Извиняете меня, вы говорите английскую язык? (Excuse me, do you speak English?)You'd like to think that question would at least provoke a No, a shake of the head, or even a shrug of the shoulder. But if you're a Russian lady at an information desk in a ticket office, apparently the correct response is to purse your lips and close your eyes.Conversation closed.That was the start of a 4 hour long mission to purchase our train tickets from Moscow to St Petersburg.

Fast forward 30mins, we've been back to the hostel and they've kindly written down in Russian, the tickets we need to purchase.Great.Now we can line up and get our tickets.You'd like to think that would be easy.But that's because you don't understand the rules of queuing in Russia.

See, the queue starts as you'd expect, a line of people waiting for something - in this case, train tickets.But then you've got the people who were in the queue, went to see if there was a queue that was moving faster, decided to come back and now take their original space in the queue.Then there are the people who are sitting on a seat nearby, they're in the queue too, you just won't know that until their 'spot' gets to the window.Then finally there are the 'side queues'.These are the people who can't be bothered joining one of the above mentioned queues, so start their own - beside yours, then they just push in.

In short, a queue that should take maybe 15mins, takes 2 hours.

But that's not the end.Just when we thought we were nearly done.We just had to wait for the lady in front to buy her tickets then it was our turn, our piece of paper at the ready……. Then a bell rang, we stepped forward………… and the ticket lady shook her head and left.Lunch time.No replacement.We could either join another line or wait an hour for our line to start again.Or we could leave.We chose option 3.Walked he extra 40mins to the train station and bought our tickets in about 3 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, Russia wasn't all never ending queues and rude people.Um actually it was mostly rude people.Turns out Russians aren't huge fans of tourists - well non Russian tourists anyway.I think someone forgot to show them how to smile.

Far from making our holiday experience a bad one, these things all worked to make it unforgettable - in a good way.What can you do when you spend half a day in a line going nowhere or see people scowling at you as you walk down the street other than laugh.And laugh, and laugh.Russia was probably one of the funniest holidays we've been on.

Aside from this Russia wasn't really at all what we were expecting. Colourful buildings, lush green parks, canals, amazing churches and cathedrals certainly didn't fit my visions of grey Soviet Block apartment buildings, grumpy people, (well ok maybe that one was there) cold and big furry hats.

St Petersburg was old!It wasn't really like any other place we've been.They love painting their buildings pink or yellow or green then topping it off with lashings of gold.

Moscow was the biggest surprise.This might sound stupid but it reminded us of Melbourne.That is if all the signage in Melbourne was in Cyrillic.