Welcome to Mockba

We arrived in Moscow at 9:20 this morning. The border crossing went fine - all very official and only mildly intimidating but we got our stamps and that's the main thing.

At about 9.30pm last night (on the train) Matt went in search of a beer. 10 minutes passed, I brushed my teeth. 20 minutes, I made up my bunk; 50 minutes, I finished my book. After an hour I started to be mildly concerned. Forever the pessimist with an overactive imagination I thought he had been sucked out of the train while trying to get between carriages, or mugged or something. We pulled in at Minsk station and finally an hour and a half after he left, he returned with a woman called Katerina in tow. He'd been talking to her and a couple of guards who were desperately keen to practise their English; anyway, she soon got off the train. I'm not sure if it was my inadvertent scowl as they appeared in the doorway that prompted her to leave or the fact that she was genuinely getting off at Minsk.

Getting from the station to the hostel wasn't too much of an ordeal, although the bags weigh a ton and we're both beginning to wish we took better advantage of our gym membership when we had it. If we thought Polish was tricky to learn, Russian goes one better. As you may know, their alphabet is totally different so a 'r' looks like a 'p' and a 'b' looks like a 'v' and so on. So, deciphering metro stops and street names is somewhat of a challenge. Still, we managed to find our way to the Nova Hostel.

Alex greeted us - although I'm not sure he was thrilled to do so as we had obviously woken him up. Anyway he seems nice; in his early 30s and very laid back. We seem to be in an apartment that he has turned into a hostel. We learned that he has only been running it for 1 month. There's one bathroom and currently about 8 people staying. It feels like we're crashing at a mate's house with a load of people we don't know. He said the people who it belongs to moved to Budapest. We're not sure what the link is to him but our theory is this; a mate of his / his parents / friends of parents have gone away for a bit. He's imported a load of bunk beds in and is renting them out to people. If we try to look up this place in a couple of months time there may well be no trace of it or him. Or because we aren't really used to hostelling, perhaps this is the norm.

We had a little walk out this afternoon to Red Square and saw St. Basil's Cathedral; we'll spend a day exploring when we get some energy back.

After only a few hours sleep last night, I had a nap this evening and woke up to find I was sharing the room with 3 other sleeping men! So we have 3 South Africans in the room we're in. They came to Russia to climb a mountain and they leave tomorrow.

Oh and it seems that Alex is my kind of person - it's Saturday night and he's cleaning the bathroom.