Having seven of us in the group meant we were split between two cabins of four, giving three of us a Russian roommate. He was ok, but keen to not socialise with us, which suited us fine as he actually smelt pretty bad. Fortuantly he was only with us for the first 24 hours and after he left, we didn't aquire anyone new for the duration.
It's difficult to remember how it was possible to pass so much time in boredom and still love every second of it, but I, and the others, did it mostly by looking out of the cabin window, looking out of the corridor window, walking to the end of the train and looking out the window there, listening to some ipod, playing cards, chatting, reading and preparing meals.
Meal times were a big part of the day, although we never really knew what part of the day it was. Keeping our watches set to Moscow time, as that is also train time, we lost at least an hour a day local time due to passing through several time zomes. It wasn't long until day became night and night became day. So meals times happened when I was bored enough, but I enjoyed the balenced diet of Smash mixed with chicken cupa soup or bovril (the chicken was actually pretty good and well worth a try). This was followed by green tea with the mash potato remains left in my cup. Others jumped off the trains and bought bland pot-noodle style meals which they mixed with Marmite. A chance to eat in the restaurant car was impossible as either our timing was always bad or the lady there just didn't like us, I couldn't read the menu anyway.
As expected the temperature on the train was nearly always far too hot, around 25°C -30°C, which I usually was ok with, but when our cabin was full, the temperature was known to rise even higher still. Our cabin was unusual and had a broken window that allowed snow to form in the inside corner of it by my bed, which ended up appearing as a snowball on my pillow a bit later. Thanks to the unbarable heat I was able to borrow an extra blanket from the others to keep warm!
Stops were fun, each time we pulled into a station (one every few hours), I would jump off to get some air and look around the platform. When the door was opened we were nearly always met by locals selling either things we should never attempt to eat or trading from a makeshift convienience store on a sledge. I would be free to wander across the tracks but with the thick ice between them I could only see it ending badly so never ventured too far. We had to master the cyrillic timetable to understand how long each stop was, anything from 6 to 45 minutes. Enough time for the cabin attendants to beat the ice from the bottom of the train with a stick. The attendants were good, and after we nearly left one member of our group behind, they always came and made sure we were all accounted for, but not until after we'd set off.
Siberia itself was beautiful but didn't change greatly the whole way. Sometimes it was flat, sometimes there were hills, many little hut villages and the odd bridge over a frozen river. There were always lots of trees. As consistant as it was, it never stopped being interesting and captivating, which was lucky.
The only downside we had, apart from the lack of showers, was that I didn't get much chance to mix with the locals and become fluent in Russian thanks to the antisocial restaurant car. This all changed on the last night but that's a whole other story!
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