Part of my Russia Trip

Russia was amazing!!! So deep with culture and history…what a fun trip. We ended up traveling for 21 hours yesterday to get home. We had to fly from St. Petersburg to Moscow and then from moscow to LA….what a journey.

So where should I start….okay the plane trip to Moscow.

We decided to fly using Aeroflots because they were the only ones who had nonstop services to Moscow. We did some research before we left and found that Aeroflots didn’t have the best reputation. We were scared of the flight before we got on. We heard that seats were literally duct taped together, flys would be buzzing around, the food wouldn’t come until 11 hours into the flight….basically anything that could go wrong…people were telling us would go wrong.

The flight wasn’t bad. Russians did cut like everyone said they would. We were warned that Russians all crowd and push to the front…I did not experience this. We waited in line to check in with Aeroflots. I figured it would be easy since we had called several weeks in advance to book our seats to ensure we would be seated next to each other. Much to our dismay, when we got to the counter, the service rep informed us that the seats we had reserved were no longer researved but he could seat us together on the back of the plane….he also told us that our calling in advance to book the seats does no good and he didn’t understand why Aeroflots tells people their seats are books over the phone because they have no way to possibly do that…but I digress.

We get on the plane, which was delayed 2.5 hours…no biggie…just means we got to spend more time together. We finally board and get to our seats ( which are about 10 yards from any tv monitors and on a 12 hour flight that takes a lot of fun out of things). The plane started to back up and move and all these old people were still standing up getting stuff out of the over head compartments. These people were crazy, it was a bumpy take off. The flight to Moscow wasn’t bad at all. I slept a bit on the plane, I was happy, Sugar bear was happy, things seemed to be goin very well.

We knew we were going to be late since the plane was delayed and we had a driver waiting for us in Moscow to pick us up from the airport but we had no way of getting ahold of him to let him know we were going to be late. When we landed it took almost an hour to collect our luggage. The driver was there waiting for us. He had sat there waiting for 2+ hours..what a sport!!!

We checked into our hotel. We stayed at Le Meridien National in Moscow. It came highly recommended to us by a friend of SugarBears. That hotel is literally across the street from red square and everything worth seeing is within walking distance from the hotel, which is great because we learned that taxis in Russia are a rip off.

After checking in and relazing for a secont we decided to venture out into the snowy night to find a place to eat. We had travel books that had recommended some cafe called FAQ cafe and we figured we would try the place out. We couldn’t find the dame place. We walked up and down the street looking for it, we asked a few people on the street if they knew were it was and the just stared at us. We learned that Russians are staring people. They won’t give you an ” i don’t understand” or ” i don’t speak english” nothing…not even a “fuck you” in english or russian…they just star at you and walk past you. it’s rather creepy. after one or two futile attempts to get directions for passerbyers on the street we finally hit the jack pot. We found two girls who not only spoke great english but they recommended a better place to eat for the night. The kindly escorted us over to a place called Viet Cafe which was right around the corner from our hotel. Since it was a Saturday night several russian youths gathered in the resturant/bar eating, drinking and dancing to loud techno music….the russians love Techno. Viet cafe had amazing service and the food was great. I highly recommend it. That night,  the locals were very friendly to us. Some even bought us a crazy drink called “gone with the wind”. They 5 shots of something or another around another drink that was in a martini glass. The liquid in the martini glass was light on fire. The drinker is supposed to suck the liquid from the martini glass up with a straw while someone throws the 2 shots next to the glass into the beverage all the while the drinker sucks up everything. The drinker is then supposed to do the 3 other shots lined up waiting. It was pretty hectic.

Ok…I can see this is going to take a lot longer to blog about than I thought….all this and I haven’t even gotten to the end of our first night…so here are some highlights and I will blog in more detail later…I have to head out to Vegas for the AVN convention tomorrow and I have to unpack and repack stilll…oh my time clock if fucked 🙁

highlights after night one

we saw Lenin….so bizzare the dude looks younger and better than me…I’ll have what he’s having.

Kremlin…very nice

St. Basil’s Cathedral….beautiful

Felix the tour guide…what a character

Went to a “Pick UP bar called Night flight” and some dude was molesting my bf and his Affliction Teeshirt.

The Americans we met on one of our tours…..nice folks…ended up spending new years with them

OMG NYE in Kremlin….Russian president bummed me out

I ate Reindeer…RIP rudolph

Flight to ST. Petersburg was great

Hermitage Museaum is  WAY to big to see in one day…one year even…we saw a lot…My feet still hurt

Peter and Pauls fortresss…saw naked people jumping into belowfreezing temperatured water….not just one or two of them either there were a lot…naked….totally awesome

went to strip club…it wasn’t all that great. girls in Russia are all about money money money.

I will give more details later I’ll post pix as well.