So we have now arrived at the crazy city of Moscow and our journey here has been one of beautiful sights, COLD, gluhwein, COLD, churches, COLD, cool European history, COLD, trains and more COLD! Yes we have progressively got colder as our journey has passed (although managed to just miss out on the worst weather in each country!) and are now almost acclimatised to sub zero temperatures in preparation for our journey on the trans-Siberian next Tuesday. From 7 to -30 in 7 days….
Apart from the cold it has been a lovely relaxing opening to our trip. Our time in Paris took us to all the gorgeous main attractions (Eiffel tower, sacre cour, champs Elysees, arc de triomphe, notre dame) and had David believing he was really French and just imprisoned in an English body. “Their arrogance, their self assertiveness, amazing.”
From Paris we boarded a nice Thalys train to Cologne via Brussels (hooray - an extra country there for
our tick list!). We had limited time of 4 hours in Cologne but set off without map and any prior knowledge of the city apart from it had a big cathedral and 7 xmas markets – out task was to find as many of these as possible – we managed 2 trips to the Dom and a xmas market crawl of 3 markets getting merry from gluweins and giving David his big meat fix with a foot long pork skewer….yum. Our outing to Cologne cost us nowt as well due to the nice lady at the market giving us change for a 50 euro note instead of a 20 – nice work for two hungry penny pinching backpackers! It also made David debate on whether he could introduce the term “long-changed”, for the opposite of short-changed. I mean what is the term for that! But i dont think Laura really cared….
From C
ologne we travelled cross country by ICE (300kmph!) to Berlin. The city has some fantastic history. (The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin Wall, Reichstag, Alexander Platz). Our favourites were the Brandenburg Gate as you remember the iconic and disturbing famous images of Hitler and the Nazis parading through it and also the holocaust memorial which was made up of 2,711 stones.
Our time in Berlin ended this morning with a flight…. yes a flight to Moscow. Unfortunately we cocked up our visa for Belarus and our tight timescales meant no opportunity for going via any other route so disappointingly we had to do the Berlin to Moscow section by air. This means I have to go back and do this bit by train another time…. anyone care to join me? (This is Laura speaking not David!)
We arrived in Moscow this afternoon and it is…………. surreal – never have we been somewhere with quite so many people wearing fur coats or with magnificent chandeliers in the underground stations. Its got a great vibe though and cant wait to see it over our next few days here.
L & D xx
After a hectic few weeks and a weekend of farewells and partying, we were finally ready to start our adventure around the world