We arrived at Baltisky station, an ornate, white, classical building, all cornice and balcony which testified to the grandeur of St Petersburg or its revolutionary buildings. Everyone but myself and one other guy got off, and after the drivers had smoked a few cigarettes we set off for the bus station. We finally arrived at 10.30 and it was now quite dark. I managed to find out there was a bus at 11pm to Moscow despite the ticket sellers simply staring at me blankly when I asked if they spoke English, and I set off to walk the couple of kilometres to the train station for Moscow.
The air smelt of the sea, and I as I followed a canal along the streets were relatively empty. Despite the guide suggesting that in the Putin-era Russian streets were relatively safe (apparently the thieves are interested in bigger fish) I felt a little apprehensive wondering what lurked in the dark, my mind throwing up images from all of those Soviet era spy books and movies I had seen of secret police hiding in dark alleyways. I soon hit a main, well lit dual carriageway street, allowing me to relax a little and observe Russian in their natural setting. 
In the half an hour it took to get to the station every person I walked past had a bottle or can in their hand - granted it was Saturday night, but it appeared as though without a drink in his hand a Russian man was unbalanced and was liable to topple over - and I saw a few who had done this. I finally managed to find the station, which wasn't so much a station but a small city within a big one - a series of buildings off the main street, first I got lost in the Metro building, then I found the main station - a huge building housing the waiting trains, a huge, two story marble waiting hall with shops and restaurants lining either side, then an endless series of stalls running the length of the building outside, and then another huge building with a sign saying Ticket Hall No. 2.
Armchair expert
In the three weeks I spent waiting for my visa I became something of an armchair expert on Russian trains. I learnt about the various routes, the various trains, the various classes, the scam of selling all the tickets to agencies to sell on to tourists. I learnt to read Cyrillic in order to be able to check the availability of tickets, and then to sign up to the site so that I could buy tickets on-line. (Frustratingly I wasn't able to complete the purchase) Through all this I discovered that in peak season it is impossible to get a ticket on the three most famous train routes (TransMongolian/Manchurian/Siberian) as all the tickets were sold to agencies or filled with Russian tourists, but that there were other trains that went along the same or similar routes that weren't famous and thus didn't attract many tourists. For these trains there were more tickets available as they could only be bought directly from the train company and I was only competing with Russians. So I looked around and decided on the train to a place called Blagoveschensk - a six day ride almost all the way to Vladivostok, to a town that was on the river that is the border between Russia and China. Once I had worked out exactly which train I was able to take that allowed me to get out of Russia before my visa expired, it became a first thing in the morning and last thing at night to check how many places were left on the train. The months of July and August are the peak periods for catching trains in Russia, lots of Russians' summer holiday consists of catching a train somewhere for a week or two, and lots of city dwellers return to where there are originally from the enjoy the brief period of warm weather - so most guides suggest buying tickets at least a week or two in advance, and to buy tickets through an agency unless you could speak Russian fluently and be able to do with the rather erratic queuing that goes on it Russian train stations. . Having left buying the ticket until the last moment I was unable to get an agency in Finland to buy the ticket for me (and they all charged 60 or 70 Euros for the service anyway), so I started to get a little worried when the two third class carriages went from having around thirteen places each left, to six places left, to one carriage being completely full and six places left in the last carriage, within the space of five days. I had worked out a backup plan of sorts, catching another train on the same day but it only had a couple of places left as well. When I was last able to check availability, in Estonia before I caught the bus to St Petersburg, there were no tickets left on my backup plan train, and only three tickets left on the train I wanted to catch. The LP guide also suggested that the ticket office closed at 8pm so I was anxious about whether I would be able to buy a ticket - even if by pure chance there was one available.
He's got a ticket(s) to ride
Having finally got around to reading the guide I had I discover to my relief that there was an agency at the station that was open 24 hours, had English speaking staff and could book tickets for a small fee. When I entered the waiting hall I followed the Information sign in to a narrow corridor that had a number of different windows that were all closed. The woman behind the one window that was open didn't speak a word of English so just pointed me around the corner. I walked around the back of the hall and then up the stairs to the second floor and stumbled upon the office of the agent mentioned in the guide. Rather than an agency it was actually a luxury waiting room, with couches for relaxing, computers for the internet and a rather dodgy looking massage parlour. I wandered in only to find that none of the staff actually spoke English and had no idea what "book a ticket" meant. Thinking I was in the wrong place I wandered about for a little longer and found a Booking Office, which turned out to be a hotel and rental car booking office, and despite finding someone who could speak English all I learnt from her was that she didn't know where the office the guide mentioned was. I walked out rather frustrated and depressed and began wandering around the station so distracted that even following the Ticket Office signs I was unable to find a place that was open and selling tickets, I began to notice that everything seemed to be dull, as if the lights were only on half power. Somehow, walking out the side door of the station I managed to stumble across another building with the sign reading Ticket Office No.2, with the lights on, if a little dim, the doors open and people wandering in and out - a shimmering oasis in the sea of my despair. Once inside the door, I found to my amazement 50 different windows, each with a different description in Russian specifying who could buy tickets at each window. (Apparently there are windows for veterans of the Great War, cosmonauts, widows, members of the Party, shoe shiners, dancing minstrels etc etc)
The other curious thing was that each window also had a list of opening times, and from what I got to see, they were only open in fifteen or twenty minute blocks, meaning that waiting in a line could be a very frustrating and pointless exercise, and I saw no point in joining any of the six or seven queues that had formed.
After wandering around in circles growing more and more confused, without even a helpful look from anyone in the place, I finally spotted an information window. (It seems that from my appearance that Russians presume that I am a Russian, each time I asked people whether they spoke English they seemed quite surprised that I would ask such a question) Fate then smiled upon me as the woman behind the counter understood a little English and seemed to understand the concept that I had come to the ticket office to buy a ticket for the train, despite my inability to speak Russian. I gave her a slip of paper with the destinations, Moscow and Blagoveschensk and train numbers written on them and she checked on the computer and found to my great surprise and relief that there were still places available (I managed to peek through the perspex to see that there was one spot left on the train to Blago) She even understood my request to find a cheaper class for the St P to Moscow leg, and told me that they were all fool. She wrote down the details in Russian on a chit of paper and then sent me to window 45, suggesting the women there spoke English. So I joined the relatively short queue for window 45, put down my backpack and wondered what would happen next. The queue moved quite quickly and after ten minutes or so it was my turn, so I smiled my best innocent abroad smile and handed over the chit of paper and my passport. Meanwhile the old man who had been served before me started asking the woman a few questions, she started talking to him, then disappeared out the back of the office and then returned in conversation with another ticket seller, finished answering the old man's questions, checked my Russian visa and typed out my name in Cyrillic as written on my visa, let out a loud sigh and said "Mamma mia", her only display of English, and passed the tickets through the window to me. Confused by the speed, complete lack of interaction and the grim look on the woman's face which suggested that I was without luck, I stumbled away with the two tickets in my hand. When I check the tickets I find that indeed I have exactly what I needed, and I think to myself walk in the park, even a bumbling fool like me can do what the guides suggested bordered on the impossible.I walk away with a smile on my face big enough to fit a train in to !!!
Off to Moscow
About an hour later I found my carriage, and discovered I was sharing the compartment with a young girl of five or six, her father/grand father and her gran - an old babushka, dressed all in black. They were most welcoming despite my inability to understand anything they said, or say anything they could understand. After a few failed attempts at communication the young girl spoke to the man then asked me in flawless French, Parlez vous Français ? It turned out she went to a bilingual school in St Petersburg so using my rather rusty French was able to find out that she was off to Moscow for a holiday with her grandparents. After being shepherded out of the compartment so Gran could get changed, I made up my bed and fell asleep almost immediately. In the morning we had a couple of hours before arriving in Moscow and Pops was quite impressed by the places I had been. After several attempts he had managed to get my name right and seemed to be obsessed with it, constantly using it as he told me, sometimes through his grand-daughter, sometimes directly to me in Russian, how he had been to Cuba and Angola during the Soviet times. Finally our train rolled in to Moscow and we bid our farewells and I started to feel as though perhaps my negative prejudices about Russians were a little off the mark.
Moscow, Moscow, city of the Russian tsar
Coming out of the station at 10 in the morning the sky was a dull grey, the ground was still wet from earlier rain and despite the sun trying to break through the clouds the cold was still a little nippy. There are three big train stations piled next to each other and I managed to navigate my way to where my train left from, find a left luggage place (Four different windows each with different closing and opening hours) and then set off to spend the three hours I had before my train left doing Moscow. On the street outside of the station there were quite a few people milling around and I began to notice that Russian came in every stripe and colour - from your white as the driven snow, blonde hair and blue eyes variety (aka Dandy South white Russian/ Baltic Kev), to dark, leather skinned, squat Mongolian looking, to straight up, short, black haired, narrow eyes and small nosed Chinese looking, and everything in between.
Walking away from the station, being Sunday morning there wasn't many people or much traffic about on the wide streets. On my way to Red Square I passed a mix of relatively few old buildings (almost all of Moscow was completely destroyed when Napoleon took it back in the day) lots of Soviet concrete behemoths all grey, symmetrical and bland - built for use rather than looks, a few experimental Soviet buildings - still grey concrete but strange angles smashing in to each other, and surprising a lot of new glass and metal buildings shimmering under the weak sun - either completed or under construction. I also walked passed the New Moscow - a covered walkway of exclusive boutiques, an Italian sports car parked out the front for sale, loud plastic pop music blaring away and all the glamour and glitz you could imagine. The security guards glared at me as I crossed the road to get a better look, clearly I wasn't part of the in crowd.
Arriving at the Red Square the first thing I saw was the Kazan Cathedral, a striking reddy brown building, all triangular towers and silver spires. However as I entered the vast expanse of the square, the walls of the Kremlin on the right, the endless windows of a Soviet concrete monolith on the left both running the 500 metre length of the square, there sits the most bizarre, colourful, swirling shaped fantasy church I have ever seen - St Basil the Fools. Walking the length of the square, like a marching soldier on parade in front of the Party Chairman, the church only became more and more impressive and unbelievable the closer I get. Built in the 1550's for Ivan the Terrible, who wanted to leave a legacy other than the 
worst nickname in history, it is supposedly the symbol of religious Russian architecture.
Staring at it from up close is hard work, the eye never wants to rest, jumping from one part to the next, and then back again, trying somehow to form a single image that takes in everything - and you have to fight off the thoughts that perhaps those domes are actually big lollies. The photos simply don't do it justice. Standing behind the church, looking at the square, the church, the Kremlin (the walled inner city sanctum of Russian power) and the 
river behind me I couldn't help but think of the book Gorky Park, and the part where the detective wanders about in this part of Moscow in the middle of winter in the freezing cold trying to make sense of what has happened. In such a historical place, that I have seen through so many images, both photos and descriptions in books, it is hard not to feel a sense of history and perspective. I also notice is that despite the rough cobble stones every women I have seen is wearing high heels, some look precarious on their six inch stilettos (with matching track suit) but all manage to pull it off without falling - perhaps Russian women learn to walk that way from childhood.
I wandered back around the other side of the square passing Lenin's mausoleum, running out of time I want to see how long the queue is. I discover however that Lenin remains very popular and rather than running just the length of the square, the queue snakes its way along the entire length of the church, then further along through a park on the left, so I don't even bother trying to find the end let alone joining it. In the square 
there a bunch of Russian soldiers wandering about, a guy with a couple of monkeys in leather jackets, a group of look-a-likes - I recognise Lenin, Stalin and Yeltsin but there are four or five more generals - you can have your photo taken with them.
As I wandered out of the square I come across a group of elderly people milling about, a few stalls with pamphlets and lots of hammer and sickle flags. A group of them are standing on the steps of the statue of Marx singing the Internationale. A Spanish tourist is busy filming them with his video camera, and I figure them to be part of the majority of Russians who long for the social security and global reputation of the Soviet days.
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