Will, Ben and Nevil

Although I’d (Ben) heard about Couchsurfing before neither of us had ever used it. Jose (an Aussie we picked up and stayed with us for a while in the van in Bosnia) was using it while trying to travel as cheaply as possible back to Australia from the UK, so we thought we’d look into it. We eventually got around to using it in Moscow and, as mentioned in our last post, after less than 5 minutes of talking to her at a couchsurfing party were invited by Sasha to stay with her! For a first experience it couldn’t have been better. Although she only lives in a very small apartment with one small room, a kitchen and a bathroom she still finds space on her floor to people from couchsurfing.

Housing (and living in general) in Moscow is possibly even more expensive than in London. Fortunately the vast majority of people own their apartments as a result of the fact that in Soviet-times housing was provided for everyone by the state, but food prices can get ridiculous at times. In one supermarket full of standard western food I found a small packet of ‘Kellogg’s Special K’ for EIGHT POUNDS!! I guess the large number of shiny expensive black cars on the roads is some indication that maybe this isn’t so expensive to quite a few people who live in Moscow.

Moscow is a crazy place, even more so for us having driven through eastern Europe where everything is cheap and tourism is welcomed. At times it was almost as if foreigners aren’t wanted there. Official prices for all sorts of things can be ten times more for a foreigner (or non-Russian speaker) than for others. To get into the Kremlin it was 2 pounds for Russians or 13 pounds for “foreigners”. This is standard across most museums and anything else you have to spend money on in Moscow. Fair enough if they need the money, but Moscow did not seem a particularly poor place.

Other things that we found only in Moscow

• every government official (there are a lot of them) appear to have one of those expensive-always-black cars but they get to have a blue light on their roof which seemingly gives them the right to drive anywhere at any speed irrespective of other cars or pedestrians!
• novel tactics for extracting money from tourists such as old women asking for you to have your photo taken with her and her monkey who’s dressed/buried in a bright pink coat
• the army/militia are everywhere
• a refusal by some to even acknowledge you if you don’t speak Russian (even the French don’t go this far!)…

During our last couple of days we spent in the most amazing museum – the Polytechnical museum: scale models of everything from Soviet nuclear power stations to Soviet spacecraft to Soviet coal mines! Surely everyones favourite museum. We were also treated to a comprehensive four-hour walking tour of Moscow by Sasha’s friend Olga including a visit to the ’skylounge’ restaurant/bar for a drink and the impressive view it has of the city from the 13th floor. The view was nice (despite the low cloud!) but an espresso cost 4 pounds! Obviously we didn’t stay there long.

Moscow was great, the couchsurfing made it much more interesting for us as we met some ‘real’ people. Despite the fact that a visa costs 100 pounds I’ll definitely make it back one day. Next time though I’ll have to learn some Russian!

 Will wrote this a week ago when we were in Moscow but couldn’t post it up so it’s a bit behind where we are now (Poland!)…

 I am slowly beginning to appreciate the inventive phonetic translations of many english and french words into cyrillic. My (Will’s)  name for example becomes beautifully foreign as it contains three sounds which just don’t exist in Russian; W, F and Th. Its ok though as they have exciting letters that more than make up for it, “the spider with two legs missing” (Ж) is my favourite .

We’re staying in HomefromHome hostel in a very central location in Moscow at the moment. Москва is excellent and everything is BIG. The buildings of the Red Square were impressive against the drab, nondescript grey sky, and almost alien when they were lit against the black night.  Mr. Putin was not in but Mr. Lenin was, much against his will it seems as he was locked away behind glass with some of the highest security I have ever encounted.

Last night we went to a house party with some Moscow “couch surfers” and met lots of people living, travelling through, studying and working in the city. I met Thomas from Toulouse, Tanya from Krasnojarsk in Siberia and Iakov from Georgia to mention a few. We have a couch to surf for tonight and the rest of the week with a very nice girl called Sasha.