Russia 2nd – 19th July

I only spent just over 2 weeks in Russia, not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because it was so expensive. I flew back to London from Entebbe on 1st July and spent a hectic 20 hours in London before flying out to Moscow.

Moscow is a beautiful city that appeared to be full of rich men in expensive cars and lots of attractive women. The Kremlin was large and spectacular and Red Square is a lot smaller than I was expecting. On the edge of Red Square is the stunning St Basil’s Cathedral. When inside, it is like a maze and while I was there I was fortunate that the choir were performing. Their singing was amazing and this was increased by the fabulous acoustics.

Situated in the centre of Red Square is Lenin’s mausoleum, I got up early one morning to avoid the queues and also because it shuts at 12pm. The rest of the day is used by to treat and preserve the body. It was a strange sight to walk into the mausoleum to look at what looked like a waxwork of Lenin laid in a glass case. Unfortunately no photos were allowed and I’d already been pre-warned about the guards standing in the shadows ready to jump out and arrest you if you tried. I decided in the end not to risk a visit to a Russian jail.

What surprised me the most about Russia was how friendly Russians are. While I was in Moscow, I met a guy called Denis. He was a musician in a band who had appeared on Russian TV (see link below) and although he didn’t speak English that well, he spent time showing Matt (An Ozzy traveler I met) and me around the city.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeFeHlNzmZ0

Language was definitely a problem in Moscow, you see very few signs in anything other than Russian Cyrillic and very few people in the shops and restaurants spoke anything other than Russian. When I decided to go to the train station to book my train ticket, I took a note written by the hostel staff in Russian. I stood in the queue for 30 minutes worriedly listening to the angry exchanges between customers and ticket attendants where they could both speak the same language and wondered what there reaction would be an English guy speaking no Russian apart from Spasiba (thank you) and Niet (no). When it came to my turn I handed over my note, money and passport, and was asked various questions in Russian, to which I could just shrug and smile. Soon the attendant was laughing at the situation, the customers in the queue behind were laughing and I was laughing. I walked out 10 minutes later with my ticket and had managed not to provoke any angry reactions from anyone. The next day I sensibly turned up with Denis to buy my second ticket, this time while we were in the queue it looked like 2 old ladies were on the verge of a fight to the death, looking at them I wouldn’t have wanted to cross either of them.

Eating and drinking out in Moscow was extremely expensive, on one of the few occasions I ate out, a few of us went to a Japanese restaurant and ordered a “Japanese Pizza” which cost around 6 pounds. When the pizza arrived we all couldn’t help burst out laughing, the pizza was so small and thin, it was barely a mouthful, the base of the pizza was actually one of the pancakes that you get with crispy duck to make your wraps in a Chinese restaurant.

Denis did manage to show me a few cheap places to eat in Moscow, small places serving soup or kebabs for about 1 or 2 pounds. Most of the time I had to buy food and cheap vodka from the supermarket, including red and a cheap black caviar (not beluga) which surprisingly I liked. It went well with the Russian dark bread washed down with vodka from the freezer.

After a week in Moscow I set out on the Trans Siberian railway for the 2 day trip to Yekaterinburg, the final destination of the train being Vladivostok. The scenery didn’t really change that often, it was basically forest all the way. Very few people on the train spoke English, in my cabin there was a professor from Moscow University, his wife and another lady who spoke a little English, but nobody else in the carriage spoke English. Even though communication was difficult, the Russians were very welcoming. We would communicate as best we could while sharing food and vodka, a couple who spoke no English invited me to visit their home in Vladivostok, and unfortunately I had to explain that I already had train tickets booked to Ulan Bator.

When I got off the train in Yekaterinburg I wasn’t really sure what to expect. The only thing that I new before arriving was that it was the location where in the 1917 revolution the Russian royal family had been assassinated.

I set off walking around the city in order to find some cheap accommodation. I tried 2 hostels, 1 which I couldn’t find and the other there was no answer at the door, I then tried couch surf without success, so for my first night I had to book into a 40 pounds a night hotel. I was extremely worried as I knew I had to spend the week in Yekaterinburg before my next train and couldn’t afford to spend them all at this hotel. The next morning I set off towards the final hostel in Yekaterinburg with everything crossed passing a communist rally by the statue of Lenin (of about 5 or 6 people) and rang the buzzer on what appeared to be an apartment block. An American guy answered the door and I asked him if there were any rooms available, when he said yes, I was so relieved.

The American guy actually turned out not to be American at all, his name was Alex and he was actually a native of Yekaterinburg. He’d lived in the States for a couple of years, hence the accent, was managing the hostel as well as performing in a band called One Glimpse Away (see link below). They had just finished making their first music video and were planning a tour of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.

http://www.myspace.com/oneglimpseaway

Yekaterinburg didn’t really provide a huge amount to see and do, I saw most of it on an impromptu tour given by a Russian army veteran who spoke no English. I met him while I was sat in the park and after he discovered I was from England, he said his one word of English he know, “Beatles” and beckoned me to follow him. First he showed me a stone computer keyboard, followed by a Beatles’ Monument and a Michael Jackson Memorial, several statues including one of Lenin, the Yellow Submarine bar, tanks and rocket launchers outside the military museum and finally the Afghanistan Memorial which showed all the soldiers from Yekaterinburg that had died in that war as well as many other wars. Up until the 90s it appeared that the USSR had been in at least 1 or 2 wars a year.

The one remaining place to visit was the Cathedral-on-the-Blood, a Russian Orthodox church which had been built on the exact spot the Ipatiev house had once stood. The Ipatiev house being the site of Nikolai Romanov and his families assassination. The building in which they had been assassinated in had been demolished by the Soviets to stop it from becoming a pilgrimage spot for royalists. Subsequently the church was built and now there is also a memorial including some photographs of the Tsar and his family.

Due to limited finances I did very little else in Yekaterinburg. There were a few attractions that I would have liked to have seen including a Russian Mafia graveyard (Yekaterinburg was once the HQ of the Russian mafia) and the Europe Asia Border (Yekaterinburg is just inside Asia). Most of my remaining time I spent drinking cheap vodka, playing poker and swimming in the lake with Alex and his friends.