St Petes to Moscow

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Our last night in St Petersburg was spent enjoying dinner with a woman that I met on the train from Helsnki, Finland to Vyborg, Russia. She is a Thai girl who moved to St Petes to attend the University to earn her MBA. She is now living in St Petes living with her boyfiend from Belgium. She mentioned that St Petes change so much over the past few years. It has become more European looking with nicely painted buildings, flowers, and clean streets. It was great to enjoy dinner on the last night with a new friend.

After dinner we headed to the train station to catch a sleeper train to Mosciw. There were no first class tickets left when we booked them a week earlier. This meant we would have to sharea cabin with 2 other people. We were taking our chances of having to share a cabin with large snoring Russian women.

When we baorded the train the ticket man who watched the wagon said for 1,500 rubles we could have a cabin to ourselves. I wasn't sure and we went back to our cabin and we decided why not. Dad went bacl to the ticket man and tried to give him the money and he was ignord. Ha! The man was going to take a bribe! After the train started rolling the ticket man came to our 2 person cabin, shut the door, and accepted the money.

We had a wonderful sleep.

Woke up and we were in Moscow. Two western girls helped us find our ways to the metro. We arrived at the hostel and saw a friend, Andrew, from the previous hostel.

After we showered we caught the metro to the Kremlin and walked around inside. It is amazing to think that we were inside this fotress that once was off limits. There were beautiful churches and buildings.

Dinner was a disaster. Dad decided to stay at the hostel and Andrew and I went on an 8 K walk trying to find a restraunt. We never did. We ended up having a picnic dinner.

Found Dad and found out that he ended up going to dinner with a Russian and a Belarussian poilce officers. He wanted to find a place to eat so he asked a police officr. Yikes! He is crazy! I had mentioned to avoid police officers and military. They ended up having dinner and numerous shots of vodka. The bill came to 0 rubles for Dad.

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