St Petersurg! (Andrew)

Note: this keyoard is roken. ear with us and take are reading, I ant e othered to opy and paste them all.

Cameron and I took the loal train (as opposed to the faster direct trains we were on efore) from Moscow to St Petersburg. In Russia trains get a numer and the lowest numbers are the est trains. Irkutsk to Moscow we were on 4. This one was 260 AND it made all the stops... so it took 8.5 hours, smelled like cheese the whole way and a Russian kid insisted on jumping on my bed and banging on the wall of the train while I was trying to sleep for a solid portion of the journey.

Moscow is a very intimidating city. The buildings are imposing brick Soviet era strutures and the streets are crowded and full of different kinds of military personel. The tourist attractions have multiple security check points (in the spirit of the quantity of over quality security chekpoint approach we first saw in Beijing), everything is shokingly expensive and there is little english for us gwylos.

St Petersburg, y contrast, has the feel of a friendly European ity. The broad boulevards are wide and tree lined, there is stunning Victorian architecture and anals rissross the ity full of sightseeing boats (reread that if needed, my apologies to our more sensitive readers). The Hermitage was free (eause we're students) and I haven't yet seen even a polieman.

other stuff:

From the small sign at st Basils I learned that St Basil was a 'nude walker ' and a 'fool for god '. Cameron suggested these might be technical terms, ut when pressed on what 'nude walker' might be technial for he was unertain. Feel free to rainstorm in the comments.

We've been drinking a yoghurt drink called 'for men '. It has 2x a bunh of good stuff we ant read ecause apart from the title everything is in cyrillic. One of these good things, we discovered the other day, is chicken . so apparently we've been drinking a lot of innamon apple chicken flavour yoghurt drink. This is potentially related to some anomolous ristol scale readings we've een getting. We'll keep you posted.

It took the combined efforts of 4 sandwich people and probably about 15 minutes to order at suway. Word to the wise, dont even try to mime 'whole grain', you just look ridiculous.

dressing for the weather when you only ring tshirts

1 t-shirt= 1 t-shirt (what are you? an idiot?)

2 t-shirts = sweatshirt

3 t-shirts = rain gear

4 t-shirts =snow gear/way to look uff for the ladies (provided you're wearing 4 nice shirts (4 collars is too many though. At very least alternate popped and not popped)

5 t-shirts = personal floatation device

6= t-shirts = spacesuit? deep sea diving gear? low udget hazmat suit?

7= t-shirts = impossile