Home

Touched down in Ireland and now I'm home. The trip has been amazing, we have done and seen so many things. We've been gone 5 months, seen 15 countries (including stopovers), 5 continents, 4 wonders of the world and spent at least one night in each of 36 different cities. Pretty exhausting but damn fantastic. So many places we want to go back to and so many other places we now want to see. For now though I want to go nowhere and just eat a whole load of Irish food and see all my friends and family all the time.

St. Petersburg

The first day was mostly just getting to the hostel. We spent about an hour trying to get into the metro from the train station. Excluding one girl who just ignored us, we asked three people how to get to it and couldn't find any door that lead in to it. We found two sets that lead out though. Eventually we found a map and found out we were only and a 20 minute walk from our hostel. With our bags at the heaviest they have ever been it took a bit longer than 20 minutes but our hostel here is really nice. The girl running it is very friendly and we got some really good food and just sorted ourselves out. Next day was spent sight seeing. We saw a few of the parks and palaces that St. Petersburg has to offer and bought a few sweets for the guys back home. Brian made a complete mess of using his Visa card in a shop and caused a big queue and a lot of confusion I doubt we could have understood even if we spoke basic Russian (my Visa card has expired). Brian stopped by a small park were people released doves on their wedding day, to play with a baby bear. We are pretty sure it is now illegal to keep bears as pets in Russia but this guy still had one in a lead and muzzle. The heat was stone splitting and the parks were full of people in bikinis. It was a nice last day. Had a chat to a few guys at the hostel that night who had been traveling by train through Uzbekistan. Next day we were woken by a very load snorer and the door banging so we got up early and headed to the airport. The airport doesn't let you check in until a maximum of two hours before your flight so we were left sitting and eating terrible airport food. We were on our way home so it didn't matter. St. Petersburg airport has about 5 places to queue before you get on a plane and while your bags can go through to your final destination you have to get your second boarding card at the stop over airport and not at the start. We got very confused by this but met two other English speaking girls without follow on boarding cards so we took it to be the norm. Also met a slight drunk Ukrainian who has lived in Ireland at least 5 years who tried to convince us to go swim in the Black Sea cause it was so great.

Moscow

Next day we headed to the to the train station after a pretty relaxing morning. We arrived at the train station and about twenty counters are labeled tickets. We needed to exchange our booking confirmation for tickets so after asking at a counter we were directed to a building at the end. We headed in with our luggage through a metal detector (the guards just ignored me as I walked through setting it off and waved Brian through when he came after me). Then a random man got us to follow him to an office further inside the building and left us at a machine which looked like an atm. After some investigation we found out it was a ticket machine which had an bar code reader hidden in it. We random clicked buttons for almost half an hour to try and get our tickets. It displayed a video to show how to use the reader so we were ok there. However it need a document number (after 10 minutes of matching symbols in our dictionary we found that out). We tried every number on the ticket and then asked a passing person. She said it was our passport number and we then spent 10 minutes entering our passport numbers in a variety of different ways.. She then left and we messed with the screen and a new lady appeared with her who canceled the whole thing, scanned the document again, changed something, entered our passport numbers and gave us tickets. She made it look easy. We then had tickets. We went outside to the display and found a train at 13:00. It didn't have any words we recognised but it was the only train at the right time. 15 minutes before we went to the platform but there were turnstiles and we got turned away by the attendants there. They just pointed outside. That took 5 minutes and now we were getting worried. We rushed back to where we got the tickets and found the nearest attendant. She then pointed us in a completely different direction (turns out there are two completely different train stations in the same place). Finally the last attendant rushed us through the metal detectors and got us to run onto our train with only a few minutes to spare. Then we headed to Petersburg.

Moscow

We were completely exhausted and terribly sweaty from four days on a train when we got to the hotel. The hotel was part of three massive buildings on the out skirts of Moscow. From what we picked up they were built for the Olympics. They were all about the same size (our hotel building being 30 floors). It took the guy about 45 minutes to check us in but it was half five in the morning so that is forgivable. By the time we had showered and sorted our stuff out it was eight. We couldn't sleep because we would never get up again and we had a train to catch the next day. So we paid the quite high price for breakfast in the hotel and had a really amazing buffet. It was filled with fruit and veg done exceptionally well. It also had cheeses and breads and spring rolls and dessert and some really random other things. Then we headed out to see the Red Square and the Kremlin building. We explored the air and wandered the markets which were much more reasonably priced than Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. I suppose Moscow does good business with tourists so they don't have such high prices. Our energy drained away pretty quickly and we gave up on the sight seeing completely exhausted. Moscow seems quite nice though there isn't a lot to do but we really didn't get a chance to see much. Russian food is really good and the country is really nice. You get the occasional person who can't stand foreigners and ignores you or tries to get you to go away but you can one or two of those everywhere. Getting your visa registered everywhere can be a real pain though and the paperwork to get into the country is fairly excessive.