we visited Heath and Alyssa in their rv, they gifted us an Epic Wipe. It's basically a wipey the size of a bath towel. It's huge. And you're supposed to be able to clean your whole body with it and feel like you took a bath. I've seriously been carrying this in my backpack since May. Oh, it smells nice.
We've been waiting for the perfect time to use it, but typically we have access to a shower, so I felt wasteful using it. This is just perfect.
Oh, my gosh.
It's huge.
It smells nice.
It does. It does smell like eucalyptus. I feel so weird doing this on the camera. I feel like I need to take my clothes off to properly feel like.
I took a bath.
I don't want to waste this, but I don't want to do any more of this on camera.
Feeling nice and fresh for our next stop, which is now.
I seriously feel like I took a shower. So if you are coming on the Trans Siberian and you're in the US Stock up on some Epic Wipes. Those are awesome. And diet shrimp. It's all building up in there. Tonight's dinner menu. Instant noodles in a bag. Instant noodles in a bowl. Beef, chicken, Beef spaghetti. I draw the line at instant spaghetti and more beef. I'm gonna go with this big chicken bowl. That's a steal. The trick is you can't point to.
It from over here.
You have to order from over there. So it might take a second.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
Honestly, there's a lot less variety of these stops than I thought there would be. They all kind of have the same instant meals, similar drinks. I got really excited last night when we saw the dried whole fish. I thought things were about to start getting really interesting, but it's just been more of the same today.
We decided that we probably bought these a little prematurely since it is our last night on the train and we hadn't eaten at the restaurant yet. We felt like we should check it out, even though we haven't heard good things about it. A guy that we were talking to earlier today said he talked to another lady who said that they were, like, reheating food in the kitchen. I don't know. We figured we should at least go check it out once if it Looks bad. We could always just, like, maybe get a small snack and then got these for backup plan. Also, I wasn't sure when I was going to work this into the video. I feel like this is as good a time as any. I just wanted to apologize that all of the b roll out the train window is like a view through a dirty window. There are literally no windows in this entire car that open up to the outside. So everything has to be shot through a dirty window. But if it makes you feel better, it's exactly what we've been looking at for the past few days. I just usually try to make the video a little more high quality than that. Let's go check out the restaurant.
God, it smells like fish in this car.
We made it to the restaurant.
How do you feel about salad?
Ordering was hilarious. There's one waitress. We've been looking at the menus because there's. They're huge and there's tons of options. And she asked what we wanted, and we didn't know yet. So we were saying, we don't know. One more minute, please. And she was just, like, pointing at the menu. Salad, soup. And we kept saying, we don't know. And then we just had to pick something. She was ready for us to order. That was so weird.
So we've gone with the traditional borscht soup. It is beets, pork, cabbage, potatoes, onions, carrots, tomato paste, and spices, all for $6. Whoa, it's sliding. Oh, no. My borscht. I think we ordered soup at the roughest point we've encountered on the track so far.
I'm gonna say it tastes better than it looks. Very he dill. If you like dill, you'll probably like it. And a lot of cabbage and some beetroot, which I can't really taste, but it gives it a nice red color. Sorry about the camera shake. Kara's doing her best. We're. Oh, soup's going. Oh, we lost it. We're not using the stabilizer because we felt like it made the waitress a little uncomfortable. Thank you. Thank you.
We also got fried potatoes with onions and mushrooms.
Not could possibly be from frozen, but not bad. Just needs a little salt and pepper.
So a few thoughts on dinner. First, I think we got the wrong impression of our waitress. She was much nicer the rest of the time. She even said thank you as we left the car. The food was better than I thought it was going to be. I said the soup and the potatoes were both, like, really good, but it was also quite expensive. I think we paid about $12 for soup and potatoes. So if you wanted to get like an actual, like, meat entree with sides, you'd be paying at least 10 to $20 per plate. So we're saving a lot of money with our instant meals this week. Well, in. Although I'm glad we tried it, I would say most people on the train are probably doing the same thing we are that's eating food in their cabin. Because that one food car is the only food car on this entire train. It has eight tables and there's probably over 100 people on this train, if.
I had to guess.
So I think we're doing it the local way by bringing our own food. But I'm glad we tried it once. May. Maybe we'll try it one more time when we go on the fermatrain.
Hope you enjoyed day three on our Trans Siberian Railway trip. This is our last night on the train for the first leg of the trip.
Somehow we downloaded a movie to watch and bought a deck of cards and we did not use either in the first 74 hours.
What have we been doing?
We just spent a couple of more hours editing video. Yeah, that seems to be pretty much all you've done, at least. Yeah, I don't really know what I've done.
We are getting off of the train at 7am tomorrow for two whole days and then you're good.
Then back on the train for six and a half hours and two more days off the train and then three more full days back on the train.
