Moscow

We booked 3rd class for our first railway journey in Russia (though not part of the actual TransSib) to see if the so called ‚platzkartny‘ are bearable. They were pretty nice indeed and Julia only woke up in the suburbs of Moscow.

Standing outside Leningradsky station you cannot miss one of the seven sisters, the siblings of that big brother in Warsaw. Through a colleague of Julia we had been in touch with a Russian family that had invited us to stay at their place. We entered the metro and tried to find our way through the cyrillic-only signs. The stations are even more impressive than the ones in St. Petersburg (Pieter, as the Muscovites call it), bombastic palaces underground.

The apartment of our hosts is in the outskirts of Moscow, apartment blocks and high rises, but safe and with a lot of parks around. They welcomed us very warmly in their cosy little flat that is filled with deco, high tech (flatscreens, xboxes, apple devices) and lots of other stuff. Marina prepared some breakfast for us right away and we met her son Alexey who was the first person we met in Moscow who spoke English.

After the first day – on which we did a walking tour through Kitay Gorod, the Red Square, the island in the Moscow river, sculpture gardens and a visit to the blueshouse – we decided that we wanted to stay longer than the initially planned 1-2 days. Yes the city is expensive, but we had found such a friendly family to host us, no we didn’t find it unsafe at all during our whole stay, and obviously there are so many interesting places in this humonguous city that even a week would just give you a small taste.

Well we’ve seen a lot in the last couple of days… we’ve been mostly impressed by the colors and creativity of St. Basils church, the dense array of golden towers in the Kremlin, the scale of the university building (the biggest one of the sisters) and the malfunctions in Gorky park (actually none of the rusty rides were open). But what we also really enjoyed was living with a Russian family for a few days, meeting their friends and family, eating their delicious food and sharing some of their past-times, like drinking tea or racing through the park with ‚roliki‘ (inline skates).

With their help we managed to book some onward train tickets, so tonight we will be leaving for Nizhny Novgorod, where we hope to catch a boat down the Volga to Kazan. And because the third class was so luxurious we are checking out plain seats tonight.