Moscow Calling

Priv-yet Commrades!

I'm back to the same dodgy internet cafe a little sooner than I thought as I forgot to send a mail to the hostel company when I was here yesterday. Apparently the hostel we were meant to be staying at in Xi'an, China has suddenly closed so we need to choose an alternative.

After leaving here yesterday we managed to successfully pick up our train tickets having been given only the sketchiest of directions and rather unsuccessfully tried to order lunch in a nearby McDonalds using only sign language. God knows how we made it so hard for ourselves when they call a Big Mac the very cryptic Big MAK.

Strangely we made the harder job of finding the travel agency look easy. I have no idea how though, as the directions we had read something like "go to the main street in moscow, take a left after a bank (there are hundreds of banks) ours is the building with the light outside it" but by some miracle we did actually find the place and even more amazingly they had heard of us and our tickets were sitting there ready and waiting for us.

We still aren't exactly sure if we are going to have a 2 berth cabin or if we may have to share a 4 berth. We have a first class ticket but apparently the train we are taking is the only train in the whole of russia to have a 'deluxe' first class which is the one with the two bed compartments. The women in the travel office seemed to think this is what we had but we're not entirely convinced. Who knows we could be spending the next 5 days with some Mongolian fish mongers bringing their catch home from market!

So on the agenda for today is to head back into the centre of Moscow have another mosey around Red Square and take some more photos (apologies for the lack of photos so far my memory card doesnt seem to like connecting directly to this PC so i may have to buy a cable. Then we'll try and find somewhere to have our last supper before a week of Pot Noodle dinners. There is not a whole lot of Russia cuisine on offer around Moscow. It's seems like every restaurant is either a McDonalds, Sbarro or TGI Fridays, although we have had blinis for lunch, they are the russian equivalent of pancakes.

We have also done a little bit of mystery solving during our stay here. Over the course of the first two days I was perplexed by the number of people on the metro sporting Dunnes Stores bags for life (- for UK folk its the equivalent of spotting Morrisons bags in Sudan). Literallly at each stop people with Dunnes bags would get off the train and another batch would get on. Very Strange. We wondered if Dunnes might be expanding its market, there is afterall a Dunnes stores in Glasgow, although we thought Moscow was a bit of jump. So the best guess we have come up with is Dunnes is shipping freighter loads of excess bags from Dublin Port bound for Vladivostok. Who knows we might spot them being lugged across the country from the Trans-Sib express.

Anyhoo I better go now and send that mail i came here to do in the first place or else we are sleeping rough next to the terracotta warriors in Xi'an

Uvidimsia!

Jules