Culture shock

Home again at last. Russia was great, they were very hospitable and they treated us really well, but it felt like it was time to leave by the time we headed home. There was *so* much food, with *so* many courses and *so* many toasts - I almost had to resort to Miss World type toasts to world peace and the end of poverty.

I will write more over the next few days, and there are many tales to tell, although some of them won’t be appearing here – such as the reason why I have a massive black bruise on my leg and had a really aching shoulder, but it certainly got the adrenaline pumping and was well worth the injuries.

I’ll also post some photos at some point, although most of mine are on 35mm film, as I haven’t made it into the 21st century on such things, but I will try and post a couple that are on my phone and will get some from the chap I went with from work.

We started off our trip in Moscow and someone met us off the flight and drove us to our hotel. When I say hotel, casino and bordello might be a better description! It was actually a very nice hotel but gambling is a big thing in Russia since communism came to an end and so lots of hotels have loads of gaming tables and one armed bandits and so on. To even get into the hotel we had to go through metal detectors and have our bags scanned, and there were lots of mafia type people about, but they didn’t seem to be interested in us very much. This was possibly because they were distracted by the strippers in the bar and the large number of prostitutes who were constantly there in the hotel – managed by the hotel in fact, who took a nice healthy cut of the charges. I’m not making this hotel sound great am I? Believe me, it was an interesting experience and rather decadent in its own way.

Anyway, once we’d checked in we were taken out to an Azerbaijani restaurant for dinner, and the food was really nice, even the goat we were given to eat. This was my first introduction to the huge number of toasts that were to become the theme of the time away. As it turned out, not drinking vodka was fine. That evening I was given some strange drink that tasted a bit like a mint/ aniseed mouthwash but was actually quite nice in its own peculiar way. The first toast was by the chap who had taken us to the restaurant and it was to me, as it was my first time in Russia and he wanted me to have amazing memories of the country. He therefore wanted me to have an amazing first evening there as that would be what I would remember about the country and would make me want to come back.

Well, heading off to Red Square after the meal was a really great introduction to Russia. All lit up in the dark, it was quite some sight and there was the Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s Tomb. Those images that are sort of iconic and are instantly recognisable images of Russia. Amazing! It was a really fantastic start to being in Russia and set us up for the days ahead. We went back to the hotel exhausted, preparing ourselves to go to Siberia and ready for a good night’s sleep having eaten really well. The chap we were with made some joke with someone he knew that we hadn’t been able to have any dinner and the other chap shot of to sort us out a meal. We had no choice but to sit down to another massive meal, as it would have made our guide lose face for us to refuse to eat this. So we were presented with yet more food, all freshly prepared, including rabbit steaks. We tried our hardest to eat a bit of everything (even the stuff in aspic – ick!) and I think we did pretty well at showing willing. After a while we felt we could bow out gracefully and finally go to bed. Having eaten two massive dinners. Siberia was looking more appealing by the moment.