2 days in Moscow... so far no vodka...!

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Well, tonight we are in Moscow. I feel I should add something about Minsk, as it may have sounded like we weren't too keen on the place when that was written... well to be fair we weren't BUT it got better. We braved the rain and made it out of the station, came across a football stadium and then a nice looking building with a stern wooden door - we tried our best to decifer the cyrillic outside but to little avail - evenutally we decided to brave it and enter the building as people were going in and out and we just hoped it wasn't a government building... it turned out to be the Belarus national gallary - which was wonderful! I'm not an art lover (unlike young Benjamin) and you would generally find me desperately looking for the cafe or toilets after 5 minutes, but this place was different - I don't know if it was after the train journey from somewhere near hell or the actual hell of the rest of Minsk we had thus far encountered but we spent a very happy couple of hours there (avoiding the army who seemed to be on a school trip there...!) and left feeling rejuivinated. We then came across our second bit of luck which was a McDonalds! Ok I haven't eaten a McDonalds for about 7years and it was only day 2 of our trip... but we caved and it was one of the best meals ever! McDonalds in Minsk also was the place to be seen - not like the chav infested hell holes in England, but busy with people like you and I, the norms as I like to call them, and we took 5 minutes to find a seat in the two story building due to it's popularity... Crazy. Anyway, we made it back to the train station and ended up boarding our train - for this journey we were in first class, a 2 bed cabin and it was bliss. The train was so comfortable that we fell asleep.... and only woke up when the attendant brought our tea in the morning - making us realise that we had not been through a border and our Russian passports had not been stamped - nor did we have a migration card, and our one from Belarus was only valid until that day. We had managed to sleep our way into one of the hardest countries in the world to get into... and this terrified us! We managed to make it to a hotel near the station where people spoke English (After turning down a taxi driver who asked us for 80 us dollers for a ride...!) and they booked us a taxi to the embassy - well we thought it was going to be a normal taxi... but being as we walked into a 5star hotel we actually had a black mercedes - which was nice but possibly a little over the top...! To cut a long story short, the embassy said we should be ok as we hadn't crossed a border... but we'll have to wait and see what happens when we try and leave the country....!

Moscow is nice, but we haven't been too far yet - being as we hadn't slept or eaten properly for 4nights, we rested the first day - then I awoke with a very sore throat this morning - so we've taken it easy today too. Tomorrow we plan to see things so I guess we'll update you when things have been seen! Until next time, dosvidanya.

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