St P - Moscow - Nizhny Novgorod

Where do I begin..its been a fairly eventful few days!

St. Petersburg is a beautiful spot, well worth a visit. They call it the Northern Venice because of its winding canal structure (built by Peter the Great for purely aesthetic purposes). Its the architectural and cultural hub of Russia, and having since seen a few serious kips of cities on the way down to Ekaterinburg you can see why they make such a big deal about it.

We took in the Peter Hoff (Peter and Pauls Fortress), and saw newlyweds go through their various post nuptial traditions along the banks of the Neva. A scratch brass band warbled through the Wedding March every time a new procession passed, champagne was popped amid much cheering and dancing, and an oul fella in a navy uniform fired off little weighted parachutes out over the river from a cannon. We watched all this from a cafe over a few beers.

At midnight we took a boat tour of the city that brough us through the canals and out onto the Neva which was bustling with activity. The bridges rise every night for a few hours to allow the commercial traffic through - pretty impressive sight! The lads went out to some place called Mod and had a great night with some friendly Russian ladies. nuff said (; Myself and Sarah decided to have an 'early' one and crwled into the leaba's at about 3am.

On Sunday we managed to get a few hours in the Hermitage, which has a ridiculously big collection of fine art. The Winter Palace in which this collection is housed was built for this sole purpose by Catherine the Great - the place is just enormous. Full of pressies to the royal family - ridiculous. We had arranged tickets for Swan Lake at the Mariinsky so we headed down there for about 7pm. Its an amazing theatre and while it was pretty stuffy (and 3 1/2 hours long!) we all enjoyed the performance. A couple of swift voddies at the interval certainly helped!

Afterwards we had a few pints in the Shamrock, (our first Irish bar of the trip so far). We got chatting to a fella who was fairly obviously a dancer (he was bounding around the bar doing plie's and ballerina twirls like no mans business). Anyway, it turns out that he was playing one of the main roles in the performance that night - and he is one of the most renowned dancers in the world. http://www.mariinsky.ru/en/company/ballet/first_soloists/dancers2/kuznetsov/.

So we toasted the night away with Ilya, and casually slagged him about his choice of profession until he insisted that we all feel his muscles. By Jaysus, lets just say he'd probably beat me in a press-up competition! Add to the mix a German journalist and a flautist - Nicolai (who again, apparently is world class and was deleriously excited about the fact that we knew who James 'Jimmy' Galway is because he made an album with him). At one stage he told me that he had spent two years in Venice just learning a particular breathing technique!

So we had by now made best friends with the lads, who were really keen to show us that particular variety of St Petersburg night life that their inflated budgets allow. A fleet of Lada's was summoned and we tore off to Nicolai's 'private club', which was a glorified brothel, and drank and ate cheeseboards to our hearts content under the watchful eye of a few bored strippers. Fair play to Nicolai though, he really knows how to host a party, and we were delighted to have met him and shared his company for a few hours.


So the four of us said our goodbyes to Ruairi last Monday night and hopped on the night train back to Moscow. As he said himself, it just won't be the same without him! Moscow again, in the blistering heat. Queued for about half an hour to see Lenin's waxy corpse which is housed in a mausoleum outside the walls of the Kremlin. It's a fairly eerie experience - when your eyes eventually adjust to the light the grim faced guards come into view. These fellas enforce a strict code of no talking, no camera's, no bags, and definitely no Paddy Bolshevik jokes. After lunch we bought a guitar in a music shop behind the Bolshoi and walked back to the hostel for some well deserved kip.

So on Wednesday we were scheduled to leave eastwards by rail. I was glad to be leaving the major cities at this stage. While they are both impressive in their own rights, I wanted to see what life was like outside the bug hubs. As the train trundled out of Moskva towards Nizhny Novgorod we all commented that this was the real start of the Trans-Mongolian. It was a great feeling to start such a huge journey, and really have feck all idea of what lay ahead for us. We arrived in Nizhny at about 7pm, and Sarah haggled (as only she can) a taxi driver to bring us to the Team Gorky offices. We had arranged a weekend rafting expedition with this crowd, who organise excursions into the wild all over the world from Nizhny. After a fairly hairy trip (the roads are shocking over here and a common pass time seems to be speeding up into pot-holed corners and throwing the car through the oncoming obstacle course for the laugh) we found the offices, and Vladimir showed us to our digs for the night.