Well, we
left St. Petersburg and travelled towards Moscow, spending a night in a
place called Novgorod. Novgorod is damn boring, the only interesting
thing about it, is there is another placed called
Novgorod close buy, just to fu<k up any tourist plans.
We spent New
years in Moscow's Red Square. It sounds a lot greater that it really
was. Basically all the pubs closed at 9pm and there were four hundred
billion cops everywhere. I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say there
were more cops than people...
So we stood
around in the cold trying to amuse ourselves:
Until the great fireworks display over St.
Basil's Cathedral (middle bottom) and
the Kremlin (tiny part of it to the right):
I'm glad I did new years in the Red Square just to tick it off my list of things to do, but I
wouldn't recommend it, unless you stay in your hotel getting pissed
before going out.
There were other cool building in Moscow, not as cool as
St.
Petersburg, but Moscow does have the Ghostbusters building, which
happened to be quite close to where we were staying:
We did find ourselves spending a lot of time at the Hard Rock cafe which
was almost opposite where we were staying. They all spoke English, had
decent prices and great service, things that were lacking at a lot of
other places we went too. After a few weeks in Russia, you welcome those
things.
Another reason we spent a fair bit of time there was because you could
buy 2 litres of beer for £5:
As you might have guessed, we drank quite a few of those, resulting in
this amusing video of Cullen (not to be
missed!). It also resulted in us leaving the Hard Rock cafe not paying
out bill after spending all evening eating and drinking there, which meant we
were chased down the road by our waitress
demanding the 6,100 ruble's we owed. That works out to be over £100 and
roughly a weeks
salary for most Russians. Yes, we paid in the end.
Here's some famous horse statue by the Kremlin:
Here's me by St. Basil's Cathedral in the Red Square:
The inside of St. Basil's Cathedral is the exact opposite of how the
outside looks. Inside is this really dark and cramped rabbit warren. You actually only get a good view when you take a photo with
a flash:
Normally you wouldn't really see the paintings on the wall.
Here's a view towards the Red Square (which is on the other side of
building to left) and corner of Kremlin:
Inside the Kremlin is where the president chills out, along with 1,000 guards (no
shiit) to look after him. There are a bunch of churches inside and other
buildings like this:
Here's a broken 200 tonne bell. Apparently just after it
was installed there was a fire and monks pored water over the bell to
cool it down and broke the damn thing. It was never rung, but was
designed to be heard over 80Km/s away:
Bet they felt pretty stink when they broke that!
Here's a view towards the Kremlin at night:
And a KICK ASS statue we saw across the river, it was massive:
After Moscow we flew to Brussels for a couple of nights and checked it
out. The centre square of Brussels is where all the cool buildings are,
all in once place:
We basically just drank heaps of beer and ate chocolates. Belgium produces a craap load of
beers. We went to once place that had 800 different Belgium beers but
didn't quite manage to get through all of them.
Brussels also has the statue of the little dude peeing, which was quite
underwhelming:
And here is a photo of Cullen behind Richard, who is about to get struck
down by Satan:
I couldn't reproduce that photo no matter how hard I tried. I
particularly like the "face" staring at Richard (it's not been
photo-shopped in any way).
And that was out trip! Apart from all the shiit you have to go through
with Visa's and getting stamps in the cities you stay in and the fact
that there is no queuing culture in Russia, Russia was cool.
