Three Days - Three Capital Cities

Am posting this blog in a bit of a hurry.....

Here we are in mad Moscow. A huge city buzzing 24/7. Needless to say we had a bit of an initial culture shock but after a self-learning crash course in the cyrillic Alphabet we found our way around and had a great couple of days mostly travelling via Metro, which runs something like over 9000 trains a day - an awesome system.

Moscow was/is hot - our hotel room had a consistent 34Degrees and today we had 38! in some places.

There was a motor racing event in the city centre when we arrived.

We planed and stocked up on all things necessary for te next phase of our trip. Here is Sara, writing one of her lists.

We visited the obligatory Red Square and Kremlin. Amazing, everything is so big, full of Architecture - we were tired just from taking it all in...wow!

However Moscow is not that cycle friendly as Scandinavia, so we had adventurous times navigating around the city.

We left Helsinki a three days ago - the city is trendy and glam with a nice hostel, huge department stores and all you can eat Pizza. We spend a few relaxing hours and a morning stocking up on esential items such as water containers for Mongolia

Then we hopped on the 10-storey Viking Line ferry to Talinn. A nice ride in beautiful sunshine, although a booze-cruise for most locals, who nip over to Estonia to buy cheap Alcohol.

We only had a few hours in beautiful, tranquil, romantic Talinn. We enjoyed wondering around the old towncentre . We explored the maze of cobbled backsreets and ended up on staircases a few times.

We boarded the train to Moscow in the early evening and found there was no luggage compartment. So we made do with the space next to our bunks.

Very Cosy. The 15hours ride was a good prep for our 4day train trip. We had some nice Russian Cabin - mates and the border crossing went smooth although something to get used too, with plenty of inspections and sniffer dogs etc.

So now we are about to board Trans-Mongolian!!!