We arrived in Moscow yesterday evening. It's really not as cold as I expected (about 3 degrees last night).

The trains were an experience. We had a sleeper from Brussels to Berlin with 6 beds but it was fine because we were only on that train from 11pm til 8am so we just slep (or not). It turns out trains aren't as easy to sleep on as I expected (even with beds). The movement, far from being sleep-inducing, is jolty and bumpy.

We arrive in Berlin on friday morning. Luckily we managed to find left luggage so we could go off into Berlin centre. We had a lovely breakfast in a cafe next to the Holocausr memorial, wandered around that then went off to Checkpoint Charlie. We didn't bother going inside the museum because there were loads of information boards outside. After lunch we went to the Reichstag but the queue was too long to go in.

The next train was also a sleeper (lucky cos we were on it for a day and a half). We had a 3-berth compartement. In the middle of the night (about 5am moscow time) we were woken (well, I don't think any of us were asleep) but the guard giving us customs forms to fill in for the Poland/Belarus border. They were completely in Russian (or possbile Belarussian) and incomprehensible to us. We spent a while trying to decipher them then Mel went and made friends with our neighbours, who were Russian and spoke very good english. Then the border control people took our passports away and gave us arrival/departure forms to fill in, luckily in english as well this time. When all the passport stuff was done they had to change the wheels on the train because Russia and Belarus have different size train tracks to west europe (defence in WW1). That wasn't as fun as we thought it might be. You could hardly tell it was happening except for some jolting. I think they must have slid the new wheels under us.

The train journeys are interesting, just looking out the window (when it's light) can occupy hours. We got off very briefly at one Belarussian and one Russian station. It was very snowy outside on the way here but I've not seen much snow in Moscow (although according to our nice Russian neighbours, there was a huge snow storm earlier this week).

After checking in at the hostel we went in search of some food. Suprisingly we very quickly found a cafe playing Jack Johnson music with a waitor who spoke very god english and understood vegetarian, they even had a whole section of vegetarian on the menu (not that we could work out what any of it was!). We chose something he said was potato and onion and 'chasa'. They turned out to be hot pot-like things with bread 'hats'. We think 'chasa' must be bulgar wheat.

Hopefully today we'll visit the Kremlin and Red Square, we might go to see Lenin's body which has been embalmed and kept. I'll try to put some photos on at some point but it might have to wait until Nepal.

 Update: just added some photos but it takes ages to upload (and in Europe still!) so only done a few. I'm not sure how I'm going to do photos, I may have to work out something different if it takes so long!