Must stop in Moscow
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
4
29
Trip End
Apr 01, 2009
Moscow,
Central Russia,
Russian Federation
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The train pulled into the Poland-Belarus border at around 10pm. On came the sniffer dogs and soldiers, Polish ones I think. They checked our passports and that was that. Shortly afterwards our new room-mate joined us. A Belarussian who looked a bit like Patrick Swayze.
Luckily he spoke a few words of English, which was more than anyone else on the train seemed to. Lucky, because the growling carriage attendant had handed us an imigration form and customs declaration, both in Russian!
When we explained that we only spoke English she growled, but helpfully returned with another copy of one of the forms, this time in...Italian! 'No ENGLEESH!' Oh well, at least we were in the right alphabet now!
We filled out the imigration card which was fairly easy. The customs form, however, was rather more complicated. The only thing we cuold be sure of was ticking the box to say we had no 'Bambinos' oh, or anything 'Radioattivi'
Anyway, Patrick helped us by getting a copy of the form in Russian, and in broken English and sign language told us the other boxes were for guns, flowers and 'strong' medicines!
No-one ever did take the Italian customs form from us, so I'm keeping it as a souvenir.
The train moved on a bit, presumably to Belerus where some more imigration officials got on, but no dogs this time. We nervously handed over our passports with that irrational guilty feeling you get when you see a policeman.
Pulling us to Russia
What if they said we couldn't come in? They took our passports and imigration cards away, and various people in uniform stomped up and down the carriage. But after a while, they came back, said 'Daniel?', 'Sarah?' and gave them back, we were in!At this point I should say we'd paid 64 pounds each for this privalige of passing through Belerus, they doubled the visa fee just before we applied! And now it was 11PM and we were about to sleep through the whole country.
Morning came, Patrick had left at Minsk in the middle of the night, but we still had about 5 hours to go until we got to Moscow. The Growler handed Sarah a little plastic box, 'Croissant' she said.
The Croissant 'looked' like meringue. On further inspection it was nothing of the sort. It was more like those rubber balls you squeeze to relieve stress, always returning to its original shape! It tasted horrible. Fortunately we still had some leftovers from the supplies we'd brought on-board with us.
The train pulled into Moscow Belarusky station bang on time, not bad for an 18 hour train ride.
After our experience with the forms Sarah thought it might be wise we spend the last hour on the train learning the Cyrillic alphabet, at least then we'd be able to read/say the names of stations, roads etc.
It proved to be time well spent. It's not hard once you get into it, B and V are swapped like in Spanish, a back to front N is 'i' and so on. Some letters are even the same!
Our first task was to procure some tickets for the Metro. We'd already worked out that there was a flat fare and that we needed to buy a pre-loaded card, a bit like a disposable Oyster card. For just 300 roubles (about 6 pounds) we each had 10 journeys anywhere on the network, that's 30p a trip! Beat that Boris!
We descended into the palatial underground station. The entire network is like a roman palace, marble and gold everywhere, it really is quite amazing-and over 100 years old.
We got to the platform. Which way do we go? It was then that our little lesson came in handy, as absolutely nothing was in Roman letters. We picked what we thought was the right direction, hopped on the train and off we went.
Success, we got to our destination with the greatest of ease, and it was far more pleasant than the London Underground.
We dumped our bags in the hostel and set off to see a bit of Moscow. We arrived at the walls of the Kremlin and thought we'd try to find a way in. As it turns our you have to buy tickets, we joined a crowd of people roughly queuing at the one available ticket window. After a while we got a bit bored of queuing and left to walk round to Red Square which was free.
Red square is breathtaking. You step in, have the massive Kremlin wall to your right, to your left is the GUM shopping centre (this is not just a shopping centre). Straight ahead is St Basil's cathedral, 'the onion' as Sarah likes to refer to it as. There was no crowd queuing to get into the onion, so we handed over some Roubles and went inside.
It's amazing from the outside, but only when you get in do you really appreciate what an extraordinary feat of engineering this place is, and it was built in 1555!!!
After a walk around the GUM, and realising we didn't have enough money to buy anything, not even an ice cream let alone a De Beer's diamond necklace, we set off back to the hostel.
Day 2 should have been easy. We just had to go and pick up our train tickets from an office in the city centre. Only problem being that the instructions of where to go were on my e-mail account and the computer in the hostel wasn't working.
Oh well, we thought, we'll go into town and find an internet cafe, there were at least 3 listed in the guidebook we had. This was at 10:30am.
4 hours later and we still hadn't found an internet cafe, it looked like all the ones from the guidebook had shut down! At this point we were starting to get only a little bit concerned that we might never find this place, but this may be through the lack of food.
So we found a phone box, called the hostel and got them to find out the phone number of the agency we'd used. We called them, and they gave us the address and metro station we needed, we got to the metro station and realised we had no way of finding the street-it was off the edge of our map.
Isn't it funny how things turn up right after you stop looking for them? Just as we were contemplating how to ask the newsagent for a map we turned around and there was a post office which had internet access!!
I had far more detailed instructions on the email, so we scribbled them down, found the office and happily collected our tickets!
After a well earned meal we thought that, to avoid a re-run of Warsaw we'd go on a little reconnaissance mission to the train station we'd be leaving from to go to Beijing. We got to the station, located the left-luggage lockers and that was that, we went back to the hostel, wahsed our clothes and played chess - when in Rome and all that!
So that was Moscow, tonight we leave for Beijing, 9000kms and 6 nights on the train.........
What's Mockba?
