I wrote a really long post about Moscow this morning and just as I was about to finish the computer crashed! So, here is a probably slightly shorter and less well-written version!

Moscow was not as cold as we'd expected. About -6 at the coldest and often 1 or 2 degrees.It snowed a few times but didn't really settle porperly. I think they clear it quite a lot in the cities, there was some in parks but it was all icy and hard so no snowmen!

Our first full day in Moscow we wandered over to Red Square. It was amazing to see St Basils. We ate a picnic lunch in the (very upmarket) GUM shopping centre. We got some odd looks cutting bread and tomato on out knees with penknives infront of Versace (or somewhere). After that we visited the history museum on Red Square. It was right from pre-histric man to the revolution. The revolution section was the most interesting. It was all in Russian but we did manage to identify Kornilov and Kerensky in a photo at the time of the provisional goverment (for people who know who they are!). For dinner we found a little cafe with an english menu! I had 'British Cake' which turned out to be a dryish fruit sponge.

On Monday we went to the Kremlin. It's impressive. I never really realised it was a citadel inside those walls. It has about 10 cathedrales and a few other buildings like the tsarina's palace and the Bell Tower. Some of the cathedrals have amazing art in and one holds the tombs of about 20 tsars. There is also the biggest bell in the world beside the bell tower. It's pretty huge. We headed down to Arbat street (a tourist shopping street) and tried to find a restaurant. The choice was interesting! There was one that had glass table tops with fish tanks under with real goldfish in! The next one was like something from disneyland.It had a plastic front made to lok like the entrance to some pirate cave or something. Inside it was a bit like a grotto. There were pictures of all the famous people who had been there, Condoleeza Rice was amomg them so we didn't go there! After that there was one that had huge plastic trees and plastic fences with plastic chickens on top! Finally we found a normal one to eat at! The Arbat is an interesting street. It has tourist souvenir shops on both sides and little stalls down the middle all selling pretty much the same t-shirts and russian dolls (you can get them with footballers on or Tony Blair!). In the evening we met a Canadian called Matt who had just got off the trans-mogolian from Beijing. It was useful talking to him.

On our last day in Moscow we had to go to immigration to try to register our visas. Everyone we spoke to seemed comfused about visa registration and we weren't sure if we had to do it or not. After waiting ages we saw a guy who looked at our passports, typed alot on his computer, rang a few people. After about half an hour of this he gave our passports back. He didn't speak any english but another guy told us that there wasn't a problem. We decided not to register our visas and try to explain at the border if there was any trouble! (As I'm writing this ffrom Beijing, I'll just say, there wasn't a problem at the border) We went to another museum which covered history from around 1900 to the present. Everything was in Russian but we deciphered some of it. There was a capitalist-communist game of snakes and ladders which was interesting. There was also a 'map of the world according to Ronald Reagan' which would be suitable (mostly) if you changed the name to George Bush. It had things like 'our oil' on the middle east. In the evening we tried to find a post office so that Mel could post a birthday present to her nephew. the first one we went to was the central post office so we assumed it would do packages. They told us we had to take the tram to another post office. We found that one and talked to them they told us we had to go somewhere else (all this was hard to understand as very few russians speak english). Eventually we found another one and had to re-pack the present in a special box and fill in loads of forms before we could send it off. It doean't sound like that much of a trek but we were all very fed up with the Russian post office by the end!

Then it was off to the train station to catch the trans-mogolian!

 If you want you can check out Mel and Steve's blog for more pics it's at www.meland steve.blogspot.com (I think).

 Tips for Moscow

it's definately worth having a student card if you can get one, I got loads of discounts with mine.

If you need help in Moscow, it's worth going into a posh hotel, they will speak really good english there!