From Russia with Love

DSC00809, originally uploaded by Louise and Luke.

For anyone who has been bored by the length of our blog entries so far (but is strangely still reading the blog), anyone who has only just started reading the blog (eg my parents), or anyone who just likes facts and numbers, we have put together a summary of our time in Russia.

Russia by Numbers

During our 26 days in Russia we:
Slept in 10 beds
Made 9 Metro Journeys
Took 5 long distance Mashrutki (a minibus) journeys
Made 4 long distance train journeys
Travelled just over 4400 miles
Spent 116 hours in transit
Spent about 20 hours in train stations (not including all 7 hours at the border crossing)
Went to 22 churches
Visited 11 museums
Saw 11 statues of Lenin
Walked down 4 different Ul Leninas (Main streets called Lenin)
Crossed 2 continents
Saw the deepest lake in the world
And visited Asia for the first time.

Our Top 10 Russian Experiences
1. Taking a Russia Banya.
2. Seeing the spectacular views and watching the sunset over Lake Baikal.
3. The Trans Siberian train journeys.
4. Standing in Red Square.
5. Visiting Dvortsovoya Square and the Hermitage.
6. Spending Saturday night in Food Master in Tomsk.
7. Taking a boat ride through St Petersburg.
8. Seeing Siberian snow.
9. Eating Russian Food. Seeing the beautiful architecture of Russian Railway and Metro Stations.
10. Meeting lovely, generous Russian people who looked after us, fed us and entertained us!

Our Top 10 Food Experiences

Whilst we spent a lot of our time eating noodles, soviet bread and two litre bottles of Russian beer that cost a quid. We also just about managed to eat out a few times throughout our time in Russia, and these were our favourite culinary experiences:

1. Eating baked Omul, a fish unique to Lake Baikal
2. Going to Stollie Pies in St Petersburg for the best pie we've ever eaten.
3. Having Russian Borsch Soup with sour cream.
4. Enjoying Beef Stroganoff on our first night in Russia.
5. Eating fish, bread and tomatoes with beer with Olga on the train.
6. Food Master's Chicken Pot, a dish of chicken, cream, cheese, onions and carrots in a pot.
7. Fried potatoes with onions and mushrooms every where we went.
8. Breakfast at Mu Mu's - two eggs, a toasted sandwich and real coffee for R99.
9. Stuffed cow's tongue and red caviar on potato pancakes in Terema's in Krestovka.
10. Eating Fried chicken and mashed potato in Napolean Hostel.

As we spent most of our time in Russian supermarkets, not being able to speak Russian, here are our best (and worst) food discoveries:

1. Strawberry flavoured chocolate and strawberry flavoured biscuits (not honey flavoured -they are horrible).
2. Ekra - A paste made from mashed fried aubergines.
3. Mushroom flavoured Lays (crisps that actually tasted of Mushrooms).
4. Baltika 3 and 7.
5. Cabbage baked in bread.

And finally the 10 things you just couldn't seem to get enough of in Russia:

1. Mashrutki buses - crowded and cheap minibuses going everywhere and anywhere
2. Russian Euro pop - played everywhere from trains to restaurants and always bad
3. Police - on every corner looking scary
4. Knee high boots - despite the snow, ice, cobbled streets and bad pavements Russian women don't go anywhere without there knee high boots
5. People drinking beer - despite suposedly being a nation of vodka drinkers everyone seemed to be drinking beer, young and old, night and day.
6. Stray dogs - the further east we went the more stray dogs there were.
7. Ugly Grey Soviet Buildings - every town has at least 10.
8. Lenin -from statues, streets, a giant head or his actual body, he was everywhere.
9. The smell of cababage - everywhere we stayed seemed to have a stairwell that smelt of cabbage.
10. Beaurcracy - why fill in one form when you can fill in three.

Then it was off to Mongolia for us....

Stay warm,

Luke and Louise

(Posted by Louise)

The post about Moscow (that doesn't use a song title just to annoy Luke)

DSC00520, originally uploaded by Louise and Luke.

We had been warned by several people that whilst St Petersburg is a very European city, Moscow would be a big culture shock. It is known for being a very big, very impressive, very busy and very unfriendly city. On most levels, it didn't disappoint.

We took the overnight train from St Petersburg and arrived into Leninskaya station in Moscow at 7:30am, the start of rush hour. As we walked out of the station in the rain, past what Luke would no doubt describe as 'vagrants and criminals' asking us for money, and into a heaving underground station full of unfriendly commuters (approximately 10 million people go through the metro in Moscow before 10am everyday), far from feeling the culture shock I was reminded of London. It was at this point I realised that to go on the underground in London in rush hour carrying half your own weight in a rucksack whilst not being able to speak any English or read a tube map or have any idea where your going would be a very stupid thing to do.

We did manage to get out of the metro station (having taken only three or four wrong trains) and get to our youth hostel - Napolean Hostel - with surprising ease. Luke however seemed panicked by the whole experience, looking around I realised that most of the roads in Moscow have more lanes than the M4 (for anyone not from Wales that is the largest road in Wales), all the buildings are massive and there are police on every corner. I tried to comfort Luke by taking him for breakfast in what ended up being our favourite cafe in Moscow, Moo Moo (or My My in Russian), where we vowed to learn a few more words in Russian after breakfasting on sweet pancakes with chicken. The coffee was great, though.

After breakfast we walked down to Red Square in the centre of Moscow, which is as colourful and vast as you would imagine, and being there made all the hassle of the metro worth it. At one end stands the renowned and fantastically colourful St Basil's Cathedral. To the left of the cathedral running all the way along the west side is the red wall of the Kremlin. About half way down is the heavily guarded, soviet style Lenin's Mausoleum. Running along the opposite side of the square is a very elaborate shopping centre, GUM. Twenty years ago this was the state department store, but has now been transformed under the market economy to hold well over 1000 expensive and flashy shops (I'm sure Lenin would be delighted).

At the far end of the square next to the impressive building holding the State Museum stands 17th Century Resurrection Gate and the small 17th Century Kazan Cathedral, which was the first building we went into. Despite its historic feel, we discovered were actually rebuilt (as exact replicas) in the 1990s having been knocked down in the 1930s because they got in the way of the Communist Workers' parades.

We queued up first thing on Thursday (well, after breakfast in Moo Moos) to visit the must see attraction that is Lenin himself. Russia as a slightly different way of keeping an orderly than in Britain. There was no barriers or fence stopping you from skipping the queue, the left baggage and metal detectors and walking straight into the tomb. There were, however, several armed police standing outside the building and by the queue - needless to say no one tried to push in!

I'm not really sure how to describe the slightly odd Lenin experience, other than to say he looked waxy, although pretty good to say he's been there 80 years. Its a definite must see experience. As you leave the tomb, you walk past the guarded burial places of all the communist leaders and big wigs, including Stalin.

Perhaps understandably, Moscow has the feel of a city not entirely at ease with its history. Incongruously, ten minutes down the road from Red Square, towards our hostel, on Lubyanska Square there is a Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism. Also on the square stands the foreboding and overpowering Lubyanka Prison, the old KGB building, which is now used by the FSB. Stranger still was our visit to the sculpture park in the South of the city. This was the place where a lot of the unwanted Soviet statues were dumped after 1991, and is now an attraction of its own with lots of contemporary art as been added to the old sculptures.

We completed our stay in Moscow on the Friday with the all important visit to the Kremlin. A lot of the state buildings you can't go into, including the palace where Stalin lived, but Cathedral Square is beautiful, and we visited all four of the cathedrals, each of which was very ornate and impressive. Bell lovers will also be pleased to hear that we saw the biggest bell in the world.

Eating and drinking highlights of our time in Moscow included Propaganda. supposedly the oldest club in Russia it opened just after the fall of communism and has a very chilled atmosphere and surprisingly well priced beer.

Our favourite bar in Moscow, however, as to be Kruzhka, a bar we happened upon on our first night and went back to twice more in threes days and we were clearly a bit of a novelty - on our first visit the waiter disappeared for ages returning looking triumphant with a copy of the menu (clearly unused) printed in English. On our first couple of visits we thought it was a quiet small bar, but it turned out, when we went for a quiet drink on the Friday night that it was in fact a huge club, staffed by four members staff.

The staff were very helpful and friendly, and the three course lunch special for only 169R (about four pounds) was fantastic. Highlights also included watching a drunken policeman handcuff a waiter to the bar and pretend to spank him with his truncheon, and being terrified on the Friday night that we realised that two large security men were stopping people from leaving. When finally got the courage to leave we found out that they were asking for some sort of proof that we had paid. Fortunately, being the only group of non Russians in the vast bar the waiter remembered us and explained that we had paid and we were allowed out!

I said at the start that Russia was known for being a very big, very impressive, very busy and very unfriendly city. It was certainly the first three things, but unfriendly? Not so much. After a difficult start, three dyas in, I felt strangely sad to be leaving the city. But leave we had to...

Luke will pick up with the tale with the first leg of our Trans Mongolian train journey soon, as well as our time in Tomsk!

Love

Louise and Luke

xx

(Posted by Louise)