Napolean Hostel - Moscow

I'm sitting in the hallway outside of my room where there is hi speed internet, and was working away reading my emails and this guy comes along and starts talking at me in this long monologue about the following: the prices of apartments in Moscow (3500 dollars for a 2 bedroom close to the centrum); the distance between metro stations in Moscow (5 kilometres, apparently); the speed of a Moscow subway train (120 km/hour); the different costs of the various classes of transsiberian trains; his investments (how much he has invested, how much he has lost, how much he still has left, how long it will take him to make back what he has lost, how much it costs him to run his car); what countries to invest in (China, Russia, and India).

I kept trying to give him all the usual "Can't you see I'm busy" signals, but he was having none of it, and it took me about 20 minutes before I realized I would have to tell him that I needed to get to work, and even then he kept talking and I had to tell him again.

But really, though, this hostel is far superior to the one in St Petersburg. It's more centrally located, being about 3 minutes to the Kremlin, and the woman who served me coffee at the cafe yesterday where I went to post the first blog entry actually smiled at me, and more than once.

Of course that was after a gruelling trip - it took me from 7 am when the taxi picked me up at my hostel in St Petersburg until 4 pm, when I finally gasped up the final flight of stairs to the fourth floor hostel in Moscow. The actual flight between the two cities is 1 hour and ten minutes, so all the rest of the time was spent in the taxi, trying to find out how check in "works" at Pulkovo 2 (the SP domestic airport), waiting, going through customs, waiting some more, entering the ground transportation from the departure lounge to the plane, entering the ground transportation from plane back to arrivals in Moscow, standing around stupidly and slowly reading the information signs in Cyrillic, avoiding the temptation of taking the easy but expensive transportation route into the centre of Moscow and my hostel, figuring out how to get on the express train into Moscow, standing around in the Moscow train station looking stupid again and trying to figure out how to get to my hostel from the train station without taking a taxi and thus avoiding the freelance taxi drivers offering their services for a mere 1000 rubles and then lowering that to 500 when I flinched and that's when I knew the metro would be a tiny fraction of even that, arguing with a taxi driver that yes I really did want to take the metro despite his curled lip and non verbal expressions of disdain, finally "noticing" the sign for the metro station, getting yelled at by the ticket cashier for not correctly pronouncing the name of the station that I was looking for, descending deep into the bowels of the Moscow metro system, going one station too far and thus missing my transfer point, walking in all directions but the right one when trying to find the hostel...

I finally gave up and went into a coffee shop with the words "wi fi" on the door, a bit suspicious because the last time I did that in St Petersburg, the young woman in the shop had no idea what internet or wi fi was, despite a similar sign. They say that Moscow is the most expensive city in the world, but I paid only 50 rubles for an hour of connection, whereas in SP I regularly paid 100. After a coffee and an hour catching up on email, I felt "normal" again, and psychologically prepared for the final approach to my hostel whose location I had managed to locate on a Lonely Planet map, and having internalized the directions, set off with my two small backpacks and my little suitcase with the wheels.

And so upon reaching the fourth floor hostel slightly out of breath and freaking fed up with things and wanting to go home right now and seriously questioning myself and this crazy trip - what the hell, do I really think I'm going to learn any Russian in a month? - I fell into my hot pink-sheeted bed and slept the evening away, waking up refreshed and alert at midnight. Oh, and I'm hungry.