Russia-Playing tourist

With the sun streaming through the windows we awoke at 8am....the room was already 35 degrees.

Today was a sightseeing day – a time to be playing tourist. We wandered the outskirts of the Kremlin and the GUM department store that is now full of every European brand name you can think of! The days of queuing and empty shelves are long gone, for the elite in Moscow at least. However, we began to get frustrated, as we couldn’t find a ticket booth that was open in order to get tickets into the Kremlin. Eventually we found one (the only one open today!) but the queues were just horrendous, so we decided we would leave it to another day.

Both of us had left not having any food for too long. We'd been too busy sightseeing, and so we both enjoyed a couple of beers at an outside bar which overlooks the gleaming towers of the Kremlin and the ‘candy-coloured’ towers of St Basil’s – it was only now that it was beginning to sink in that we were really, really here.

The road down was much more difficult than we had anticipated but sitting here in the centre of Moscow, every hard-earned mile had been worth it.

We had managed to get a couple of telephone numbers for BMW in Moscow and a few pone calls later we were talking to Vladimir Tchaikovsky, (what an amazing name-so typically Russian!) we’d been told he could speak English. We arranged to meet Vladimir in front of the hotel at 9:30am the following day and he would lead us to the largest BMW dealer in Moscow. In the meantime evening was drawing in and we couldn’t resist going for a midnight stroll around Red Square again.