Day Eight - Jun 3, 2013
St. Petersburg, Russia to Moscow, Russia
Daily Didactic
It was a good day, that had the opportunity to have been a pretty disappointing one. We rose at 4:30, packed, and walked the 45 minutes to the St. Petersburg Moskovsky station for our 7:00am train to Moscow. It was a lovely walk through quiet streets and we found the station without incident. We were able to recognize the letters of the cyrillic enough to find our train and platform. As we boarded the train, the attendant took our paperwork and passports and was puzzled by our tickets having different passport numbers on them than our freshly renewed passports. He let us on the train anyway and it eventually dawned on us that it was because we had purchased the tickets before realizing we had to renew our passports before we left. Shortly after that it occurred to us that the same would be true for our big tickets that we were to pick up in Moscow today. The train ride was about four hours through mostly rural countryside and dropped us at the The Moscow Leningradsky station. We found our fancy Hilton Hotel across the street (an expenditure Brian rationalized during the complications of booking the trip) and dropped our bags off until we could check in. The concierge mapped out the metro stops for us to find Real Russia Travel, our booking agents for the trains on this trip. Working our way on character recognition, we pretty flawlessly found the residential neighborhood and small office to pick up our Trans-Mongolian tickets. We explained to Alina what had happened in St. Petersburg and everybody's Russian level of concern seemed to rise. Long story short, the tickets that you have to buy two months in advance (and get on a list for months before that) were going to have to be canceled and rebooked a day before departure with no guarantees it would work out. We would know later in the day. We metro'd back to the hotel, found some Russian style Chinese food for lunch, and made the most of our ridiculously opulent room on the 14th floor of a Russian landmark (one of the Seven Sisters, worth googling). At 8:30 the email came that Real Russia had made it work and all was good. Good for us.
Today's Photos
