Tuesday 2nd of July 2019 - St Petersburg - Day 1 (Moscow)

View from the cabin - lots of cruise ships in today

Long day today..

Russia aparantly is worried about 71 year old aussies sneaking into their country.. Dave got held up in customs because he has a beard now and aparantly russians don't like beards? anyway after 5 times as long as everyone else they finally let him into the country.

Sapsan Train

After a short bus trip to the train station we had a long walk to the train - we're taking the high-speed Sapsan train into Moscow.

The train was quite nice, doing 200-250kmph through the countryside and into Moscow.

Brett and Dave, in Red Square - in front of St Basils

Once we arrived at Moscow we boarded a bus and began a quick bus tour through the city - Moscow is quite a modern city, with a big mix of aritecture, clean streets and looks quite nice.

After a while we arrived at Red Square and St Basils.  It's very impressive, seen this place in so many movies!

Big shopping centre - right off red square!

We had some free time and walked around and looked at the shopping malls and such near red square (there are a LOT of them) - interestingly enough there are metal detectors everywhere - even to get into a department store (I think we went through 12 metal detectors during our trip to moscow).

The Kremlin

Next we had a tour of the Kremlin - it's quite a large complex, with curches, barracks and old canons.  Also it's where the current russian goverment works from.  Very impressive!

Our next stop was a tour of the Armoury - it's basically a museam dedicated to the old Tsars and their excesses - gold, diamonds and silver are everywhere - from clothing to the Faberge eggs.  I'm amazed that when the communists took over they didn't melt everything down!

After a short drive around we headed back to the train station for another 4 hours train ride across russia.  We started the day at 6am onboard ship and got back to the ship at 12:30am the next morning, thank goodness we have our tour tomorrow in the afternoon.