April 23rd, Moscow, KM 0

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.". So waxed Mr Churchill in a radio broadcast in 1939. Russia has always existed in my mind from before the fall of the Iron Curtain: frozen in time as a place of mythical oddness. A distopian state of uniform ideals that didn't quite work. A place of turnips and Ladas. Of cold, dank, streets and endless blocks of dreary buildings filled with people with their souls crushed. Dark-eyed and haunted people who move as if asleep, their realities forced into someone elses waking dream, that has become their waking nightmare; much like B&Q on a Sunday morning, but without the elevator music. Things have changed just ever so slightly...

We got into Moscow at around 9:30am. The train was late. Some deep - and probably misplaced - stirring sense of patriotism felt a bit grateful that at least the UK wasn't the only country in the world that had problems with trains. The night had passed uneventfully. Apart from passport control at around midnight. We were boarded by some very stern looking female soldiers who proceeded to scrutinise our passports and luggage before giving us our entry forms to fill in. I was surprised I didn't get my head patted at the end of it. Getting a Russian visa even now is by no means, easy, or cheap. It also required us to get an invitation from someone within Russia. This turned out to be something we could get from a hostel. The invitations were emailed to us for the trifling price of twenty hinglish pinds. They looked like something my 2 year old cousin could do with mspaint. The joys of being ripped off via cultural differences.

Moscow is an amazing city. To say it is vibrant doesn't really do it justice. Perhaps vivacious, colourful, resounding, pulsating, thrusting, sonorous, vigorous even! these words may be more apropos. God, I thought, why am I describing this place using sexual metaphors? I need to lay of the Viagra. It has been inhabited for over a thousand years. Razed by the Mongols in the 13th Century it was slowly rebuilt and in 1326 it was made the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was enlarged greatly during the reign of Ivan the Great and further flourished under a great many successive Tsars, most famously Ivan the Tewwible who ordered the construction the weird and wonderful St Basil's Cathedral, known to Victorian travellers as the Pineapple. Napoleon sacked the city in 1812 during his invasion. He crossed the Niemen river with 650 thousand men in his Grande Armée. less then 200 thousand returned. Many died after the victory, during the retreat back along the road to France. Walking on frostbitten toes, they marched out of Russia, rags of uniforms hanging from diseased infections. Walking cadavers, insanity and hunger driving them off the roads into the forests, where wolves and Cossack soldiers were waiting. Must have been fun. Napoleon was the last to do any serious damage to the infrastructure of the city. Most of the city's buildings come from after this period. The next major forming event here was the revolution of the late 19th century, and again in the 20th century. Heralding Lenin and his Bolsheviks, and then Stalin. Modern Moscow seems a bit tame in comparison. But hopefully fun to explore, however time, as always, is against us. We only have 36 hours.

We emerged into Kievsky Station looking for an Internet cafe. We'd booked ourselves into a hostel online and now we just had to print out the directions that we forgot to print out before we left the UK and then again in Latvia. This was our first obstacle. No speakski Russian, and no Internet Cafe in sight. We spent a joyous four hours walking around with 20kg packs on our fronts and backs, looking like the sumo wrestling puppets from It's a Knock-Out. We got to the Red Square, and still couldn't figure out where we were on the kack-map we had. we walked-up-diddly-up-up, we walked-down-diddly-down-down. Oh the fun we had.

...The map is next to useless. It's not to scale and the land-marks don't make sense. It's got nothing to do with the fact I can't read it properly. We are looking around for the umpteenth time for the Internet cafe marked in a shopping centre we still cannot find. Even though there
are signs everywhere saying it's here.
Why don't we just go down into this underground station and try and ask someone again?" I venture. M is beginning to look like one of Napoleon's doomed soldiers. We haven't eaten for hours and we are both exhausted.
"Ok." She says. I don't think she really cares anymore. We head down into the station and miraculously we meet someone who speaks English. He finally enlightens us as to the whereabouts of the Manezh Shopping Mall. It's subterranean; we've been walking on top of it all morning. Nice. Oh, but the Internet cafe is closed...

We finally got some food and our bearings, not to mention our marbles, and located the hostel; four and a half hours after arriving in Moscow. We checked in and promptly passed out for three hours in our room. I woke up first, feeling more than a little disorientated, and decided to get a beer - well, I was on holiday. Ten minutes later I had to have another lie down again. M got up about an hour later and we both had a sit down and a pow-wow about the next 3 weeks. We realised we had not really planned a decent itinerary for our trip across Siberia, and given the amount of time we had to play with, things were going to be pretty tight. The main problem we realised was that train departures from certain cities - such as Urkutsk and Ulaan Bator - were subject to fixed, bi-weekly, timetables that could potentially affect where we could stay. So that evening, instead of sight-seeing, we sat with pizza and beer and did some serious planning. The hostel was pretty busy that evening as a group of models had booked in for a photo-shoot. They spent most of the evening prancing around half-naked and draping themselves in door-ways and looking sultry; and that was just the men.

... M and I are trying to sleep in a dorm-room full of chaos. There have been people in and out all evening. We have been watching Dexter - the American TV black-comedy about the serial-killer - and now we are trying to sleep. I have been woken up again, this time by snoring. I am pretty sure it is the rotund American guy we were chatting to earlier on. It sounds like a hippo on heat. I lift our little tent-flap we have fashioned for some privacy to discover it is actually one of the models, a female one, (about a size 6). I spend the next 10mins digging out my earplugs. How did she manage to fit a pair of lungs into that torso? ...