Three minutes about Moscow

A very quick note today, as my half-hour on the computer in the Russian Post Office is about to end! Moscow has, like St Petersburg, been wet - yes, their heatwave ended the day we arrived and it's been 13 degrees C rather than 30 for the duration of our stay... Moscow has been strangely unimpressive in comparison to St P. Although it has much that is monumental in scale, many of the monuments were rather disappointing once you got in. The Orthodox cathedrals are tiny on the inside, although highly decorated... and the VDNKH, which was once Stalin's massive park devoted to progress in the Soviet Union, is now an emtpy husk of a place.

 

Oops, time to go!

St Petersburg (no photos yet, sory)

Well, it's another damp day in St Petersburg. Rather like yesterday, in fact - frustrating when you're only in a place for three days!

I will post pictures soon, but right now all we have here is the pastel confections of St Petersburg under threateningly dark skies, while we scurry from one tourist must-do to another! I was in St Petersburg about... ten years ago, and my abiding memory of that time was the difficulty of finding anything which resembled a modern, western shop. Looking back, we must have wandered up and down Nevskt Prospekt, St p's main commercial sreet, without even realizing it was anything more than a residential backstreet! No fear of that today - it's Oxford Street ransplanted, heaving with people and neon and global brands. But over it all still broods the original baroque buildings, and even the glamour of modern marketing can't quite shake the impression that modern St Petersburg is shoehorned in, that it is trying to find the cracks in Peter the Great's diktat. Perhaps as a result, the place has the feeling of make-do and mend. Here and there are signs of it - the Russian Mint being run out of the incongruously candy-coloured confections of the Peter and Paul Fortress... a decidedly aged antenna strung up over a baroque spire on Nevsky Prospekt... the glitter of the west, thrown over a dustsheet of poverty, covering the original, brutishly-powerful nouveau-riche power-architecture of Imperial Russia...

Okay, enough nonsense. There's a girl in a hotel room waiting for me to get back so we can go eat! 

The Big Adventure

 

Stupid google maps, can't get directions from Cambridge to Beijing. What's the point of it, then?

 

Well, Google might not be able to tell you how to get there, but I can. Trains. Oh, all right, there is technically one ferry involved, from Stockholm to Turku, but after that, it's trains all the way to Beijing. Haven't decided how we're getting to places after that, but right now, from the comfort of home, it seems a shame to go all that way and then hop on a plane.

So, on Saturday we shall walk to Cambridge railway station (I love that bit), get on a train which will take us to London, get on another train which will take us to Brussels, then to Cologne, then an overnight train to Copenhagen, then a quick hop (in a train) to Stockholm, then an overnight ferry to Turku. A brief train journey takes us to Helsinki, where we shall spend our first night in a hotel, before heading over to St Petersburg. By train. Three days there, then another overnighter to Moscow. Three more days there (unless it's four - I forget), and then the Big One - a straight six day train journey from Moscow to Beijing. Originally, there were going to be stops along the way, but my health and hospital treatments mean we are limited to six weeks, so there's a lot to cram in!

So after three weeks of travelling we shall arrive in Beijing, where we have a week of sightseeing. Then we go to the Panda Conservation Thingy Place in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, where we have volunteered to muck out pandas for a week... then onwards to Shanghai for a quick look at the Expo, and finishing in Hong Kong, from where we shall fly back to the UK.

Phew. I feel tired just writing it all down.

So, yes, our Great Adventure - Overland to Beijing, and Beyond. Hence the test - I wanted to see if I was going to be able to keep y'all updated (and you never know, send out emergency messages too when we get arrested for wearing disrespectful socks in Mao Tse Tung's tomb, or something). 

Test from China

I'm just seeing if this works, so that next week when I go on holiday I will be able to send updates to all you lovely people from wherever the heck it is I am.