Clash of the Koreans

It was the fourth night of our trans siberian journey and we were both suffering from lack of oxygen, food and exercise. Therefore we practically tumbled out of the train to breathe some fresh air when we arrived at Irkutsk at 3 in the morning. We returned after five minutes, since temperatures had reached 27 degrees below zero, to find 70 Koreans filing into our carriage (which had remained empty for the first three days). We managed to elbow our way to our cabin and found six Koreans sitting on our beds with huge bags! We immediately started explaining that this was our room (as if it wasn't obvious enough with empty pringles packets and clothes thrown all over the place). They refused to move. At a loss since they didn't speak a word of English, we tried to talk to the group as a whole. All 70 were travelling together and for some reason desperately needed to sleep ontop of each other.

We tried everything; we got angry, we refused to move, we tried to compromise, we showed our tickets, Snorelax threw a tantrum, we got our big Polish friend involved- but nothing worked. They countered everything we said, they even went to the effort of changing carriage numbers so that we would think we had been in the wrong place for three days. Their argument was that the numbers change at Irkutsk and we had to move 12 carriages down to the other end of the train- ridiculous. In the end they threatened to fetch the police and we rejoiced over the fact that an authority figure might slap some sense into them. A tiny man who had worked as a carriage attendant for the whole journey turned up wearing a jumper with a velcro patch that red "police". This was when we realised that we were done for. 70 angry Koreans whispering to Mama Baboushka in Mongolian, a fake policeman showing us out of our cabin, an old woman telling us a sob story about leaving her family behind and travelling alone, and so on.

We decided to admit defeat and move in with our charming Australian friend Jared who luckily we had met earlier that day. He was sharing a cabin with a not-so-charming Russian man who sported a massive beer belly and seemed to abide by "better out than in". He would burp and belch making the room smell like stomach acid. After the fight we were knackered so luckily fell asleep straight away. After quite an eventful night, things turned out alright in the end.