We've arrived in sunny Russia...

You may have detected the hint of irony in my voice(?). I failed to mention in my last post that we have been having magnificent weather since arriving in Helsinki on Thursday. So much so that I think I saw my first cloud since London today. We arrived in Moscow at midday, made it to our hostel at 1-1.30ish and as soon as we were ready to step out for a wander round it had begun pissing down with rain. Obviously not a problem for those of us with Gore-Tex™ but for others (HANA!) the inclement weather proved too much. Hopefully its not one of those Munich showers that lasts for precisely the time you intend on staying in a place... Technically we've had an excuse this afternoon - the official line is that we were exhausted after our marathon 16-hour train ride from Riga. We feared the worst from the outset. Feeling we'd be able to survive in a 2nd class seat (as opposed to sleeper) we opted for the cheaper but even seat was a generous description. Passengers were in lines of three along hard benches (essentially wood with a vinyl cover) and I even had the priviledge of a 2-inch wooden windowsill sticking into my back. Luckily about 90% of 2nd class cleared out just before the Russian border leaving each passenger a bench of three seats to lay down on. This turned out to be actually better than what I'd imagined and while we didn't have the foam mattress and sheets and blankets the extra 14 Lats would have got us in a sleeper, I still managed non-continuous sleep until about 9am. I frantically studied the cyrillic alphabet in the 2 hours between waking up and arriving and while I'm proud to say that I can now translate Москва and Шит (Moskva and shit) into roman letters it was nowhere near enough and when we stepped off the train into the station we had no idea what the fuck was going on. We were pointed in the direction of the metro by a friendly Russian who said he was going to Melbourne soon and would call on the return fabour from me. From there I was able to figure out where we had to go (I had dilligently translated the names of key stations from the roman on our map to cyrillic so I could recognise them when i got there). The Moscow metro is unbelievable, not for the actual trains which are similar to the Paris metro (efficient enough but smell overwhelmingly of urine) but for the stations which are decorated as though they're palaces. There are gilded chandeliers lighting the tunnels, marble floors and walls and stained glass (not windows cause we were underground but stained glass nonetheless). We got to the hostel eventually but then the rains came and coincidentally (?!) the fatigue...

The days previous we had spent in Riga, which turned out to be quite a nice town. The old town wasn't as quaint as that of Tallinn but seemed much more used. Whereas the majority of people wandering the streets of Tallinn were tourists, in Riga they were locals going about their daily lives. There was also a more happening nightlife in Riga which coincided with more younger backpackers (which came first the nightlife or the young travellers?!). We also noticed an unexplainable aussie presence there. Two of the three hostels in old town are run by aussies, most of the travellers we met there were aussie and the articles in the 'what's happening in Riga' magazine had the word dodgy in it far too often for my liking. Unfortunately the facial hair trend seemed to peter out by the time we got to Riga - it must be a rural thing. I guess they're still on the first run of Magnum PI up there.

Still much more of Russia to come. Just hope the weather improves a notch...