We wanted to get going reasonably early (for us) on Wednesday morning – it was our last morning in Moscow and we wanted to go to see Lenin. The mausoleum closed at 1pm and before then, we had to walk through Red Square and around the Kremlin to the cloakroom near Kutafia Tower, then back again into Red Square to the queue for the mausoleum, preferably joining the queue around noon. Achieving this AND sourcing a breakfast location would be an impossibility for me and SleepyLeach so we elected to breakfast in bed.
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Since we didn’t have any breakfast plans, we didn’t rush out of bed at 8am on Tuesday morning. We leisurely woke up about 10am and took an hour or so to get out of the hotel.

Our plan for the day was visiting Red Square, GUM and the Kremlin. We walked over the bridge into Red Square, stopping to take photos of one of the “seven sisters” on the way (I’m not sure which one – the one to the east when you’re standing on the bridge in the middle of the Moskva river – possibly Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya).
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To connect with the flight to Moscow, we had to get the 0605 flight from Leeds Bradford to Amsterdam. Ugh. I am so grateful we only live ten minutes from the airport. There wasn’t much of a queue at check-in (unlike at the adjacent Jet2 counter) and we got through the security-pantomime checks pretty quickly. We had a bit of breakfast in the cafe, marvelling at the buckets of coffee and many pints of beer that were being consumed by our fellow passengers. At 5am. Ahem.

The flight to Amsterdam went smoothly and we arrived on time. Much to our amazement, we arrived at the gate next to the one we were departing from and said gate didn’t change repeatedly while we were waiting. I almost missed our usual 10km hike across Schipol.
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I’ve wanted to go to Russia for as long as I can remember – and my reading over the last couple of years (particularly about the Siege of Leningrad and the Gulags) has only increased that desire. Last year, when we were planning the holiday that became Budapest, I contemplated Moscow instead (I didn’t know then that the visa requirement would have made such a last-minute trip almost impossible) but John, who was looking for an excuse to get a better camera, said we should wait until we could do the trip photographic justice. So a year on, equipped with the fruits of John’s current consumer obsession, we went on a two city break: Moscow and St Petersburg, with a night on the sleeper train inbetween.

• Monday 29th August
• Tuesday 30th August
• Wednesday 31st August
• Thursday 1st September
• Friday 2nd September
• Saturday 3rd September
• Final thoughts on the holiday (coming soon)

(Full photo gallery to follow)

– written up at the start of September, 2005

John and I are (all being well) off to Russia at the end of this month. We’re staying in Moscow for two nights then taking a sleeper train to St Petersburg, then staying there for another two nights before flying home.

I’m a bit of a nervous bunny when organising such things – mostly because if I get something wrong in the planning/booking stage, it’s a waste of quite a bit of money. Consequently, it took me a while (think, months) to actually book the flights and the hotels. We got that sorted a few weeks ago though so then my attention turned to getting the visas.
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For almost a year now, I’ve been playing an online game based on the Foundation series by Issac Asimov. It is, strangely enough, called FoundationGame (or FondationJeu in its original French) and can be found here (and here for the French version).

I started playing because John introduced me to it. He had read the series and was enjoying the game, so got me to sign up too. I was reticent at first: the rules/instructions seemed really vague, with no guidance for newbies. I also felt I would suffer because I hadn’t read the books. But my obsessive gaming streak won through in the end so here I am, a year later, and it’s the first site I visit each time I get on the web. I have a higher threshold for annoying bits of games and bad interfaces than John – he gave it up after a couple of weeks.

This game has become a big part of my online life now so last week I decided to take the plunge and start reading the books. I’ve only read the first one so far – I’m just having a minor Iain Banks break (re-reading Espedair Street and Whit) then will crack on with the others.

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