Moscow

The first leg of the trip should have been easy; a quick flight to Moscow with no Russian needed. However 10 minutes out of Pete's house and just after we have boarded the tube I realise we have left the laptop charger plugged in back in his room. Luckily thanks to Pete's dads great knowledge of London he managed to run to a PC world at a tube stop and pick us up a universal charger. The rest of the trip went without any problems apart from having to stand on a freezing cold bus at Riga for half an hour just so we could be driven across a road! 


We spent the morning of our first day in Moscow attempting to visit the Kremlin only to find that it is closed on Thursdays! We settle for Red square and Lenin’s mausoleum. A bit of confusion about where to leave our cameras so that we can get in leads us to what we think is the Moscow state museum. We ditch our bags in the cloakroom (much to the confusion of the staff) and head back out to see the dead communist. A very surreal experience you go down into a darkened room and he is just lying there lit up in a glass box sporting quite a fashionably goatee (apparently they dust him every 3 days). After this we wander around Red square and then back to the museum. We pay for our tickets and go inside only to realise we have been had! Rather than the state museum we have paid for a tiny museum currently housing an exhibit on Napoleon (of course all of the signs are in Russian), so we spend a quick 5 minutes walking round and leave. In the evening we get chatting to 2 Italians and they tell us they are heading out to a club, on the walk it turns out it costs about £12 to get in and they are taking £100 each for the night! We decide to head off by ourselves to a club we had heard about called Propaganda. When we finally found it (after Pete stopped to take a piss in sight of the former KGB building) the inside looked more like a cafe/bar than a club. After a few beers however the tables were cleared and a DJ appeared and began to play very Sankeys-esk music. 


We woke on our last day in Moscow about 20 minutes before check out thanks to the large hangover earned the night before. Managed to get up and out in time. Spent the day trying to get a headphone splitter from a massive electronics market somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, we eventually succeeded and were suitably ripped off. On the way back we decided to visit Red square again because the sun was shining. A bit of a mistake, we ended up getting the wrong metro on the way home and ended up an empty station. When we finally realised where they had hidden the line that went in the opposite direction we were pressed for time to catch our first train. We made it to the station with only 5 minutes to spare and eventually found our train (it wasn't listed on the main time board) hidden at the end of the station on it's own separate platform.