From Russia with love

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It was all going to plan when I arrived in Moscow late at night on 13th June. I hadn't plunged to my death on the Aeroflot flight and my baggage hadn't been sent to Minsk by mistake. So, when I arrived I was all ready to meet my friend, Dawn, who is traveling with me to Hong Kong. Dawn was due on a flight 3 hrs earlier, so it was just a case of finding her and then getting in our pre-booked taxi to the hotel. But there was no Dawn and my mobile - which had worked perfectly well in St Petersburg was now on the blink. To cut a long story short dumb and dumber hadn't realised that Moscow has 5 airports. Poor Dawn was in one 100km away on the other side of the city. A $70 taxi ride later in some dodgy mafia mini-cab (and a few girlie tears) and we were re-united.

After that we could handle anything Moscow could throw at us. I'd expected a grey city, but Moscow is quite the opposite. Beautiful and immaculate kept parks are surrounded by the kind of ornate building you'd expect in Paris. In fact the city was so clean and poverty free we wondered if anything less than pleasing on the eye had just been shipped to the suburbs.

I'd also expected Moscow to be a small city, but it's a sprawling monster. The vast population became all too apparent in the Metro - I thought the Northern line at 8am was packed but the crowds in our nearest station (Kievskaya) took crushed to death to another level.

We skipped the Moscow night-life and instead found our entertainment in the hotel (the hotel was one of Stalin's 7 sky scrapers and it's grandeur really added to the whole experience). It seems that all hotels in Russia are the patch of prostitutes, we guessed that their level of attractiveness matched the star rating of the establishment. Therefore, the girls who worked in the lobby of our 4 star were definitely not the arse end of ugly. We spent several hours watching them do turns of the room and their comings (no pun intended) and goings. The only problem was as two young women we were getting the 'are they or aren't they' looks from certain German gents! At that point it was time to give up the social study and get an early night from the trans-Siberia train the next day.

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Photos

Russian dolls
Russian dolls

Comments

[zsteve]

It's always the Germans...
Quite a funny article... Steffen (from Germany)