Dear God, Goddess, Creator, Mother Earth, thank you so much for all that you have given me. Thank you for my family, friends, education, and generally wonderful life, I am so grateful. Thank you for the love that surrounds me. Thank you for keeping me safe so far on this journey. I pray, that I will make it through this country unharmed and healthy. Everything else is secondary. Please, please, just let me make it through this. That's all I ask. Thank you. Thank you. Amen.

I roll over and snuggle deeper under my thick musty wool blanket. My body now comfortably releases into the jostling rhythm of the train as the clickety clack of the tracks beneath lulls me to sleep. I awake with the same repetitive noise ringing in my ears. It is a new day and I shiver with the cold that has seeped in over night. I lean over the edge of the bed and yank hard on the stubborn shade. A world of barren appears before me. I shiver again, this time from the awing reality that I am traveling through Siberia.

16 May, 1:30pm, Irkutsk
It's funny, sometimes home doesn't feel that far away. I don't know what it is. Is it one's atmosphere, nearing physical proximity to home, one's nearing return to home, a recent contact, a sense of familiarity, comfortablility, or calm, or just feeling close in one's head?... I think in certain ways traveling makes the world seem smaller. Once you realize how "easy" it is to get somewhere. Perhaps after the last few trains and the flight back to North America I will feel differently. It is a strange sense, though; to feel like currently I could be in a coffee shop in Cambridge when in reality I am in a cafe in Siberia, where I can't read anything or talk to anyone. Maybe it's just the atmosphere and people doing essentially the same things the world over: having coffee and lunch together on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Things, people, places can seems so different at times and then so similar at other times. It is a bit surreal.

I am a well-versed traveler for my 23 years, yet virtually none of my previous adventures were experienced solo. Traversing Russia as a lone strict vegetarian female possessing zero language ability, is... (insert clique here) a challenge.

Why did I do it? Seeking to discover? Wanting to push boundaries and forge a unique identity? These thoughts confounded me throughout my venture, particularly at troubling times. Now I could easily delineated the richness I gained, however, reliving my excursions through journal entries, my original motivation remains hazy.

49 hours, train
(I recorded transit entries by hour, as days are askew crossing time zones)
It is hard not to hate this train and want to be off it. And I am ready to leave Russia too. I still have two weeks left. Ugh. I wish I didn't feel this way, but what can I do? It is so hot and stuffy. Fortunately the day is coming to an end outside the train, if not on it, so maybe it will cool off a bit. One of the older guys bought me an ice cream at the last stop. That was nice. However, the only way to escape seems my book. I fear I might go crazy alone with my thoughts, and frustrating ones at that. And the weird guy is eating and his chewing is really annoying me, but there is nowhere to go. You can tell you're on the Trans-Siberian when you have people helping you play Solitaire or when you would even be happy to see Dave (the creepy chef I worked with).

It meant all this, the exotic and foreign, the pleasing and the unsettling, but I survived.

23 May 2004, 7:25pm, Vladivostok
I've made it. I am sitting on the end of a pier looking out across the water and there are tears in my eyes. It is beautiful and I traveled all the way here on my own. I really didn't know if I would make it and here I am, after all that. I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but this is an accomplishment for me. I will write more later, for now I am going to appreciate this moment.

Yes, I did achieve much personally however the tears in my eyes have long dried replaced recently by the crying of my heart. I survived Russia while hundreds of Russians, many a fraction of my age, have not. The headlines of the Beslan school siege followed in increments by 200 dead, 340 dead, and tomorrow more, tear my insides to pieces. Alongside the headlines in the images of the relatives I see the concerned provodnitsa (train conductor), the old man who bought me ice cream, the museum director who helped me in out of the rain, the young soldier I befriended, and the gleeful children playing cards in the next cabin. These are no longer nameless faces in an unfamiliar land, but real people shocked by the cruel savagery of humanity. They had all the seeming advantages I didn't, language abilities, family and friends, yet, it made no difference. I don't know what it is like to face death, but I do know what it is to be scared. So I think now of them, bewildered by the pettiness of my own concerns then and now. What does it mean to survive?