Day 205: Made it to Moscow

Up with the alarm at 5.30am, packed and out the door – waking the poor woman on the reception desk. Walked up to the main train station, where a friendly newspaper delivery man guided us to the trains – ours a nice, new fast one that got us to Moscow in just four hours. There, we found our way to the metro station, bought some tickets and then found our platform. Luckily, we only had to go five stops, because very few of the stations are actually identified in any way, so it would have been easy to miss ours. But we arrived okay and then made our way to the surface world again, where it was snowing lightly.

Our hostel had provided us with some very helpful directions, complete with captioned photos, but Kate's phone managed to lose the email right at the vital moment, so we had to rely on a relatively rudimentary map we had picked up on the train. Thankfully, we were able to orient ourselves easily enough and found our way without any real difficulty and were soon checked in and unencumbered again. This was a proper hostel, with a shared kitchen and lots of dorm rooms – and a lot of Russian guests. We had booked out a whole room for ourselves – bunks for seven, including a double for Kate and I – so we had lots of space in which to spread out.

We then headed back out for some lunch, found a supermarket and bought what we needed for a basic dinner of pasta with a jar of ready-made sauce (pimped with some fresh tomato and basil) and a tasty bottle of Bordeaux. While we ate, we watched an interesting pair of TV shows where two young Russian presenters flip a coin and then experience the budget and luxury versions of travel in various parts of the world (in this case somewhere in the USA and Naples). It was fascinating to see the Russian take on these Western destinations (the girl taking the budget option in Naples was horrified by all of the litter – and understandably so, as Moscow is largely litter free), and also to see the shameless product placement in the shows – at regular intervals the presenters would stop to plug the smartphones they were using to find their way around, or the credit cards they were using to pay for their meals etc.