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.