Train-wise

On the Trans-Siberian Railway front, we are still waiting for the 45 day window to open for our tickets to be booked. That means that although we have our deposits in and we're on the list for the first class tickets we want, we may not yet get them, so we can't really book anything else firmly yet.

We've enlisted the help of Trainseurope to get us from London to Moscow and the guy seemed very helpful about it all, especially as I had lost the dates that we wanted to travel just as the call connected and he had to listen to me pad for a bit while I found them. This company seem clued up with Intourist, our Trans-Siberian guys, so I think they get the 45 day window thing and don't think they're going to book our tickets without calling me first. I don't know, it's going to be amazing, but booking trains ain't as easy as booking a flight! That is definitely one major difference I've noticed: booking a ticket for a regular working train you can only do 45 days before. Some flights can, apparently, now be booked TWO YEARS in advance!

I enquired about the much-talked about transit visa to allow us to pass through Belarus (arrest-free) and we are well on the case to getting all of our visas fixed up. One geniously designed bit of frugalness that I came up with was to make our own passport photos. It makes sense to me, given that we have a nice big white wall in our flat, a digital camera, tonnes of photo paper and photoshop. Oh, and the fact that all photo machines have been removed from The London Underground (meaning that our nearest tube-based photo machine is in Paris...), makes getting a 'proper' one taken very hard these days! I remember when they were in Boots, Sainsburys, Woolworths AND the Co-Op!!! In any case, I don't think the Belarusianados are going to notice the difference between a machine taken passport photo and my homemade jam. No offence, like!