'How did I end up here?' I asked myself, looking down at the sheep's embryo in my hands and the group of giggling, Mongolian nomads who had given it to me as a 'present.'
And the British think they're good at sarcasm.
My journey had begun four months earlier, when I had voluntarily put myself in exile, or in other words, decided to move to central Siberia for six months. My borderline obsession with all things Russian and for discovering off-the-map places made this seem like a logical thing to do at the time.
Armed with a head full of curiosity, trepidation and an infant's grasp on the Russian language, I took a 15-hour flight over dense forests and blue lakes to wind up in Irkutsk, one of the largest Siberian cities. Irina, an extremely friendly local girl who I met on the plane, forced her parents to drop me at my dormitory. I was greeted by a stern lady who showed me to my new 'home.' It had a mattress thinner than I'd seen on one of those 'toughest prisons' documentaries. That bargain price of £10 a week which I had marvelled at before now brought the phrase 'if it's too good to be true, then it probably is,' to mind.
The first month was actually really, really horrible. I learnt how to wash my clothes by hand, navigate the crazy bureaucratic labyrinth of getting Russian paperwork done and was barely able to converse with a single soul except through some wonderfully honed miming skills. Nearly every day, I would go to the local market and feebly attempt to practise Russian and pretend to be interested in buying some honey that still had bees swarming all over it or cabbages. Trust me, when you're really desperate, you can feign interest in a cabbage.
But over time, something beautiful happened; the snow, the mist off the Angara river, the bleak apartment blocks, smoke billowing from wooden houses and fur coats all became somehow familiar. A new world opened up to me as I was able to speak with the wonderfully curious people who approached me in the streets wanting to know what I was doing there and 'what exactly do they write about us in the news?'
It was time to travel and see the thick forests and steppes that had been etched in my mind from years of reading Russian literature. I hopped on the trans-Siberian railway, intending to get a bus to Mongolia from Ulan-Ude. As soon as I sat down, a huge, bulky man opposite me introduced himself as Ishmael. He was an army commander and motioned over to his brigade, who were sitting on the other end of the carriage. He proceeded to open up several large green boxes labelled 'Russian Army,' that contained crackers, tinned meat and vegetables which he neatly placed on the table.
'Eat, eat!' he said, and several people joined us, including an elderly couple named Galina and Alexander, and a warm, middle-aged woman called Lyubov who reminded me of my mum a little bit. We all drank tea and chatted for nearly the whole journey, until Lyubov insisted I used her lap as a place to sleep. It was already a weird day of chowing down on the Russian army's food: Why not just snuggle up with this woman on a train who I'd just met? She stroked my hair as my eyes closed and opened to see small, snowy mountains pass across the pink skyline through the window.