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Day : I'm not really sure anymore.
The long awaited blog entry...... let's hope the computer doesn't crash again!
So I think now we're about 3 countries behind so I won't fill you in with all the boring details but I will try and start from the beginning..!
So Turku (Finland) - we arrived after what must have been the longest/slowest ferry journey in history! it took like 12hours, but we (I say we, I mean I) just slept for most of the way on a sofa in the cafe as we were too stingy to buy a compartment! People on the boat started getting on it literally as soon as the boat started moving (8am) with glasses of beer and shots of jaegermeister...mmmm.... Not my preferred breakfast but who am I to judge. ANYWAY, so finally we arrived in Turku to our next couchsurfing hosts (did i mention that in stockholm we did manage to find a last mintue couch with the lovely Pierre, who put us up, made us curry, bought us beer, and shared his wii with us! Pierre is a legend...)
So getting back to Turku - our next couchsurfing hosts were Caline (from st.petersburg) and her lovely little boy Gael -SOO cute, all white and chubby and he speaks english, french, russian and Finnish at 2 and a half! He liked showing us his collection of escargots (snails) on the balcony which he took everywhere...poor snails... !
Turku was good, but expensive and unfortunately our 10 pounds a day budget went right out of the window! Next we hitchhiked to Helsinki because public transport in Finland is REALLY expensive! Managed to get to Helsinki in the end to meet up and stay with the lovely Kirsikka! We did all the touristy things, and had a dinner party with Kirsikkas friends and she even made us blueberry which was amazing (her mum and Nan also makes their OWN juice - crazy!!!But delicious....) Everyone spoke english in Finland which was good, as we don't speak any finnish...
THEN, as you know, we decided to get to Estonia as it worked out cheaper to go helsinki-tallinn-st.petersburg then to go helsinki-st.petesburg! Overral Tallinn was really good as it was way cheaper than Finland/sweden, only downside is that our couchsurfing experience was interesting - not bad, but interesting. We arrived to meet our host who we believed to be a young student living with flatmates to discover that the woman lived with her husband and their son miles out of the city center! Was all a bit odd, as she hadn't told her boyfriend (who's flat it was) that we were coming as he wasn't really into the couchsurfing thing and so he was angry at her and they had a big fight, and also her little boy weed on our bed....which was nice......ANYWAY, we only had to stay there one night so it wasn't so bad then the next night we got our bus from Tallinn to St.Petersburg, this is when the madness begins to commence (when I say madness I mean complete lack of organisation or sense in anything, and this is how we knew we were entering Russia - home of insane bureaucracy and general anarchy, where may I add No-one speaks english!!! I mean NO-ONE!) So we eventually managed to find and get on our bus, on which sleep would only be possible if you had taken an entire packet of diazepam and washed it down with Vodka as it stopped every hour, the roads were terrible and we spent an hour (which isn't so bad by russian standards) at the border.
Arrived in St.Petes later and managed to find our hostel (despite tom not actually writing down half of the instructions) which hasn't been decorated in at least 30 years, but it was ok, except for one day when a group of crazy alcoholic 'lads' stayed and were a nightmare! They started drinking from about 9am and carried on throughout the day finishing off at least 4 bottles of vodka in one day and washing it down with beer in between, the more drunk one was angry with us as he had been denied an English visa - shame! but the others were more tolerable...
St,petes was generally amazing, so many good pics which we will hopefully post within the next few days. One of the main reasons we haven't been able to write much so far is because it takes an eternity just to find an internet cafe! Much to my frustration believe me - while i'm ranting, the streets are terrible! Tom cuts/bashes his feet on a daily basis, russian bureaucracy is insane we have to register our visa if we stay in a city for more than 3 days, which involves either paying large amounts of money to an agency or spending two hours trying to find a russian office whcih is impossible even if you have the address where no-one speaks english and there are no signs for anything and you will inevitably queue for hours in a box with a temperature of about 35 degrees... This is much the same with trains, queue for hours to get to the front, wher no-one speaks english, and even if you have (like us) taken hours to painstakingly research every single journey (all on a russian website) and then translate it all into cyrillic, there will often be no seats left, or seats only in the kupe class which isn't really that great..... ANYWHO, enough ranting! I do like Russia, honestly! Its just the jumped police officers who will try and fine you for anything, and all the bureaucracies which are hangovers from the soviet times... But generally the people are really nice and friendly and would love to talk to you even if you don't understand what they're saying! And people will often go out of their way to help you..
We had our first Russian train journey the other day, which was extremely exciting! There was a huge storm before we got on the train and mood music on the platforms(!) it felt like you were at Disney! It was rather more disapointing in the morning when they switched the air conditioning off! We travelled kupe, which is 2nd class which wasn't bad but our next journeys are mainly in plaskart which is 3rd class, which should be interesting! 54 people all in one carriage...
So we're now in Moscow!yay! Lots of lovely things here too, red square, the Kremlin etc etc... and we're couchsurfing with a lovely lady called Tanya, with whom we shared some 'soviet champagne' (yes this is its real name!) last night, and even went to a couchsurfing meeting the night before.
So tomorrow its off to Nizhny Novgorod. There is still lots more to fill you in on, but hopefully we'll do that in the next few days...
As a last anectdote, often if you ask people in Russian if they speak english they laugh at you....
and also the lonely planet book 'trans-siberian' is a farce! Practically nothing they right is true/exists... so don't buy it.
And must mention - Vodka here is so unbelieveably cheap - starts from about 1.80 for a bottle! And often beer is cheaper than water....maybe this explains a lot of things....
Lots of love! Tom and chloe
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