We took an overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the city of the Russian czars.

St. Petersburg has lots of grand buildings and canals.

The Winter Palace is home to the Hermitage,  one of the world’s biggest and grandest museums.  If you’ve seen the film Russian Ark, it was filmed in the Hermitage.

It is filled with paintings and statues from all over the world.  The rooms themselves are like the palace of Versailles, with walls decorated in gold leaf.

The real reason Russian brides are popular.

A gravestone with a very relaxed looking representation of the deceased.

St. Petersburg also has the deepest metro in the world.  There is a super long and steep escalator ride to the platforms.  It takes 5 minutes on the escalator and there are signs asking people not to sit down on the escalators.  You still see people sitting down though.

St. Petersburg suffered terribly during the second world war.  The city was called Leningrad at the time.  The German’s besieged the city for 872 days.
More than a million people died during the siege (only at Stalingrad were more lives lost during a siege).
Tanya Savicheva is St. Petersburg’s equivalent of Anne Frank.  She kept a diary during the siege.  Her diary only consists of a few pages and basically lists the dates each of her family members died.
Tanya was 11 years old when the siege started and worked digging trenches and putting out fires.
Her sister Zhenya had to walk seven kilometers every day to a factory where she made mine cases and then she would donate blood.

Tanya’s diary reads:

Zhenya (her sister) died on Dec. 28th at 12:30 A.M. 1941

Grandma died on Jan. 25th 3:00 P.M. 1942

Leka (her brother) died on March 5th at 5:00 A.M. 1942

Uncle Vasya died on Apr. 13th at 2:00 after midnight 1942

Uncle Lesha on May 10th at 4:00 P.M. 1942

Mother on May 13th at 7:30 A.M. 1942

Savichevs died.

Everyone died.
Only Tanya is left.

Tanya was rescued after the siege was lifted but died of illness shortly after that.
A Russian astronomer named an asteroid after her.

The tour ended in St. Petersburg and most of the rest of the group returned home.  A few are still travelling in different locations.
I stayed in St. Petersburg a couple of extra days and then took the train to Finland.

From Ekaterinburg we had a 24-hour train ride to Moscow.

I loved Moscow.  It’s a wonderful city to visit and has one of the most beautiful city centres of any city I’ve been to.  Red Square is a great location and is home to St. Basil’s Cathedral, one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve seen.

Lenin and the last Czar still hang around Red Square.

And Marshal Zhukov still keeps watch.

The square is also home to the Kremlin.  Several Russian cities have kremlins, the word means fortress.  The Russian princes and then Czars lived inside the fortress, and later the Russian presidents had their offices there.  I remember pre-Gorbachev Soviet years, so it was a strange experience to wander through the territory of the cold war enemy.

Inside the Moscow Kremlin there is a square with several beautiful golden domed churches packed with golden icons and frescoes.

The Kremlin Armoury is a museum containing a lot of the treasures of the Czars.  There are floors full of imperial carriages, weapons, armor, icons, Faberge eggs, crowns, and book covers covered in precious stones.  The Kremlin Diamond Fund is one of the 3 most valuable collections of diamonds and jewels in the world (along with the British Crown Jewels and the Shah’s Collection).

Moscow also has one of the oldest and grandest metros in the world.  Many of the stations have murals and chandeliers and are tourist attractions themselves.

I also visited Moscow’s oldest banya (Russian bathhouse).  It’s a big sauna with separate areas for men and women.  They have birch leaves that you can whip yourself with in the steam room and afterwards you go for a dip in cold water.

There is also a collection of old communist statues at one of the parks in Moscow.

For some strange reason, this song was on one of the very few records I owned as a kid.

Have fun,
Aidan

Foreigners in Moscow claim that, according to a Soviet statistic, there are only three brassieres for every five Russian women. In view of current Western women’s fashion trends, they may be abreast of the times.
– B. Michael Frolic.

From Mongolia we took the train to the Russian border.  It often takes a long time to go across the border.
We had to wait for the Mongolian customs and immigration officials to board the train and check people. Then the train travelled a short way to the Russian border and Russian immigration officials checked everyone’s visas.  Then they had to change the trains over.
The whole process lasted more than 9 hours.

In Russia we took the train to Irkutsk.  We stayed at a little town near Lake Baikal, about an hour from Irkutsk.  We did a homestay for a night with families who live near the lake.  Baikal is the deepest lake in the world.  At its deepest point it’s 1637 metres deep and it contains about 20% of the world’s fresh water.

From Irkutsk we got aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.  We joined the line at about the halfway point (it runs all the way to Vladivostok in the east).  The journey from Irkutsk to Ekaterinburg took 51 hours.

The Trans-Siberian trains run on Moscow time, (Irkutsk is five hours ahead of Moscow).  Even the clocks at the train stations are usually set to Moscow time, which can make things confusing.

The trains were comfortable and clean and we shared four person sleeping compartments.
Most of the trains had restaurant cars but the quality and price of the food varied greatly.  On one occasion four of us ordered meals, but only two of us got food.

The trains have a supply of hot water and a lot of people survive on instant noodles they brought with them (us included).  Unfortunately Russian supermarkets generally don’t have the wide selection of flavors that you can expect in China or Japan.

The carriages are usually ruled over by female attendants.  They are notorious for waking people early in the morning and grabbing their bed sheets, so that they will have all the bed sheets packed away by the time the train arrives.

The train makes short stops along the way and a few times a day there’s the chance to get off the train for between 10 and 30 minutes.  There usually isn’t much to see, except for old ladies selling food.
You want to make sure you get back onto the train on time.  On the tour before us, two people hadn’t got onto the train on time and the train attendant chased after them.  All three of them got left behind at a small station and had to wait a few hours for the next train.

The people on the tour with me were good company and we had a really fun time on the trains.  We spent the time talking and playing cards.

We stayed in Ekaterinburg for 2 nights.  Ekaterinburg is where the last Czar and his family were taken after the revolution.  There’s a church built on the site where they were executed.

Once inside Russia, I began my program of Communist indoctrination.

Ekaterinburg had an interesting keyboard sculpture.

I saw wedding groups all over Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.   Newlyweds were visiting scenic places to have their photos taken.

I wouldn’t go too far out of my way to visit either Irkutsk or Ekaterinburg, but they are nice places to break up the long train journey across Russia.
I like travelling by train and the Trans-Siberian is one of the world’s great train journeys.  It was a wonderful experience.

Have fun,
Aidan.

Some number trivia: We were on the train at 12:34 and 56 seconds on 07/08/09.

I saw the weirdest ever message on an ATM in Minsk, Belarus.

I put my card in and just Russian writing came up (or maybe it was in Belarussian, I can’t tell the difference).  So I hit what I hoped was the cancel button and my card was returned.

A different menu appeared which had a button labelled FAQ.

It’s disturbing that these questions would be FREQUENTLY asked (and why in English?  And the answer is in Russian?)

Someone translated the answer to the questions for me and it says in Russian: Because you forgot to give him food.