Local Knowledge

Day 8: Moscow (RUS). “Thanks, Sergie. we feel a lot better now”, I said as we shook hands and made our goodbyes. Karen and I made our way down the narrow corridor of 20a Novoalekseevskaya Street, through security and back out to the main street.

Our stay in Moscow had taught us the importance of seeking local help to enrich our travel experience, whether that be from our new found chums in the hostel, Moscowvites that we met during our stay, or 'friends of friends' that everybody has across the world. We didn't need to try do everything alone - in fact, the truth was, we couldn't do it all on our own.

And so , when we became concerned about the our visa registration we opted to make the short trip to the Alecseevskaya area of Moscow to pay a visit on our friends at Real Russia. It is a legal requirement in Russia that if you stay in the same location for more than 72 hours you have to register your movements with the State Police. We had been in the city for more than two days and hadn't got around to this. Also, to make matters worse, when we entered Russia from Belarus nobody had stamped our passports which added to our anxiety's. 20 minutes with Sergie, though and everything was sorted. All the paperwork in order, everything legal, everything explained.

As we left the offices, Sergie enquired about our plans for the day and he insisted that as we were in Alecseevskaya we must pay a visit to the All Russia Exhibition Centre . Off of the main tourist map, this was fascinating place. Originally created in the 1930's to show everyone the success of the Soviet economic system - glorifying every aspect of socialist construction from education and health to agriculture, technology, science and food. We found the Armenian pavilion particularly inviting but that was probably due to the availability of their excellent local brandy that we just had to sample (it would have been rude not to!)

Our confidence in navigating Moscow had increased immensely and by the afternoon we were hopping onto monorails, off trolleybuses and onto the metro with relative ease – a very different picture than when we arrived in this alien city just a few days ago.

It wasn't all plain sailing though. At dinner, in my constant battle to get to grips with the Russian language and with my clumsy understanding of Cyrillic, I ended up with a plate of Pigs Snout with Boiled Cabbage. Tasty!