Never knowingly taking the shorter route

So, six days on a train. What can I say? I learned that no-one was particularly upset to be leaving Russia, that Siberia is empty, but hot in the summer, that Mongolia is just a desert, that China has amazing hills.

No, me and Emily managed to avoid arguing, so anyone who had bet money on that is pretty much wrong.

Got to Beijing and got sorted in a hostel. As Emily is on a tight schedule we only have two full days in Beijing, but because the trains aren’t doing what we expect we’re going to get the train to Xian to see the terracotta warriors, but then have to get a plane to Hong Kong, which is a shame as I wanted to do it all by land, but the trains just haven’t done what we were led to expect. Oh well, I’ll cope.

Anyway, got to go I need an early night as I’m walking the wall tomorrow.

Ok, so where was I? Oh yea, freaks.

So the first day in St Petersburg got off to a bit of a bad start, though the sleep deprivation probably didn’t help. Over the next couple of days we saw the various sights of St Petersburg. These include galleries, statues, churches and so on. The thing with St Petersburg is that everything was build from about 1750 to about 1850 and its all baroque and gilt and, well, a bit tacky, really. Its also like they’re trying to pretend that because this wasn’t the capital during communism then it had nothing to do with them. They like to spend their time thinking its still 18th century.

Got the train to Moscow. They play crazy music on the speakers. Luckily it stops after a while, but there is no volume control. Hope thats not the case on the trans-siberian. A much better start in Moscow - got the metro to the hostel with no problems, had a nice wander around, managed to get food and stuff, the hostel has a really good atmosphere. So over the last 2.5 days we’ve seen St Basils, the Kremlin (which is full of churches), Lenin, loads of communist statues, and a modern orthodox church. Quite fun. One thing that has dawned on us, though, is that Russians really hate tourists. They seem quite a non-smiling, taciturn bunch, and everyone fleeces tourists, but they seem to want to punish you for being a tourist. They blatantly have different prices for Russians - even on official things; they refuse to help, even when you really try to speak their language and read there crazy letters; they won’t smile, even when they are working in the service industry, I mean isn’t that the point?

Don’t get me wrong, Russia isn’t all bad, but their attitude really stinks. They need to embrace tourism and just smile occasionally. They also need to accept that they were communist, not just hide it. I mean Berlin can do that with Hitler, surely they can.

Anyway, now I’ve got 6 days on a train, see you later!