Monday morning we arrived at the hostel in Novosibirsk, started off with a great, hot shower and then decided to explore the city. Since we got a bag and an e-reader less, we were only using the map the hostel provided. So we lunched with blinis and walked around for a while, heading to the “must-sees”, without knowing what they were about, because the map was in Russian, of course. It turned out to be a good plan, Novosibirsk is beautiful. Our hostel was very close to the city center and almost everything we 'wanted to see' was in walking distance. After a nice walk to the one side of the tourist map, including a nice church and other typical (as far as we know, at least) Russian, colorful, imposing buildings, we headed back to the hostel to do laundry and relax a bit.

Dinner was a new adventure, since the restaurant had no menu in English and no staff able to speak English. Luckily, a German speaking guy, visiting his Russian family, helped us out and ordered our long wanted vegetables, accompanied with “cheese fried” (kaassoufflé's, apparently). After that, we walked around for a bit more and went into a bar 'Friends'. The cocktails were delicious and the Russians we spoke to (learned a lot about Siberian life style) ordered us some “hot cocktails” that are served during the long, cold winters. Those, too, tasted great (one of them reminded us of Glühwein).

That night we discovered the beds where a little less soft than expected (understatement), but a massive breakfast, next morning, made up for everything. We think it was fairly Russian, with dried sausages and omelets (completely made out of egg whites). Next to that we had great coffee and what we thought would be hot chocolate milk with marshmallows, but turned out to be a kind of mousse.

Then we headed off for our real adventure for that day, the police station. We found out Marit's bag with e-reader got stolen at the train station, so we needed a police report for the insurance. The lady of the hostel already warned us that probably no one would speak English. Next to that, we knew Russian police are said to be, well, not the nicest, cheerfullest, et cetera. So we started off this afternoon with that in mind, but again things turned out to be different. The amount of English was quite small, indeed, but they were very helpful and with the help of Google Translate we could make ourselves clear.

After a while, one of the police men took us outside, told us to get in a police car, put on the sirens and drove off. We had no idea what was happening, but the guy was laughing to us and after a while stopped at another police station. There, a young woman walked to us and appeared to be sent to translate everything Russian-English and vice versa. Then the three of us had to tell everything to a police woman, in a pretty relaxed way. That took another 1,5 hours and after that, the translator thought we would be done and invited us for dinner that evening. But then there was another unexpected turn, since telling the story was only the beginning. Anniek, accompanied by two police women, had to go to the train station to show how everything had happened. Marit, with Lina, our translator, had to answer all kinds of questions from another police lady, including how she got the money to buy the e-reader. Another 1,5 hours later, we finally were done. But that report we were not allowed to have, since they will be searching for the bag and e-reader for the next two months. So. That was our afternoon.

We went to buy foods and drinks for our next train ride, dropped them off at the hostel and walked to the subway station where we were to meet Lina and have dinner with her. After waiting for a pretty long time, we decided to have dinner on our own and had very nice pizzas. Back at our hostel, the people from the hostel told us Lina called and said sorry for letting us wait for so long. So sweet! It really was too bad we couldn't meet up anymore, because we had to get showers, pack our bags and leave for the train station. This time we learned from our previous mistakes and got on the train in time.

Arriving at the train, it immediately was clear this train ride would be different from the last one. We were welcomed by Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Hong Kongese and other tourists, all of them on their way to Irkutsk. This time, we slept in a normal cabin for four persons, which we shared with a very friendly British couple, Brett and Cathy. They came straight from Moscow, so had been on the train for those 60 hours already. Luckily, they brought lots of games with them and we played some with them. Also, they assisted us through our next adventure: the hostess of the carriage and her cleaning-mania. When cleaning our cabin, she turned everything upside down and even mopped underneath the rug.