This Country is INSANE!!!!!!

Hello form the insanity that is Russia! I'm loving it, but I am definatley ready to move on, this place is nuts, but not in a totally bad way...all the time. So last update I had just arrived in Irkusk, Siberia from Mongolia. Well Irkusk was nice, a surprise since it was quite a large and "fashionable" (lepoard print and leather, fur and all, full out ensembles). We went to Lake Baikal for a day, it was nice, just another lake though if you want my real opinion. Then we spent a couple more days on the train to a city called Novosibirsk, where we were in an apartment so basically my Dad cooked and then we at and then we went to the market for more food and then he cooked and we ate, it was nice to have home cooking. Things started to get interesting after Novosibirsk, I had my first BAD DAY, and I was really grumpy, my poor father. S0 it all started with the fact that it was really nice in Novosibirsk the day that we left for Yekaterineburg. I was in my sandals, capris and a tank top. I had a windbreaker out in case it got cold. WEll we happened to get in the only compartment with a broken window, maning that it would not shut properly...okay so no problem, until I go to "sleep" in my sleeping bag, and 3 wool blankets on the bunk where the windchill facter is the worst in the car at something like -75 degrees C. The car literally felt like we were in a fridge and then it was windy (because it happend to SNOW during the night). I have never been so cold in my life, NEVER. So I was cold, tired and miserable when we arrived in Yekaterineburg. To top it off our pick up never arrived and it was cold enough to snow, which it dad later in the day, and I was still dressed in sandals and capris. So we took a taxi, but since Russia does not lable thier building or do anyhting helpful that might make life a bit easier (and the taxi drivers don't seem to know how to get anywhere), the taxi drive just let us out on a random corner. It turned out that our hotel, called the Academy of Geology hotel, was part of a large apartment block and there was not even an address on the building, let alone a sign or antyhting. It was in a spot that, when my Dad and I were wandering around looking for the hotel, I was like, I need to go pee really bad, so my Dad had said, just go over there, behind that bush, and I was like, I can't pee infront of someone's apartment...well it turned out that apartment happend to be our hotel. So anyways after looking for the hotel for too long we went into this Russian travel agent and luckly there was this super friendly lady who spoke English. She let us use the phone to call the travel company and they thought we were coming on a different train. They arranged to meet us at the travel agent and take us to the hotel. The travel agent was so nice, she let em sit inside and made me tea and cookies and let me use her bathroom, it made me feel less grumpy. But then there was no one to let us in our hotel and we had to leave out bags with the security at a geology museum and hang out in the snow until there might be someone there. Craziness, I got a good sleep that night though and Yekaterinburg was a really nice city. It's the place where Boris Yeltsin (I shook his hand so Yekaterineburg adn I go way back :-P) was born. It's also where the Romanov's were killed. We checked out all the main sights, along with a really cool/artsy/oddish museum called the museum of the youth and a photography museum. Then I finally entered Europe after 5 months in Asia crossing the Urals on a train where the window actually closed. We arrived in Moscow to find out that the hotles in the last two cities were meant to have stamped out passports, but they had not so our hotel would not check us in. WE were given directions to report to the nearest police station, which was just our the back door and then it was obvious (hmmm...the Russian translation for obvious must be very different than the English word, since it was actually out the back door to the right, past a bank, across two streets, through a parking lot and then it was justa random door that we would have missed had a police man not come out for a smoke break at that moment). So there we went and ended up paying a $200 USD fine, signing our name about 15 times under a bunch of cyrillic that we could not read, adn getting the correct stamp. PHIEWPH!!!!! But now that we have been in Moscow for a couple of days, I'm really enjoying it. It's a beautiful city, although everyhting is made 10 times more difficult than it needs to be and we tend to walk in circle trying to find things. We'll I'll make a seperate post for Moscow once I've left and I can do it properly. Photos to follow later, I can't seem to upload photos to my blog anywhere in this country, not too sure why, but I've learnt not to ask!

Update: Now there are photos, hopefully that did not need to be pointed out though ;-p They are of (from top to bottom): Lake Baikal, Dad on the train, Lake Baikal, The Romanov's death place, out hotl in Yekaterineburg (yep, the grafitti one), near Lake Baikal, and a sunset from the train.