Moscow, Russia

Tuesday to Friday, 26 - 29 September 2006

After a sleeply 8 hour train journey from St. Petersburg, we are met at Moscow's Leningradsky station by Svetlana, a family friend of the Cummins', who has kindly offered to put us up for the few days we are staying in Moscow. It's great to see a familiar face! Svetlana tells us that all official taxi drivers in Moscow are "robbers" but as nearly every car in Russia is a taxi, she quickly flags down a driver in front of the train station and negotiates a good rate to get us to her apartment. Svetlana gives us a great tour and history lesson en route and we feel we know more about Russia from this than the guidebooks we have been lugging about! The apartment is centrally located, with a view of the Russian White House and within walking distance/a few metro stops of Red Square and the Kremlin. We walk the nearby Arbat area and Svetlana takes us for dinner at a Georgian restaurant.

Over the next few days we visit Red Square, the Kremlin and see St. Basil's Cathedral (the one that is in every postcard from Moscow and looks like the experimental-icecream-cone wing of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory). We also see some spectacular goose-stepping by soldiers at the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Apparently, these soldiers used to guard Lenin's tomb (where he is eerily well-preserved) but were shifted to the tomb of WWII soldier after communism fell out of fashion in the early '90s. On Wednesay, we put on our least scruffy clothes to go to see a ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre. We have nose-bleed seats but, once you get over the sight of men in spandex tip-toeing at high speed across the stage, the ballet is entertaining. The evening probably marks the cultural high point of the trip and we round it off with a meal at a gem of a local restaurant, McDonalds. On Thursday, we visit Sergiev Posad, the centre of the Russian orthodox church which is just outside Moscow - worth visiting alone to see the holy men with their monumental beards.

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St. Petersburg, Russia

Wednesday to Monday, 20 - 25 September 2006

We arrive in St. Petersburg early on Wednesday and kill a few hours in the Baltiisky train station trying to master cyrillic by converting kiosk signs into the English alphabet. (A big thanks to a Greek bishop called Cyril who had a hand in this migraine-inducing alphabet - it's not so much the new symbols that are difficult; it's the old reliables - pronounce "H" like an "N" and "P" like an "R" - that are the real difficulty!)

Russia has given us the biggest culture shock of the trip so far. A few examples: St. P. has nearly 5 million inhabitants and, in some sort of impromptu attempt at getting into the Guinness Book of Records, the whole city crammed into our carriage the first time we take the metro. Shaken but otherwise okay, we finally make it to our apartment, which is well located, a 10-minute walk from Nevskiy prospekt, the main tourist strip. Then we try to master the subtle art of buying bread in one of the produkty cornershops. The system is as follows: point at the bread you want, get a piece of paper from the shop attendant responsible, take this piece of paper to the cashier and pay for the bread, take the new piece of paper you receive from the cashier to the attendant and exchange for the loaf of bread, which at this stage has gone stale. Kafka is turning in his grave that he didn't think this one up!

We are slowly adjusting to the strangeness of the place and St. Petersburg, although fairly run-down in spots, has plenty to show-off. Two of the high points have been the Hermitage Museum and Peterhof. The Hermitage, located in the Tsars' Winter Palace, has a breathtaking art collection, including works from Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse and other big names we might have recognised if we knew anything about art! Peterhof palace and gardens are 30 km outside of St. P and are Tsar Peter the Great's spectacular effort at creating a "Versailles-by-the-sea" - we make the trip out there by hydrofoil, which was a good way of seeing the more remote parts of St. P.

On Sunday we watched the last bit of the Ryder Cup in the Shamrock pub. All of St. P's 8-strong Irish ex-pat community was there. Enda, a Clareman, who has
been working with Aer Rianta in St. P. airport for the last 5 years and is now returning to Ireland, gave us a good take on life as an Irishman in Russia. Martin, the owner of the pub, a Corkman, entertained us with yarns about celebrities who had passed through. These included Bertie Ahern, who ducked out of the nearby Mariinksy Theatre for a pint after 40 minutes of a 3 hour ballet saying that the performance was "a bit long". We were also introduced to Russian opera star Mikhail Petrenko. Despite not having a clue about opera, we cornered him for a photo - you never know, it might be worth something on eBay a few years from now.

A group of Russians also invited us to drink with them. Despite the language difficulties they were very friendly and big fans of Guinness, Jameson and Dublin (mentioned over 300 times in the space of 30 minutes). One of them, Sergei, a 22 year-old oligarch with a fleet of planes to his name, wanted to show us the city in his Mercedes with the rest of the lads. Having been assured that this was not a kidnapping but normal Russian hospitality, we hopped in for a high-octane night-tour of the city involving five Russians pointing at various buildings, shouting in a mixture of English and Russian and occasionally mentioning Guinness, Jameson and Dublin. All of this was to the ear-drum bashing backing of Depeche Mode's Greatest Hits. A calm descended as we were shown the nightly bridge-raising - between 2 am and 5 am the bridges along the River Neva are raised to let cargo ships through the port. This can mean that people are stranded in the wrong half of the city until breakfast time and is a favourite excuse for teenagers out past their bed-time and philandering husbands. For their great generosity, we have to plug the lads' band, HAT3K: "we play loud, like Blink 182". Check out www.hat3k.narod.ru at your own risk.

Our next stop is Moscow.

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Tallinn, Estonia

Friday to Tuesday, 15 - 19 September 2006

On Friday we flew from Warsaw to Helsinki and then took a catamaran to Tallinn. This sounds like a poor imitation of John Candy/Steve Martin film "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" but, as the alternative was a 30-hour bus journey, we thought the extra bit of cash was well spent.

Tallinn is nice and had enough cobbled-stoned streets, pretty churches, buildings and parks to keep us occupied for about two days but we had decided to stay a bit longer to get a few things done (e.g. try to write-up this blog and take on the humming laundry bags) before the big push to Russia.

The city caters for stag nights in a big way and, at night, the town square is taken over by droves of beer-swilling foreigners dressed up in cartoon-character outfits. We met one local odd-ball in a bar - "The Pub With No Name" - who claimed to be Estonian mafia. This was credible enough as he was accompanied by two silent types with leather jackets and no necks. As the mafiosa began to forcefully slap his own forehead (as if struck by a lightening bolt) and say to Leahanne 'you are beauoootifulll!' we decided to make a quick exit!

Batteries re-charged, we took an overnight bus on Tuesday to St. Petersburg.

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Warsaw, Poland

Wednesday and Thursday, 13 and 14 September 2006

Lured by the website of the "Garden Villa" hostel in Warsaw (judge for yourself at http://www.hostelworld.com/availability.php/GardenVilla-Warsaw-17526 ), which boasts having its own swimming pool, we are looking forward to a few days of shoe-string luxury. We arrive to find that the hostel shares a "garden" with a psychiatric hospital - we are noticing a trend here (see Gdansk). Also the "villa" is being completely gutted with only the top floor half-way habitable. It is difficult to say whether the dishevelled people we meet in the corridors are (a) staff, (b) patients or (c) plumbers and we keep expecting to bump into Basil Fawlty with Manuel in a headlock. Warsaw is not the prettiest of cities with alot of Stalinesque architecture remaining but the Old Town and Royal Way, levelled during WWII, have been completely re-built and are worth seeing. We also visit the Jewish Cemetary which certainly has an impact. To get a break from the unique Garden Villa experience, we see "United 93" in the cinema - perhaps not the best movie to watch as we are taking a plane the next morning!

Gdansk, Poland

Monday and Tuesday, 11 and 12 September 2006

Gdansk sees the first tentatative step of the trip into the world of youth hostels. We take the Lonely Planet's advice and try a place that looks like a high-security prison/pyschiatric hospital (lots of reinforced doors, jail bars, man at reception desk wielding truncheon etc.). Much to our disappointment, it is booked-up. The next place we try is down by the waterfront which, apart from the (watch out for the pun) Baltic showers, is decent. We are near the "Royal Way" - this is the ornate main street of Gdansk which received any visiting Polish kings. Also nearby is the "Gdansk crane", a wooden crane originally built in the 15th century, which was the largest of its kind in Europe at the time - fascinating stuff for anyone who has an interest in crane-history! We visit the Gdansk Shipyards to see the museum commemorating the "Solidarity" strikes of 1980 and take a boat trip out to Westerplatte where WWII broke out in 1939. This is starting to sound like an essay on a school tour...

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Poznan, Poland

Saturday and Sunday, 9 & 10 September 2006

We stayed for the weekend with friends, Andreas and Roza. A & R's apartment is being renovated (we are told that it is difficult to get good builders in Poland at the moment as they have all moved to Ireland!) so we stay at Roza's mother's place, where we meet the dachshund double-act that is Truffaldino and Balbinka. T, despite being in his 12th dog-year, has the libido of the viagra test-rabbit. We are treated to numerous public shows of his doggy affection for B, who seems unmoved by it all. We are keeping things clean so none of the photos can be shown here.

A & R gave us a great sight-seeing tour of the city. Dara had visited Poznan as a student but, due to old age and/or Polish vodka, can't remember much. We visit numerous churches, each hosting a wedding ceremony - according to Roza, in Poland there is a wedding every hour, on the hour, on Saturdays!

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Dresden, Germany

Friday, 8 August 2006

Dresden deserves its title of "Florence of the North". The newly-rebuilt Frauenkirche (levelled by the Allied bombing at the end of WWII) is very pretty; although, with the amount of pink paint and gold trimmings in the interior, it looks and smells like a show-church for an exciting new first-time buyers' development within an easy 4 hour commute of Dublin! We have an early leader in the Least Helpful Stranger of the Trip: wanting to get a rosemantic photo of the two of us in front of some Baroque palace, we asked a local gent whether he would be so nice as to photograph us - "I simply cannot do that" he fumed and marched away, leaving us in the dark as to why he couldn't. Answers on a postcard please...

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Heidelberg, Germany

Wednesday and Thursday, 6 & 7 September 2006

The next two days are spent in Heidelberg with Eoghan. As ever, Eoghan is the consummate host (although he doesn't go in for the "Ferrero Rochet pyramid on a silver tray" shim-shammery and instead lays on a barbeque by the Neckar river with his pals from EMBL). Eoghan helps us technophobes set up this blog. We have dinner the next night in a restaurant which does good stodgy Alsace food - we take in plenty of meat and veg before the expected Mars bars and Pot Noodle starvation diet in Russia/China.

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Rome, Italy

Monday and Tuesday, 4 & 5 September 2006

On Monday, we made a whistestop tour of the city. The morning was spent at the Colosseum (left in ruins since that "Gladiator" movie; Russell Crowe has alot to answer for), the Forum, the Irish Embassy (to pay a minute's silence to Eoin Small, former first citizen of Rome), Circus Maximus, Piazza Navona, the Pantheon and finished up at the Spanish steps where we met Shane, who was also spending a few days in Rome.

The next day started early to beat the queues for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The museum leading up to the Chapel has an array of sculptures from antiquity and a couple of thousand "Virgin and Child" paintings but we hurried past these so that we could get to the Sistine Chapel before it became convulsed in a tour-group feeding frenzy. Even by then, the Chapel was packed and it was difficult to get a good vantage point. The low murmour of the crowd there would rise to chatter, to be cut short by a shouted "silenzio" from the Chapel guards. Not the best conditions to savour the art but it was good to see Michelangelo's deft crayon-work.

We took the overnight train from Rome to Munich that night and shared our compartment with four chatty South Koreans with no English, which made for some interesting exchanges. Dara congratulated them on a well-organised World Cup 2002 and they responded by directing him to the toilet down the carriage (didn't think Ireland had played that badly!). The journey itself was pretty uncomfortable but probably a good foretaste of the Trans-Siberian leg of the trip.

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Nettuno, Italy

Saturday and Sunday, 2 & 3 September 2006

The first stop on our trip was Nettuno, a seaside town about 30 miles south of Rome. The occasion was Ian and Silvia´s wedding. The biggest migration of Paddies since Italia ´90 - a 70-strong Irish contingent - came to witness the Irish-Italian nuptials! The ceremony was in the town hall in Anzio (the neighbouring town to Nettuno) and was followed by a marathon (7 course) dinner at the nearby Villa Delfino. It was a memorable day: fantastic weather, delicious food, speeches from Ian and bilingual funnyman Cian Carroll (Groomsman) and a virtuoso performance on the keyboard by Niall Colgan (Bestman). Text messages later in the night told us of the 1-0 defeat against Germany in the Euro 2008 qualifier from a deflected Lukas Podolski free-kick - a small blot on an otherwise perfect day!

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