Despite a fairly comfortable ride and hassle free border crossing, I didn't get enough sleep and so my core is drained but, like downing an octuple espresso, I'm charged by my situation, my first solo steps of adventure in the first truly unknown country on my journey East!
You know you've arrived in Russia when your station is called Leningradsky!
But that's a good name if the central feature of the station is this fine bust:
Now I really feel like I've arrived somewhere foreign. The cyrillic characters are close enough in form to latin ones as to make my eye scan them but my brain can't comprehend what my eyes are delivering – I'm a linguistic infant again.
I'm tired from the train journey and I only have a rough idea of where I am in Moscow, the largest city in Europe. My limited information, lack of language and physical state convince me that getting a taxi to my hostel would be a good idea.
I'm not sure exactly why, maybe the space and building styles in front of the station or maybe the language thing still, but I really felt alien and a bit disoriented walking out of the main entrance. Taxi drivers spy me a mile off (no, not literally a mile) and scurry to scam me. I, the sceptic, don't pay them too much attention and begin to walk away from them and the station down the road, but not too fast. It has the desired effect of thinning out the crowd and I'm left with one taxi driver who has passable English. I'm kidding myself that I can make it on foot, which helps me be more convincing in my negotiations on price. In the end I think I do ok, paying a bit more than I might expect to in London.
A pricey hotel not so far from the station.
The eight lane ring road.... note that it's eight in each direction!
Reaching Godzillas Hostel, I speculate that I could have walked... but I would have taken a lot longer and would be an exhausted sweaty mess! With only two days in Moscow, it was worth the taxi fare to save my energy for sight seeing.
No comments:
Post a Comment