Mother Russia and Trans-Mongolian railway (Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Trans-Mongolian railroad)

Russia has definitely been an experience... Russian people have a very different idea of customer service eg constant scowling (or at least not smiling) and use as few words as possible! On the whole people were generally otherwise friendly and appreciated our garbled attempts at Russian! 

We spent 2 days in St Petersburg which is a lovely city. It's very modern and European and a bit more tourist friendly than Moscow! We went to the winter palace which was really ornate and covered in gold! There was a lot of artwork on display as well as some rather odd sculptures...

Our hostel was on the Main Street but hidden on the top floor of an enormous building which looked very grand from the outside but a bit delapidated on the inside! 

Moscow was interesting with a visit to the Kremlin, Red Square and St Basil's Cathedral. 

We had a lot of fun looking at potential souvenirs and gifts, most of which involved either bit hats or tshirts with Putin looking cool in sunglasses!

We joined our tour group for the train on our last night in Moscow and we're pleased to find that everyone was nice and friendly :) we're a mostly English group with a Swiss couple, Dutch couple and a kiwi. Our tour guide was lovely but seemed a bit out of her depth with our group - she got us lost when finding a restaurant that night then accidentally got stuck on the train with us when settling us in the next morning! She had to stay on the train for 3 hours before the next stop and then had to get a bus back to Moscow!

The train is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience (emphasis on the 'once')! The first part of the journey from Moscow to Irkutsk lasted 4 days and nights non-stop...in 3rd class... As Karl pilkington said - you don't even send post 3rd class! It was basic but we had fun and survived, though we were probably a bit smelly by the end of it! People generally left our group to it (being the only tourists silly enough to book 3rd class!) but we did make friends with 2 drunken Russians (who we eventually had to ask the carriage attendants to get rid of for us!) and a grumpy old man who kept yelling at us in Russian presumably for being too loud for him to sleep even when it was still light!

Piri piri! (Portugal)

After a hectic 2 weeks travelling around Ireland, Andy and I figured travelling was too much like hard work. So we had a holiday :) we had a lovely 9 days in sunny Portugal doing nothing but lazing on the beach, lazing in the apartment or tucking into delicious food!

We did have a few unanticipated adventures such as me getting a fish bone stuck in my throat and nearly having to go to the hospital (thankfully finally managed to swallow it as we were on our way!) - this incident resulted in Andy constantly singing 'fishbone' to the 'wishbone' theme tune and being allowed to tell me to chew my food before every meal...

We also took a taxi to a nearby town to one of Andy's favourite restaurants - only to find it closed and we had no way of ordering another taxi back! Thankfully a local English speaking pharmacist took pity on us and booked it for us! There's €20 we'll never see again. On the plus side we then made that meal at home ourselves which was delicious!

Highlight of the holiday has to be kayaking around the coast of Lagos! We had booked this a few days in advance when the weather had been gorgeous, but on the morning of the trip we woke up to this:

Thankfully it cleared up a bit by the afternoon and we had great fun kayaking through caves and grottoes and then out into the open sea! Needless to say we were knackered by the end of that!

We were well rested by the end of that holiday and ready to take on the rest of the world! We're now chilling in St Petersburg... But more on that later :)

Kirren x