I apologise for the quality of some of these photos, they are old and my original scans could have been better. I will do them again one day.

In February 1990 David and I traveled through China and Russia on the Trans Mongolian and Trans Siberian Express trains. Recently I found some of the photos from the trip that I had scanned onto discs years ago.

It was bitterly cold in February in Moscow as you can imagine. We had chosen not to take any tours. We had a limited budget and anyway we preferred to just wander around on our own. We figured out how to use the Moscow Metro despite a complete lack of signs in English. We had a map with the station names in English and another in Cyrillic. When we started to look at the maps we realised that the system was colour coded and that helped us a lot. We only got lost once and as the train fare at the time was the equivalent of about five cents in Australian money we weren’t really bothered. We loved the metro stations which seemed a combination of art gallery and air raid shelter. They were so much further underground than the ones we’d used in Sydney and Melbourne.

I especially liked the styles of some of the buildings.

The Museum of Agricultural, Scientific & Economic Achievement was a huge museum which we had to take three trains to get to. We were very proud of ourselves for finding it. Of course we could not understand one word about anything we saw but we loved the Space Exhibit which you did not need Russian to understand.

Naturally we wanted to see The Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral and they did not disappoint.