Our morning flight from London on BA arrived mid afternoon and we moved our watches forward two hours. The weather is much the same as we left in England, around 20 degrees and overcast with the threat of rain. We took a bus to the nearest metro station and during the drive, we thought at first glance how familiar things looked – dual carriageway, traffic, grey sky, green grass, trees, BP garage with a Wild Bean Cafe … but there are also signs in Cyrillic and the cars drive on the other side! The Metro was easily navigated, with most signs also in English and a short walk brought us to our B&B.
We couldn’t make the bell work, but fortunately someone let us in through the outside door and we walked up a rather shabby staircase in the middle of the building up to the third floor. Inn Aldebaron is an apartment with several rooms and a friendly receptionist who used google translate to communicate! She made us coffee and showed us our simple but perfectly comfortable room.
Next job was to register our visa, a procedure over which there is a huge amount of conflicting advise online. The consensus seemed to be that while it isn’t strictly necessary if you do not intend staying more than 7 working days in any one town, which we are not, it was nonetheless advisable. The visa process isn’t difficult, just time-consuming to state every country visited in the last 10 years (that’ll be 45 entries then), provide an invitation letter with details of your itinerary in Russia and go to London to get fingerprints scanned – and at £150 each, more than the flight to get here! We took the bus to the agency office and we were told it really wasn’t necessary but that we should keep all our travel tickets to prove our itinerary if asked, so we’ve taken their advice and hope all will be well. A quick stop at a phone shop for local sims and some roubles from the bank and we were all set.
We went for dinner at Gosti, a Russian bakery and restaurant with cosy rooms filled with comfy chairs, kitchen and trinkets. We were a little uncertain what the food might be like, but we certainly made an excellent start here. We began with a mixed platter where the pickled cucumber bruschetta was the star, then a I had confit of duck with cranberries and Chris had a Russian style mushroom cannelloni served on creamed spinach, washed down with a carafe of Russian red wine which was young, but very drinkable. We might just have to make a return visit here!
Certainly our concerns about language difficulties have proved unfounded as all three people we asked for directions spoke English, and we were presented an English menu for dinner. We’ve learnt two words – hello which sounds like preeviet and thank-you which is spaseeba so hopefully all will go well tomorrow!
Off Travelling Together 