We arrived nearly two hours early at the station which was enough time to grab something to eat and a couple of beers. It was still incredibly hot in Moscow and we were a little worried about the kind of train we would get after our last experience. We needn’t have worried, the train was very modern and had air con- only it didn’t come on until we left the station, which left us slow baking for half an hour. There were only five carriages and they were all bound for individual places, one for Basel and one for Amsterdam, and we gained carriages and lost them on our route. The other odd thing was that the compartments all slept three people. The beds were vertically stacked on top of one another and they were smaller than we were used to. One of us could have gone into a carriage with a young couple, but we thought it would have been unfair to leave them with Harry...One night and a morning brought us to the Belarus/Poland border where once again, passport formalities were all done in the comfort of our own carriages. We also experienced the changing of the bogeys as the guage changes 10 centimetres as it had done in Mongolia. We barely felt any movement as the carriages were hoisted aloft in a big hangar and then lowered back on to different rolling stock like so much Lego! Harry and Maisie were particularly impressed and hung out of the carriage doors 10 feet in the air!
After this we had a three hour stopover in Warsaw where our train turned into the 449, but we didn’t change carriage. It’s a shame we were one stop out of Warsaw, as the city centre beckoned to us over rooftops. Instead we found a shop to buy some provisions for our train meals (everyone point blank refused to look at a packet of instant noodles- even Harry) and a park for the children to run around in. We feel most definitely in Europe now, and everything is starting to get that familiar look about it! 24 more hours!
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