AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a repost of content I produced on the road in Europe, Russia and Mongolia for the Meridian Collective blog. I will repost one entry a day this week, leading up to new entries in my “Mongol Saga” series coming soon!
Greetings Comrades from Moscow,
I’ve taken thousands of photos thus far on our journey, but I can only edit a handful every several days, so here’s just a few to get the ball rolling.
We finally escaped Latvian purgatory by making minor repairs to the Team Great Job! car and getting it reinspected, thus obtaining a crucial holographic sticker that some guard looked at for about two seconds at the Russian border. The delay since our first failed border-crossing attempt had been two weeks.
After taking all night to cross the border and then driving all day without a good night’s sleep, we arrived in Moscow with our little yellow Nissan Micra. Think of the most hectic freeway junctions in Los Angeles, stick them in the middle of one of the world’s largest city centers and then subtract eight hours of sleep before trying to imagine me at the wheel on Sunday afternoon, trying to find our hostel. Russians don’t feel obligated to obey lane markers, which is too bad because in the heart of Moscow there can be eight lanes in one direction at a time.
Our hostel is called Godzillas and is run by a man who appears to be American, and who runs around micromanaging his green-shirted staff as they replace screws that are the wrong color and clean up the laminated board of registration FAQ by the reception desk. Moscow is an expensive city, the most expensive in the world actually, and so even though the hostel isn’t the cheapest we’ve seen, it is quite popular.
We walked to the Kremlin and took in the sites, enjoying the light at dusk as we danced around in front of the Basil taking group photos like any other tourist. In fact we were set on being tourists just one last time, because for the next two weeks we will be rushing to reach our goal in Ulaanbaatar.
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