Moscow and St. Petersburg

After a long train ride of 3 days and 4 nights, we made it into Moscow. The ride was kind of uneventful but it's one of those things I'm glad to say I've done. The bed was about 5 feet long and I'm 6 feet 3 inches so you can imagine 4 bumpy stinky loud nights later I was pretty glad to step off the train into Moscow. Along the way we passed inumerable country cottages and pretty fields with lots of trees, but we passed by the only mountains the Urals, during the night, so it was monotonous, but the time went by pretty quickly. I'm glad I did it, but next time we'll fly.
In Moscow we stayed with a wonderful couchsurfing host who has tons of guests so we were treated to a film night with about 25 people together in a small room, then a lot of people to meet hanging around. We toured the Kremlin and Arbat street, and our favorite was a lunch buffet soviet style canteen place with awesome salads and meatballs in GUM shopping center next to red square. The next day we just ate our way up Arbat drinking all kinds of beer and people watching. That was a treat.
Then we took the train to St.Petersburg, where we stayed in a downtown hostel. We got there late and then spent two days sightseeing around there. Day 2 was spent entirely in the Hermitage, an amazing collection of art in a spectacular old palace, and the largest museum in the world. The town is spectacular and we thought that the onion-domed multicolored church there looks a lot like St.Basil's in Moscow, but it actually better because of more detail and a more interesting setting.
Russia was probably the most difficult place we've been as far as the language barrier, and they are certainly not set up for tourism as much as other places. Also it's expensive in general. However, with persistence and patience we got what we wanted, and although the people in shops are kind of gruff and cold on the surface we had some really good and warm interactions with several people who we had the time and situation to get to have an actual conversation with. Two weeks was enough for us to get a good taste of Russia, though suprisingly we drank nary a drop of vodka! How strange is that? We had plenty of their delicious beer though.