Huge Buildings, Smiling Girls and Weird Cars

The Buildings.
Huge, monumental and impressive. I don’t know much about Russian History, but I’m sure Stalin tried to make some kind of proportional relation between his the size of Moscow’s buildings and his own Ego! Unfortunately, there are no photos capable of showing the grandness of these buildings. I felt I was in a Flash Gordon movie…

The Girls.
Ooof… The girls. What can I say about them without hurting girls from other nationalities feelings? I won’t say a thing. Go there and see for your selves.

The cars.
Volgas, Ladas & CO.

Finally...

...we got there!

It’s hard to describe the feeling of arriving to a city like Moscow. For us even harder… We were tired, carrying huge backpacks and the weather was rainy and chilly. Still, I was immediately amazed by the city, huge, monumental and so different from all the cities we knew…

After walking for 30 minutes we finally arrived to the hostel. Well, I think we can hardly call it hostel.

The right definition is: “Place where people pay for sleeping in a dump with beds”. If any of the readers plan on going to Moscow, please avoid a place called Travellers Guest House. Hard to describe, but I’ll do my best: Bumpy beds; spotted linen; towels similar to baby diapers; the worst bathroom I’ve ever seen (smelly, small and almost cold water); a dirty TV room, a 1rst world war elevator and not very nice looking French people. Oh, and it had a kitchen but I never got the courage to get inside. Besides that… it was perfect (!?). I’m trying to find something nice about this place… but I really can’t. Anyway, we found a way to overcome it. On the first 3 nights we slept there only 1, but that’s another story…

Obrigado Andrea! (26/7)

Moscow is far away and prices are too high for "just starting their professional lives" type of Portuguese. So we found a not too expensive way to get there: first to Zurich and then to Moscow with Swissair. Only problem was: we had to spend the night in Zurich... Well, no problem at all! I have a friend in Zurich and she was kind enough to have us in her flat.

I met Andrea last year, in Barcelona. She's not the typical Swiss girl, she seems latin and (sometimes) she thinks latin. Her hospitality was just perfect and we are thankful.

After some beers in the Red Light District (almost as busy as the Dutch one) and some table soccer, the night was over and we slept until Pedro's annoying alarm clock started what was ment to be a veeeery long day...

Guys... I lost my passport... (26/7)

On a trip like this unexpected problems are usual or, at least, they tend to happen. Some of us (ok, just one of the 3) are well known for their huge attraction to bad luck events like forgetting plane tickets before the plane trip, leaving eye glasses on top of cars, wallets and mobile phones outside summer festival tents and so on and so on. These were only some reasons for us to be worried, before and during the trip.

Vain worries, I have to say, things turned out almost perfect! The only stress we had happened on the first 15 minutes of the trip and it was quickly solved: Just before boarding, the playmaker realised he had lost his passport… We tried to act cool about it, even if we weren’t… We thought about going back the same way and it turned out to be a nice plan. On the first stop, a security guard knew why were we worried, we saw the passport on the ground and he sent it to lost and founds. What a relief…

That same guard even gave us some precious piece of advice: “Cuidado com as moças russas” which roughly means “Beware of the Russian girls” :)

WoW!

It was over before I could find some time to write about it… It was all so busy, so fast!

I guess this time I’ll do it in a different way: I’ll post some pictures and then comment it. It won’t be “right on the action” but at least i'll write some kind of fresh memories that, I hope, will last forever.
The return to reality hurts, as usual…