July 2008 - 14

Postcard from Siberia
Four avid bridge players did their thing from Moscow to Irkutsk.
By Anne Jennings

The intrepid bridge group at
the Museum of Wooden
Architecture in Irkutsk:
Emelie Quennell, Aleid Douma,
Sue De'Ath (front) and Anne
Jennings.
Photo by Tatyana Mekhannikova

The journey began with the idea
for adventure. Then we blended it
with the love of a game. Wouldn't it
be great to ride the legendary TransSiberian Railway, Moscow to Irkutsk,
and play bridge the whole way?
Four of us - each from a different country - made the trip. Aleid
Douma is from the Netherlands, Sue
De'Ath from England, Emelie Quennell from Canada, and I am from
America (with an address in Oregon
at present).
We all spoke the same language.
Well, sort of. There was a little Acol
thrown in to confuse the five-card
major advocates - and we had the
added problem of trying to count
points using a Dutch deck - H is really a K, a V is a Q and a B is a J!
Every Wednesday in Moscow the
four of us meet to play duplicate in a
bridge group sponsored by the International Women's Club of Moscow.
The nationalities of our members
vary from Croatian and Korean to
Russian and Turkish. The language of
bridge is universal.
Thanks to the patient experience of
14

the Marlis Travel Agency in Moscow
- You want to do what? Play bridge
to Siberia? - we boarded the No. 10
Train at Yaroslavsky Station at 11:25
p.m. on Monday, April 14. Our Siberian bridge journey had begun! Over
the next three and a half days, the
longest we would stop at any station
would be 23 minutes. It didn't matter.
We had a plan. We even brought a
proper bridge cloth for the table. And
bidding boxes, of course!
Our group may have an adventurous spirit, but we did travel in the
first-class wagon. The individual
cabins in the train car were decorated
with a nautical theme in honor of our
destination, Lake Baikal, a World
Heritage site of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization. Each cabin had two
beds and a small table. We set up
the first bridge game in Cabin No.
6 just after midnight that first night
and played until nearly 2 a.m. We got
more than a few strange looks from
our other wagon-mates. Perhaps it
was the bridge cloth that had them
guessing.

There were only four of us, so we
decided to play three different types
of bridge, Home Bridge (Chicago
with Russian scoring), DOOP by
Edgar Kaplan and Play at Home, a
game developed by Dutch bridge star
Berry Westra. We drew for partners
with each new game series and kept
track of total points per person to
determine a winner at the end of our
trip.
Only the Home Bridge hands were
individually dealt and scored. The
others were selected tournament
hands previously played. Our scores
on those hands were determined
against the tournament play.
The train journey took us across
5,178 kilometers (3,218 miles) of
vast Russian countryside. We crossed
the Ural Mountains to Yekaterinburg,
the city where Tsar Nicholas and his
family were exiled and later assassinated during the first few months
after the Bolshevik Revolution.
We stopped in Balyezino and
bought a bouquet of early spring
flowers from a delightful man named
Tolya. Day and night, we snaked our
Bridge Bulletin
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of July 2008
