June 4 - "Some smiles please"

I love getting screamed at at 8:00 in the morning by a burly Russian woman - nothing says welcome like a good 'ol fashion tongue lashing! In my haste to pay for our bikes before our check-in closed I neglected to get our baggage stickers back so ofcourse these wereabsolutely imperative to be able to retreive our luggage in Irkutsk - like seriously! After feigning a full body pocket search which I knew was fruitless I suppose she felt that Ali and I had been verbally abused enough and pushed us out of the baggage room only to be met by a throng of inbound Russians packed 20 deep to get into the room - thus ensued even more verbal abuse as we pushed through with our bike boxes! Yay Russia! Our Irkutsk hostel is actually quite the anomaly where we get our own bachelor apt. A life saver really where we ca unpack our bikes and get the panniers ready. So far people have not been exceptionally nice to us and it's quite obvious that we are annoying everyone we encounter! I am a bit worried that we will be so exposed and vulnerable on our bicycles on the side of the road. Looks like roughly 680kms to the Mongolian border so fingers crossed that we encounter some smiling faces along the way. Off to sleep at 6:30 pm and wishing I had some ginger kittens to play with like the ones up on Scotland!