10TH - 12TH JUNE 2005

Noah had told us in a joking sort of manor that we would be tackling the Moscow metro, and we were all like yeah yeah yeah, but haa-ha his joke backfired when our driver didn’t show and yeap you guessed it, we were on the Moscow metro in rush hour! It is impossible to describe the sheer volume of people using the metro, I thought yeah sure it will be busy, I been to enough gigs to know what crowds are like but jesus I have never ever experienced anything quite like that before, after the battle to get through the doors began, the crowds just continued all the way to the actual train and beyond! Any yippee we all had our backpacks on so of course we didn’t stand out too much did we!!! Everybody just vanished in the crush for the escalator, I didn’t know if there was just one way down or various ways down to various different platforms and believe you me you just had to go with the flow, there was no stopping to change direction, I swear to god at one point my feet left

the floor and I floated along, not an experience for the faint hearted that’s for sure. Once on the escalator and still not being able to see a rucksack in site I thought hmmm, I have no money and I have no idea where our hotel is let alone the name of the bloody thing! Fortunately everybody was going in the same direction and once at the bottom I turned round to have a look back up the escalator and phew what a relief there was Rob about half way down the escalator I’d just got off frantically waving so at least I wasn’t on my own! After attempting to stand firm in the swarm of people, I got near to Rob and as we rounded the corner there was everybody from our group all looking as shell shocked as we felt! We fought our way onto the metro train and all breathed a huge sigh of relief, a great way to bond!!! After the battle out of the metro station everybody re-grouped and to be honest I was slightly surprised with the amount of people boozing at 9 a.m., there were a few ruff and ready characters