Moscow - day 8

Woke up quite late and headed off to the Kremlin with the Brazilian boys in tow. There is a breeze in Moscow and so the sweating is easing, thank the lord. Getting there was a nightmare.... the Brazilans are just so disorganised, we have to stop at least 20 times in a 1 mile journey, and then one of them had to go back to get his passport and so we left him and didn't see him again all day! Very nice guys though, friendly and easy going. I did feel a bit uneasy though when one of them stepped out this morning wearing a bright orange tank top... I don't think they can understand the notion of trying not to get noticed by the police. But actually did you know Brazil has a new pact with Russia, where neither inhabitants are required to get visas to each country? An odd relationship, methinks.

I am hating the Russian bureaucracy in Moscow. So many queues and different things you have to pay for... it's just awful. For instance, you pay 350 rubules (£8) to get in to the Kremlin, you pay 300 rubules (£7.50) to see the exhibitions, 700 rubules to see the Armoury (£16), extra to climb Ivan the Terrible's Bell Tower, extra for the Diamond Exhibition, and so it goes on. Needless to say, I didn't pay for anything other than the entrance.... I would love to have seen the Armoury but £25 is steep..... but if I did want to see it, I would have to come back out of the Kremlin, queue up again an hour before the 4 entrance times throughout the day open to get a ticket. Come on Russia, get with it. It's a joke. Plus I don't like the feeling of being frightened by the police.... maybe I'm a woos but they look so mean. So undemocratic. And the whole visa registration thing is such a scam! I knew it'd be like this but St Petersburg wasn't so I am a bit disappointed by Moscow.....You also have to go through security checks, and I got this "really funny" guard, wait till you hear this. I open my bag and he is like "you have guns? ha ha ha ha ha" in a deep Russian voice. I looked at him and didn't smile. He didn't say anything and let me through. HA UP YOURS RUSSIA! I got my own back you bastards. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

So the Kremlin has lots of Catherdrals in it, very beautiful structures with gold domes. They have amazing names , like the Assumption Catherdral, Annuciation Cathedral etc etc. These are places where Tsar's get buried and made Tsars...... Plus behind of all of these is where the Russian President lives sometimes - nice. The Kremlin has a massive history - Ivan the terrible reeked havoc from here, Napolean watched Moscow burn, Lenin fashioned the proletariat dictatorship, Stalin purged his people, Gorbachev began perestroika, and Yeltsin thought up new Russia. All very interesting but if you refuse to pay to see the exhibitions, you can't really get more details than that.

In the Kremlin also is the Tsar Bell and Tsar Gun - I don't know why the Bell is broekn (or who broke it? naughty), but when I saw the gun, I thought of Crocodile Dundee "that's not a knife, this, is a knife" - it's forking massive. I had an ice cream.

Then we left the Kremlin and went on to the Red Square, where we found Lenin's mausoleum and St Basil's Cathedral. Of course, this being Russia, Lenin's tomb is only open between 10am and 1pm, so I missed out on him (they have mummified him if you didn't already know that?). However, FACT; did you know that when Stalin died he was buried alongside Lenin, but the lady in charge at that time had a dream where Lenin told her he didn't want to be bedfellows with Stalin, so they had him removed, and he's now at the back of Lenin's tomb, where no one can see him! and FACT; Lenin wanted to buried beside his mother in St Petersburg but the government refused to let his wife take him there, and so he has been in Moscow ever since, with thousands of people walking past him every week. He went on holiday to Siberia during the war, which was nice.

So as I was sat on some steps in some shade (turns out I was by a loo - nice), a guy (1) comes and stands a short distance away by a wall. After about ten minutes, a guy (2) in a suit walks up to him, and guy 1 hands 2 a small plastic bag of something, which 2 takes, and then 1 and 2 secretly hand a piece of paper between them.... of course this can only be spy correspondence and not a son giving his dad his lunch, or something as banal as that. I was secretly quite excited. Then I got a sandwich and it was nice. I love bread, and miss it's glorious wonder.

Tonight I was supposed to be going out for a drink with the Brazilians..... they are currently asleep. I think their idea of going out is at midnight, back at 5am. Ugg, not my cup of tea. They told me earlier before they had ever met an English person they thought the English were cold. Shall I show them how cold an English person can be? No, I'll save that for another day.

As they say in Russia, Moscow!