Catching the train from St Petersburg was the beginning of our first train trip and a sign of what was to come over the next month. We thought we would turn up 30 mins before giving us plenty of time but no... we had to find the ticket office and then find the track, sounds pretty simple you might think but when everything is all in cyrilic and no one understands you its not that easy. Anyway after running around like crazy people, calling up Natasha and asking numourus randoms we finally managed to sort ourselves out and got on the train.

Our cabin was a Kupe, 4 berth with 2 strangers. What you dont want is a "big" sweaty guy and his wife sharing with you and their mother next door coming in every 5 mins and telling them off for god knows what.

Anyway, he turned out to be a funny chap who we ended up chatting to for a bit and found out he was Belerous and from what we could gather that he was a gypsey of type.

The first night on the train was not that pleasent, no air, windows not allowed to open and the Belerous guy snoring so loud that walls shook. In the morning he asked to play my guitar and actually turned out to be pretty good, he played us some really nice gypsey music and sang a little song for us. After that he got his laptop out and started asking us if we wanted to stay with him in Moscow and that he would take us out clubbing. He then proceeded to show us on his laptop the best prostitutes in Moscow and that he knows them and if we wanted he would set us up haha...hmmm we thought probably best not to go and stay with this guy, even though he was a nice guy.

We said our goodbyes to him and his wife and agreed that for the rest of the trip we were going 1st class! We saved up money for that perpose so lets use it and get our own cabin with food brought to us for that little bit more. It was a nice experience but with all our bags, guitar and mondolin it was just to cramped.

In Moscow we instantly felt the bigger city, more pollution and more money! We trekked it to our hostel, dumper our stuff, and got chatting to the hostel manager who was another real nice russian fella. We wanted to book our next few train tickets to Perm and Novosibirsk. He helped us write down in cyrilic what we wanted and then we went to the train station to try and buy our next set of tickets... 1st class ;) We thought it wouldnt be hard but bloody hell.. it was a mad house, lots of ticket counters, lots of people and everyone just going free for all. We got in a queue and when we got to the front they closed the counter! same happened again the next time and then an old lady literally just walked infront of us and put her papers down on the counter haha...We both had enough at this point ana switched into Russians haha, Adam just said nice and clearly with no worry at all, "Oi old lady get out the way we were here before you" hahahaha. She went back and we realised at that point it was just normal, you need to just go at stuff for yourself. We then we saw one with no queue...why the hell hasnt it got a queue, it must not be working, ah well lets go and try, it was fine, strange but oh well we got talking and then we hit the language barrier, we showed the stuff the guy wrote for us and then she pointed somewhere else and kinda told us to go there. We wondered around not really knowing where she pointed but then she came and got us and showed us which was nice. Finally we got our tickets and got a few funny looks when she looked at us and then looked that we wanted first class and then couldnt believe we wanted to pay that much. Its not "that" much, for the dfistance its not bad at all.

Finally we were all ticketed up for the next 2 legs of the trip so no more stress there....time to sight see. We headed out on both days and went hard core sightseeing walking around Moscow seeing all the normal stuff. We were lucky to turn up at the tomb of the unknown soldier during a guard change which was impressive to see. The Kremlin and Red Square were huge, and it was nice to see the place you only ever see on the net of tv.

We were itching to get out into the countryside away from the cities so we only spent 2 days in Moscow, a city is a city to us, and we prefered the smaller (even thought its big) size of St P.

We bought a bottle of fine Russian vodka ready for our 28 hour train journey to Perm and prepared to start the first long leg towards siberia :)

What we learnt from Moscow was how to sort stuff out with tickets and that the english gentleman approach doent do b***** all, holding doors open or letting people pass, you dont get thanks yous or a nod or anything, even from the old women. Ah well, we wernt gonna let it stop us being nice to people but we just didnt expect anything back in return from that point.

Next stop Perm, Its a city but we were heading off into the country side so bring it on!