I have arrived by train in Moscow this morning. It was an overnight train with sleeping compartments and I managed to get a little sleep on that 7 hour train ride. Earlier in St Petersburg, I had been couch surfing with two different hosts. One was a university student who lived in the farther reaches of the city, and she took me to a medieval festival that was going on in the castle at the center of town. We watched people bashing and wrestling each other with swords, and then people even jousting each other on horses. That was pretty intense... their lances would often break as they hit each others' shields and rode past each other. A few of these knights even got thrown off their horses, but not because of the jousting, only because they weren't the best horse riders I suppose.
I had also met quite a few people in the couchsurfing meet up in the town and hung out with some of them for a while. I was hanging out with Stacey a lot while I was in town, she is a talented linguist who has lived in many countries around the world, and who is now trying to go to China to learn Chinese. She showed me many things about the city, such as a really hipster cafe in a semi abandoned building, where we sat with another couchsurfing friend Yulina and played a board game called Munchkin. We also went to the Kunstkamera museum. Now that place is museum to the next level. There are indeed normal objects to be found in the museum, but what is extraordinary about the collections are the deformed babies Peter the Great collected. They are babies who died due to deformities, such as two headed babies, babies with no legs, babies with cleft lip.... ahh it could easily have been a traumatic experience.
Yulia is the other couchsurfing friend I would hang out a lot around town. She is from a city called Glazov in the Udmurt Republic region of Russia. The Udmurt Republic is a region near the Ural Mountains, and Russia has many regions around the country like it which are home to many minority groups. She is in St Petersburg because she would like to live there someday, and has a job that involved working online, so she is relatively free to live in different locations. We went to the Hermitage museum, the most famous one in St Petersburg, and spent hours walking through the collections which we didn't even finish watching. There were a lot of paintings from all eras and also archaeological finds. We were really tired and hungry at the end, and I stuffed myself full of food later.
I am couchsurfing again in Moscow, and went to Red Square to see all the rage in Moscow today! There are also 3 dollar shwarmas here... whoever said Moscow is too expensive doesn't know where to look.