Sunday, September 30, 2012

Moseying around Moscow

We arrived in Russia and made our way to the train; after trying to exchange money (no they do not take Czech kronas) and having a manly looking woman in a fur coat asking if we wanted a taxi ride. Luckily, with Tom's Polish background, he can understand Russian, but understanding their cyrillic language is another. Knowing some letters or language of Russia is essential if you want to visit. The subway signa are ALL in Cyrillic so don't expect any English favors, at least in Moscow. After getting off the subway and walking for 40 minutes, we found the hostel- a 10 minute walk in reality. We made our way in, got settled and explored the red square. It was actually very pretty at night. Everything was lit up, with red stars everywhere. Moscow isn't the nicest city in Russia, even people we traveled with said that St. Petersburg is much nicer and a bit more friendlier. But with a one night stay there, we managed. For dinner, we looked at a 1000 places it seemed, all with sushi, which o oddly did not want. I wanted warm, comfort food. We found a cafeteria which was half off dice they were closing for the night which was nice. Good, kinda, but it filled the void in our stomachs.

We didn't go out, as we were unsure as to where to go and didn't want to end up in a bad group, so we headed back to the hostel and fell asleep. The next day we headed back to red square to see the it in daylight to kill time before our 10pm trip. After buying groceries and me freaking out about my debit card, we did our last minute interneting before our 3 day trip on the train.

When we go to the train station, no one was helpful, we couldn't read anything and their were 5 of us lost and confused. Tom went to see if he could get help, which he finally did after asking someone in line. The Italian guys who found us also found out a well right as Tom came back. I had my thoughts on the situation (which ended up true) but was ignored but whatever, right now I'm headed to Beijing so things worked out.

So we got on our train and with a total of 5 people in our carriage ( us, the 2 Italians and a Londoner) we headed out to Irkutsk!

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