Moscow, Russia – 09/07

(Michelle) We were awoken on the train about 2 hours ahead of arrival by a morning news radio program blaring on a painfully loud volume over the speakers in each car. We were in a four person car (known as class Kupe in Russian) and even the two other Russians could not figure out how to turn it off. We arrived in Moscow at about 10am and let me tell you, 10am on a Friday morning is not too early to get your drink on if you are the kind of person that lingers at a Moscow train station. I was slightly uncomfortable with the number of dudes staring at us while holding their tall boys.

We got on the metro train and found our hostel, waited forever to check in, then started another mission to get the train tickets we wanted. By 5pm on Friday we were in business - with tickets from Moscow to Tomsk and Tomsk to Irkutsk. They could not sell Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar (UB) Mongolia and UB to Beijing because they did not sell international tickets. We looked up online (in Russian) what the prices should cost and then went to a “travel agent” to compare prices as opposed to going all the way out to the train station. It was only a few dollars more expensive than what we saw online. Of course there was still a lot of waiting involved. Also, there was some problem with our proposed itinerary. We will never know why for sure as no English was spoken, but we could not go to Yekaterinburg as we planned.

You may ask yourself, is it worth it to spend so much time buying tickets in Russia when clearly it is not an easy task. You can buy them from a travel agent that speaks English outside of the country, but the difference in price is astronomical. We had read that through comments on the Lonely Planet Thorntree online forum, but we also were able to confirm it in person. We shared a car later on with a couple from Switzerland who had done practically the same trip we did. We summed it up and all our train tickets from Moscow to Beijing cost about $350 per person in total. The couple from Switzerland had a few hotel rooms included (one of the hotel rooms included was in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, where hotel rooms would be about $20 per night), but other than that it was the same train tickets and they spent over $2,000 per person. On the money alone, it was worth it, but it was also a very interesting experience even though it was very frustrating.

Now that we are done, we did some sightseeing around the Red Square and Kremlin. We also went to shop around a little at the “Gum”. The “Gum” was the expensive shopping place for the upper echelon back on the day, but it is for everyone now. We had not given up hope on finding our track suits for the long train journey, but everything in the Gum was still too expensive for us.

We had dinner at a bar recommended at the hostel. We were there during the happy hour time, as all appetizers were half off then, and so were many other people. We got the last table. The place was pretty big and rather dark, but the people looked mostly like normal everyday people who just got done working on a Friday evening. It was the first time in Russia that I felt like we weren't in a totally different world. We didn’t stick around for any evening entertainment as we were both pretty tired, but I noticed on the way out that after 9pm there was a $20 (Russian Ruble equivalent) to get in, so it must be the place to go.

(TJ) Getting train tickets is a royal pain, all I can say that the sooner Russia Railways gets it act together so that you can buy tickets online the better. I’d say that in Russia overall they are not too interested in the tourist dollar. The mindset they have for the tourist is limited to the very wealthy one. If they ever pull their heads out of their asses they could have hundreds of millions more if they reformed their insane visa system (this could also be said for the US and the US has one of the worst visa programs in the world costing us tons in tourist dollars) and maybe made it a bit easier for independent travelers.

Red Square and the Kremlin were pretty much how I had pictured them to be. You could definitely picture by the size of Red Square all of the military parades that happened here during Soviet times. The GUM is more or less today your typical high end shopping mall with the exception of the exterior. The building its self is a very nice looking structure from around the turn of the century. I think it would have been nice had they tried a little harder to keep some of the old character to the interior, its no comparison for a old store like Harrods in London.