Russia

After leaving Dublin, we had brief stays in Liverpool, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. The Lord worked things out in amazing ways for us to get through those places. We landed in Riga, Latvia at around midnight and had no idea what to do. We got on a random bus and got off at what seemed to be downtown. There was no one on the streets, and nothing to do. We knew that we had to get to Estonia the next day, so we thought we might be able to get a bus...or else we were sleeping on the streets. We turned a corner and found the bus station. We caught the last bus to Estonia that night...it left 1o minutes after we got there. We then decided to catch a ferry to Helsinki, Finland. Latvia and Estonia were bazzar places. It was like stepping into some sort of twilight zone where people slept in until 10 (when everything opened) and bright colors didn't exist. These were obviously cold war countries.

We jumped on a train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, Russia. The ride was long (6 hours) and nothing overly exciting happened. A young Russian guy offered to buy me Vodka. He had already had 7-8 glasses himself. I graciously declined.

Once we got to S. Petersburg we had to immediatly catch a night train to Moscow. Russia was not an English friendly place at all. Thankfully, we met a guy named Andrew (picture above) who helped us get the ticket. There is no way that we could have figured it out without him. He was amazing to help us like he did. We still keep in contact with him.

We spent 3 days in Moscos and got to see almost all of the Kremlin. We went through some sticky dealings to purchase our airline ticket to Tajikistan, but we eventaully got it. The best pary about Moscow was the 2 free nights we got at the Courtyard Marriott. We had not slept in a bed for 5 nights or showered in 5 days. It was very nice to be able to relax before we hit the real 3rd worldly part of our trip. We watched the US tie Italy in a WC match late one night. We were hooked by now. The World Cup would continually captivate us throughout the trip.