Moscow, Russia

So iconic is Red Square that it was impossible for us not to gawp unabashedly at St Basil’s Cathedral, the Kremlin and Lenin’s Mausoleum. In all honesty, we had more fears than hopes for Moscow but it proved not to be so alien after all.

As lazy tourists, we basked in the Kremlin’s sunny park eating ice creams, reading and enjoying some last traces of familiarity in our final major city before sending ourselves to Siberia. The Trans-Siberian Railway officially begins from Moscow but first there was the Metro to navigate. A grand metro it is too, even if we needed our combined energies, sharp elbows and Sam’s distant memory of her visit as a student, to find our way up and down the grandiose escalator halls.