Viel gabs in unserem Hostel in Nizhny Novgorod nicht, aber überall Rauchmelder.
Das sind übrigens weder Pfannkuchen noch Crepes, sondern блины…

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.

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The lights in the bus were switched on at about 2 am and the stewardess Tatjana made an announcement in Russian and Latvian. The only thing we did understand (with the help of a sign out the window) was that we had reached the Latvian-Russian border. We had an interesting break of about 70 minutes – 10 with the Latvians and 60 with the Russians. The guardians of EU’s outer border came onto the bus, checked the passports and off we went. On the Russian side all passengers had to take all their stuff, leave the bus and queue up. After having passed a stall for the passport control one by one, we had to open our luggage for the sinister looking eyes of a female Russian agent. All bags were lined up and a 2m tall guy brought an old shepherd dog to sniff them all. Note that the whole procedure did not involve a single piece of technology (not even the clock on the wall worked – the time literally stood still here).

Back in the bus we fell asleep again – despite the bumpy roads and when we woke up we could already see the incomplete highway constrution projects in the suburbs of St. Petersburg. A friendly Latvian guy called Arti in the seat next to us told us that there would be a festival in the city – 308th birthday celebrations of the city’s foundation. We got off the bus at Vitebsky Vokzal, oriented ourselves with the free wifi at McD, got some roubles from the ATM and walked through the pouring rain to the hostel.

A few hours of sleep later, the sun came out again and we got up to roam around the Tsar’s city. ‚Don’t connect with drunkards or the police, they are both dangerous‘ was the receptionists advice before we made our way to Moskovskaya station and down Nevsky Prospect amidst a huge crowd of people, waving flags, drinking and listening to the many concerts along the boulevard. We came by the Church On The Spilled Blood, the Summer Garden and the Winter Palace and were incredibly impressed by the appearance of this city, which we were looking forward to explore during the coming days.

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