Day 14 and 15 - On the rails again
Edit: Posting this from the KOFE HAUZ across the street from our hotel as the internet wasn't working when we left this morning and we're in need of some warm coffee after the big day we've had. I'm referring to this particular place as Offy's House though due to the missing K on the sign. Emily, I don't think Offy would be too interested in owning a place like this though unfortunately. XD
I'm currently typing this up from the hotel room in St Petersburg, unfortunately our internet access isn't working, and will hopefully be fixed by tomorrow, but for now I'm going to type this all up and post it when I next get a chance, whether that be the fixed connection or just some WiFi enabled coffee shop like the one across the road.
We left Smolensk after enjoying one last breakfast in the downstairs restaurant, packing our things and communicating with the lady on the desk mostly through a series of figures written on paper and pointing at things. We got her to order us a taxi though as Mon knew the Russian for that and it arrived very quickly, which we were especially grateful for as we'd gotten our coats and scarves on which can quickly become way way too hot when inside a building. (once you add things like layers and thermal underwear into the equation)
The taxi driver was much less seedy than the last one which took us from the station to the hotel, but his car was still 30 years old and had seat covers which made it look like some kind of mythical blue leapord. He seemed slightly unenthused by the fact that the people he'd picked up from the hotel had luggage though and attempted to get his boot (trunk for all you Americans) open to accomodate it. I say attempted because he didn't actually succeed, whether the lock was frozen shut or whether the car was just too old to have a functioning boot I'm not sure, but he played around with a lighter trying to defrost it for a few minutes before giving up and helping us just load our suitcases into the back seat. This meant that I had to sit up along side him in the passengers seat while Mon cradled our bags in the bag. Thankfully this meant that I actually had a seatbelt, though Mon was still left without, though she really didn't have anywhere to go with the suitcases packed in with her. He took off at speed and after sliding a little over the roads on the way we arrived at the train station unscathed and with all of our belongings intact. He only charged 100rubles (just over $3) for the ride, half of what the other guy had charged us for the same trip in the middle of the night a few days earlier, and still a fraction of what you'd pay in Australia.
So we got to the station without any hassle which meant that it was simply a matter of picking up our tickets and waiting, and despite waiting almost 20 minutes in line to get said tickets, we were still an hour or so early to board our train. Unfortunately the Smolensk station made the decision at some point to not actually use the large digital screens in their waiting area and simply announce the platforms and arriving trains over a speaker system bought from the same company that makes all Russian train speaker systems and revels in making them sound like the announcements are being made from a great distance away and under water. Since we had so long to wait I decided to eat a large amount of the "Grand Toffees" I'd bought for the trip, drink a bunch of water and then need to use the bathroom before we left.
For those who don't know, a lot of Russian public toilets, especially those in stations and at some shopping centres and tourist attractions have a charge to enter the toilet. We thought initially this charge was just for the toilet paper, because for the first week or so all of the places we went we didn't need to pay, restaurants, hotels and the like. With this in mind I believe I illegally peed for the first time in my life, ok maybe not, but I still didn't pay when clearly I needed to. I went downstairs and there was a little booth with a woman there who said something unintelligable to me which was likely "You have to pay to go in" and me thinking she was asking if I needed paper mumbled something equally unintelligable, made some hand signs and walked right in. As I was leaving she gave me a bit of a displeased look and as I headed up the stairs I realised for the first time that I probably should have paid the 20rub to get in, by this time I just wanted out of the situation though and went right back to sit down and wait for the train, though I remaning paranoid for the remaning time that a security guard / policeman, who walk around with taser bats, would walk by to extract the 20 rubles from me. Thankfully that didn't happen and we managed to overhear the number of our train and follow the large crowd of people out onto the freezing cold platform and board the train to Moscow.
I do feel sorry for the toilet money collecting ladies, there are a lot of unpleasant jobs in Russia and this must be a particularly boring and unrewarding one. 20rubles seems to be the going price though I did go to one that only charged 15rub, though that place didn't have toilet seats so perhaps that was why there was a discount. Between that, snow shoveller, sidewalk sand distributor and a few other unexciting tasks, I'm grateful we don't have the need for these kinds of professions back home. That said, the last toilet lady I saw seemed to spend the entire time talking on her phone so I guess it's a job that requires minimal effort and you can just do whatever you like in the meantime.
So the train trip back to Moscow was uneventful, we were in 3rd class this time as it was during the day and I don't think any of the 2nd class we'd been in so far were even still available. 3rd class is still very similar to the sleeper cabins we were now used to, but with the difference that there are no cabins, just a whole carriage of pull down beds / couches with an additional seat / bed combo tacked on the side in the space saved by the lack of doors and walls. The seats however were not very comfortable, and after sitting on the hard leather for 5+ hours I was ready for a little bit of luxury on our trip to St. Petersburg.
Unforunately our train arrived at 8pm in Moscow and our adjoining train didn't leave until midnight and as such we had some time to kill. By this time however we were tired, irritable and really just wanting to sleep. We jumped on the Metro, struggling with our bags (which makes everything about travelling somewhere so much worse) and arrived at the station that our next train would leave from. It went by something like Leninskaya Ploshad and appropriately had a nice big bust of Lenin in the middle of a very large waiting area / cafe area. We weren't very hungry but we realised that we had to eat something for dinner or we wouldn't eat until we arrived in St. Petersburg. However the only sit down restaurant at the station ironically wouldn't let us in with our suitcases. As there was nowhere to check the bags at the station we were forced to settle for what was around, but despite hauling our bags around for 20 minutes we couldn't find anything which looked even the least bit appealling. We decided then to get some snacks from the snack machine to tide us over until we could eat a proper breakfast, nothing exciting, just some chips, waffle looking things and the like, but after inserting some money into the machine and hitting the buttons for a packet of chips we were rudely disappointed to find the chips roll off the line and get stuck right between the glass and the metal rack. Fantastic. We figured this was a good sign to give up and after getting what I'd amount to a fist full of unwanted coins back from the machine we went back upstairs to brave what could be had from a little cafe that actually had something with a table to sit. Our "meal" consisted of some unpleasantly flavoured chips and some Pepsi, the earlier of which was very hard to order without me actually knowing the Russian names for the flavours. It was enough though, and we knew it would't get us sick like half of the frankly horrible looking things in the little cafe fridges, so we suffered through before getting kicked out of the cafe waiting area when it closed and having to find somewhere else to sit. We passed the rest of the time being tired, cold and paranoid about theives as everyone in the station seemed to be making it their business to look seedy, untrustworthy and generally unpleasant. This was probably a combination of our general state of mind at the time, as well as the fact that train stations do seem to attract a pretty diverse crowd of degenerates and low lifes. Thankfully we passed the time unscathed, I even managed to get online for a few minutes to check my email in one section of the station and we boarded our train to find two Russian men (both of whom seemed to speak a little english) which we none the less had no interest in speaking to and went right to bed after getting our passports checked.
The train from Moscow to St. Petersburg was really just an upper scale version of what we got going to Volgograd. It cost a bit more, but we decided it was justifiable when we booked it and set us up at the right times where we weren't waiting too long either side of the journey. The bedding was already set up, and involved doonas instead of blankets, a somewhat edible breakfast was provided, and they even provided us with a little kit which included some crappy slippers to wear in the cabin, a shoe horn, and what is probably toothpaste and a brush. All in all not bad, nothing you can't provide yourself, though some form of convenience was certainly appreciated at the end of this very long trip. We were woken up 30 minutes shy of arriving and ate a little breakfast before packing up our things and departing at 8am in the heart of St. Petersburg.
Feeling very unclean, smelly and still a bit tired we quickly checked our luggage at the station and headed out to fill in 4 hours until we could check in to the hotel I'm now writing this from. We first wandered the streets to get ourselves some coffee and warm up a little bit, this meant just walking up and down the streets to see what we could find, and after first discovering that St. Petersburg seems to have a lot of posters advertising Metal bands, and wandering past a closed down art exhibit called "Mikki Mouse Fucks Everything" (in english), which seemed to involve Mickey Mouse with nazi symbols and a lot of blood and gore, we eventually found a KOFE HAUS (Coffee House), which I'll explain more about later.
Warmed up we decided to get some Metro tickets and find somewhere to browse out of the cold for the next few hours. Thankfully we were saved from having to go too far by a large shopping centre nearby the station, we stumbled in and actually managed to kill more than the required time going through what turned out to be a fairly upper class establishment featuring a wide array of shops selling designer clothes and very very pricey fur coats and accessories. I was thankfully also able to pick up my email again courtesy of a little Nokia shop on the ground floor and we proceeded to spend the next few hours amusing ourselves with stores names like "Lady and Gentleman City", "Men's Mania" and many others. We also solved the mystery of why everyone in Russia seems to wear so much Adidas when we found not 1, but 3 Adidas stores in the same complex.
Lunch was Russian McDonalds as we had to try it at least once just to see the difference. I tried to get myself an R2D2 happy meal toy along with our Big Mac meals but simply wasn't able to communicate the request in hand gestures and pointing without her offering me a Happy Meal, so sadly I came away empty handed. The meal was fine though and while different to what we have in Australia, all in all mostly the same. After umm'ing and ahh'ing for a while about whether I wanted to go back and get myself one of the very nice woolen coats I'd seen in the last few hours I decided to leave it until tomorrow and if I still wanted it I could always come back.
We then grabbed our bags and jumped back on the Metro line headed towards our hotel. After going up and down stairs far more times than it turned out to be neccessary we found our way to the right platforms, got out of the station and started the task of heading down a small but ridiculously icy section of road of which we are now very familiar. We failed to notice at the time the church which we now refer to as Batman Church, but there'll be more on that later I'm sure.
Of course getting to our hotel we had to struggle with the stairs of doom since the reception for this hotel is on the 3rd floor and we are on the 4th. They of course have no elevator, but whatever. We got there and checked in with a huge sigh of relief that we would not need to move our suitcases except for one more time in our entire trip. The hotel itself is nice enough, very small and they are currently doing construction on our floor to turn a section of it into some kind of lounge/bar. There is thankfully no-one partying outside our door, but they still decide to play crappy music which I can hear right now while Mon is trying to sleep. Really it's more of a backpackers than a hotel, but it's very cheap and very modern so it has everything we need... except for reliable internet. Everything worked perfectly for the first few hours, and then approaching bedtime everything dropped out. We can still get onto the network, but simply have no internet access anymore. I was planning to post all this on that night but exhausted and of the impression that it would all be fixed by morning I went to bed and found it still not working the next morning. Since then we have been very busy running about so thankfully it hasn't been a huge issue, it was on when we got back the next day, but proceeded to die again in the evening before I could post this yet again. As such we are unsure when we will be easily contactable again, but with any luck it may be tomorrow as the Hotel's ISP doesn't work on the weekends and tomorrow will be the first day they should be able to look into the issue.
So I'll cut this here because it's already long enough and St. Petersburg is beautiful and a whole different story. The travel was stressful and tiring but it's all part of the adventure and I'm sure is going to be something we remember as part of our journey as much as the wonderful things we've seen. As such I bid you all adue for now, I will be back shortly with the last 2 days!
Hope you're all well!
I'm currently typing this up from the hotel room in St Petersburg, unfortunately our internet access isn't working, and will hopefully be fixed by tomorrow, but for now I'm going to type this all up and post it when I next get a chance, whether that be the fixed connection or just some WiFi enabled coffee shop like the one across the road.
We left Smolensk after enjoying one last breakfast in the downstairs restaurant, packing our things and communicating with the lady on the desk mostly through a series of figures written on paper and pointing at things. We got her to order us a taxi though as Mon knew the Russian for that and it arrived very quickly, which we were especially grateful for as we'd gotten our coats and scarves on which can quickly become way way too hot when inside a building. (once you add things like layers and thermal underwear into the equation)
The taxi driver was much less seedy than the last one which took us from the station to the hotel, but his car was still 30 years old and had seat covers which made it look like some kind of mythical blue leapord. He seemed slightly unenthused by the fact that the people he'd picked up from the hotel had luggage though and attempted to get his boot (trunk for all you Americans) open to accomodate it. I say attempted because he didn't actually succeed, whether the lock was frozen shut or whether the car was just too old to have a functioning boot I'm not sure, but he played around with a lighter trying to defrost it for a few minutes before giving up and helping us just load our suitcases into the back seat. This meant that I had to sit up along side him in the passengers seat while Mon cradled our bags in the bag. Thankfully this meant that I actually had a seatbelt, though Mon was still left without, though she really didn't have anywhere to go with the suitcases packed in with her. He took off at speed and after sliding a little over the roads on the way we arrived at the train station unscathed and with all of our belongings intact. He only charged 100rubles (just over $3) for the ride, half of what the other guy had charged us for the same trip in the middle of the night a few days earlier, and still a fraction of what you'd pay in Australia.
So we got to the station without any hassle which meant that it was simply a matter of picking up our tickets and waiting, and despite waiting almost 20 minutes in line to get said tickets, we were still an hour or so early to board our train. Unfortunately the Smolensk station made the decision at some point to not actually use the large digital screens in their waiting area and simply announce the platforms and arriving trains over a speaker system bought from the same company that makes all Russian train speaker systems and revels in making them sound like the announcements are being made from a great distance away and under water. Since we had so long to wait I decided to eat a large amount of the "Grand Toffees" I'd bought for the trip, drink a bunch of water and then need to use the bathroom before we left.
For those who don't know, a lot of Russian public toilets, especially those in stations and at some shopping centres and tourist attractions have a charge to enter the toilet. We thought initially this charge was just for the toilet paper, because for the first week or so all of the places we went we didn't need to pay, restaurants, hotels and the like. With this in mind I believe I illegally peed for the first time in my life, ok maybe not, but I still didn't pay when clearly I needed to. I went downstairs and there was a little booth with a woman there who said something unintelligable to me which was likely "You have to pay to go in" and me thinking she was asking if I needed paper mumbled something equally unintelligable, made some hand signs and walked right in. As I was leaving she gave me a bit of a displeased look and as I headed up the stairs I realised for the first time that I probably should have paid the 20rub to get in, by this time I just wanted out of the situation though and went right back to sit down and wait for the train, though I remaning paranoid for the remaning time that a security guard / policeman, who walk around with taser bats, would walk by to extract the 20 rubles from me. Thankfully that didn't happen and we managed to overhear the number of our train and follow the large crowd of people out onto the freezing cold platform and board the train to Moscow.
I do feel sorry for the toilet money collecting ladies, there are a lot of unpleasant jobs in Russia and this must be a particularly boring and unrewarding one. 20rubles seems to be the going price though I did go to one that only charged 15rub, though that place didn't have toilet seats so perhaps that was why there was a discount. Between that, snow shoveller, sidewalk sand distributor and a few other unexciting tasks, I'm grateful we don't have the need for these kinds of professions back home. That said, the last toilet lady I saw seemed to spend the entire time talking on her phone so I guess it's a job that requires minimal effort and you can just do whatever you like in the meantime.
So the train trip back to Moscow was uneventful, we were in 3rd class this time as it was during the day and I don't think any of the 2nd class we'd been in so far were even still available. 3rd class is still very similar to the sleeper cabins we were now used to, but with the difference that there are no cabins, just a whole carriage of pull down beds / couches with an additional seat / bed combo tacked on the side in the space saved by the lack of doors and walls. The seats however were not very comfortable, and after sitting on the hard leather for 5+ hours I was ready for a little bit of luxury on our trip to St. Petersburg.
Unforunately our train arrived at 8pm in Moscow and our adjoining train didn't leave until midnight and as such we had some time to kill. By this time however we were tired, irritable and really just wanting to sleep. We jumped on the Metro, struggling with our bags (which makes everything about travelling somewhere so much worse) and arrived at the station that our next train would leave from. It went by something like Leninskaya Ploshad and appropriately had a nice big bust of Lenin in the middle of a very large waiting area / cafe area. We weren't very hungry but we realised that we had to eat something for dinner or we wouldn't eat until we arrived in St. Petersburg. However the only sit down restaurant at the station ironically wouldn't let us in with our suitcases. As there was nowhere to check the bags at the station we were forced to settle for what was around, but despite hauling our bags around for 20 minutes we couldn't find anything which looked even the least bit appealling. We decided then to get some snacks from the snack machine to tide us over until we could eat a proper breakfast, nothing exciting, just some chips, waffle looking things and the like, but after inserting some money into the machine and hitting the buttons for a packet of chips we were rudely disappointed to find the chips roll off the line and get stuck right between the glass and the metal rack. Fantastic. We figured this was a good sign to give up and after getting what I'd amount to a fist full of unwanted coins back from the machine we went back upstairs to brave what could be had from a little cafe that actually had something with a table to sit. Our "meal" consisted of some unpleasantly flavoured chips and some Pepsi, the earlier of which was very hard to order without me actually knowing the Russian names for the flavours. It was enough though, and we knew it would't get us sick like half of the frankly horrible looking things in the little cafe fridges, so we suffered through before getting kicked out of the cafe waiting area when it closed and having to find somewhere else to sit. We passed the rest of the time being tired, cold and paranoid about theives as everyone in the station seemed to be making it their business to look seedy, untrustworthy and generally unpleasant. This was probably a combination of our general state of mind at the time, as well as the fact that train stations do seem to attract a pretty diverse crowd of degenerates and low lifes. Thankfully we passed the time unscathed, I even managed to get online for a few minutes to check my email in one section of the station and we boarded our train to find two Russian men (both of whom seemed to speak a little english) which we none the less had no interest in speaking to and went right to bed after getting our passports checked.
The train from Moscow to St. Petersburg was really just an upper scale version of what we got going to Volgograd. It cost a bit more, but we decided it was justifiable when we booked it and set us up at the right times where we weren't waiting too long either side of the journey. The bedding was already set up, and involved doonas instead of blankets, a somewhat edible breakfast was provided, and they even provided us with a little kit which included some crappy slippers to wear in the cabin, a shoe horn, and what is probably toothpaste and a brush. All in all not bad, nothing you can't provide yourself, though some form of convenience was certainly appreciated at the end of this very long trip. We were woken up 30 minutes shy of arriving and ate a little breakfast before packing up our things and departing at 8am in the heart of St. Petersburg.
Feeling very unclean, smelly and still a bit tired we quickly checked our luggage at the station and headed out to fill in 4 hours until we could check in to the hotel I'm now writing this from. We first wandered the streets to get ourselves some coffee and warm up a little bit, this meant just walking up and down the streets to see what we could find, and after first discovering that St. Petersburg seems to have a lot of posters advertising Metal bands, and wandering past a closed down art exhibit called "Mikki Mouse Fucks Everything" (in english), which seemed to involve Mickey Mouse with nazi symbols and a lot of blood and gore, we eventually found a KOFE HAUS (Coffee House), which I'll explain more about later.
Warmed up we decided to get some Metro tickets and find somewhere to browse out of the cold for the next few hours. Thankfully we were saved from having to go too far by a large shopping centre nearby the station, we stumbled in and actually managed to kill more than the required time going through what turned out to be a fairly upper class establishment featuring a wide array of shops selling designer clothes and very very pricey fur coats and accessories. I was thankfully also able to pick up my email again courtesy of a little Nokia shop on the ground floor and we proceeded to spend the next few hours amusing ourselves with stores names like "Lady and Gentleman City", "Men's Mania" and many others. We also solved the mystery of why everyone in Russia seems to wear so much Adidas when we found not 1, but 3 Adidas stores in the same complex.
Lunch was Russian McDonalds as we had to try it at least once just to see the difference. I tried to get myself an R2D2 happy meal toy along with our Big Mac meals but simply wasn't able to communicate the request in hand gestures and pointing without her offering me a Happy Meal, so sadly I came away empty handed. The meal was fine though and while different to what we have in Australia, all in all mostly the same. After umm'ing and ahh'ing for a while about whether I wanted to go back and get myself one of the very nice woolen coats I'd seen in the last few hours I decided to leave it until tomorrow and if I still wanted it I could always come back.
We then grabbed our bags and jumped back on the Metro line headed towards our hotel. After going up and down stairs far more times than it turned out to be neccessary we found our way to the right platforms, got out of the station and started the task of heading down a small but ridiculously icy section of road of which we are now very familiar. We failed to notice at the time the church which we now refer to as Batman Church, but there'll be more on that later I'm sure.
Of course getting to our hotel we had to struggle with the stairs of doom since the reception for this hotel is on the 3rd floor and we are on the 4th. They of course have no elevator, but whatever. We got there and checked in with a huge sigh of relief that we would not need to move our suitcases except for one more time in our entire trip. The hotel itself is nice enough, very small and they are currently doing construction on our floor to turn a section of it into some kind of lounge/bar. There is thankfully no-one partying outside our door, but they still decide to play crappy music which I can hear right now while Mon is trying to sleep. Really it's more of a backpackers than a hotel, but it's very cheap and very modern so it has everything we need... except for reliable internet. Everything worked perfectly for the first few hours, and then approaching bedtime everything dropped out. We can still get onto the network, but simply have no internet access anymore. I was planning to post all this on that night but exhausted and of the impression that it would all be fixed by morning I went to bed and found it still not working the next morning. Since then we have been very busy running about so thankfully it hasn't been a huge issue, it was on when we got back the next day, but proceeded to die again in the evening before I could post this yet again. As such we are unsure when we will be easily contactable again, but with any luck it may be tomorrow as the Hotel's ISP doesn't work on the weekends and tomorrow will be the first day they should be able to look into the issue.
So I'll cut this here because it's already long enough and St. Petersburg is beautiful and a whole different story. The travel was stressful and tiring but it's all part of the adventure and I'm sure is going to be something we remember as part of our journey as much as the wonderful things we've seen. As such I bid you all adue for now, I will be back shortly with the last 2 days!
Hope you're all well!