It was a hot night, but the thunderstorm cleared the mosquitoes.  Rob came to wake me up but it wasn’t necessary.

We left Lake Metz at about 10, bound for Moscow.  We’re still on the main highway linking Moscow and Saint Petersburg.  After about an hour we get stopped by the police.  Rob and I are getting used to this by now but for the others it’s all quite exciting.  Strangely though, having stopped us the police promptly vanish, leaving Dimitri searching high and low for someone to fine him.  In the end he gave up and we drove on.

Having crossed two state borders, we arrived in Moscow at 2.45 PM.  We checked into the same hotel where Rob and I had met Sasha two weeks ago.  This time we were on the seventh floor.  The hotel has two sets of lifts: one for even numbered floors, and one for odd numbered floors.  Last time we’d been on the second floor and the lift had been dodgy.  Now we discovered that the other lift was even dodgier – not only did it seem to randomly accelerate and decelerate, but it actually scraped the shaft wall.

Lunch at the hotel at 3.00 PM.  Rob had discovered that he left his bankcard in a cash point in Novgorod, so he went to find a telephone to phone his bank.  The afternoon was spent mostly wandering around Moscow.

We met for dinner in a basement restaurant behind the GUM.  Incidentally the GUM, Russian for “state universal store”, is a common name for the main department store in many cities in Russia, but the most famous example is the one facing red square in Moscow.  During the Soviet era, the GUM was one of the few stores not plagued by shortages of consumer goods, and very long queues often extended across red square.  Now the GUM is fully privatized and features mostly international luxury brands.

Over dinner Mike tells us one of the funniest anecdotes I’ve heard in ages, but I’d ruin it in the retelling so you’ll just have to live with the suspense.