Peer reviews and research (beware the gorge!)

I've mentioned this trip to a fair few colleagues at work now, and it seems people generally have one of two things to say about Russia:

• nothing; or
• a distasteful story.

One guy told me how he went through Vyborg (one of the first towns on our way into Saint Petersburg) and witnessed a hefty (car to car) drug exchange in daylight, full sight, no qualms.

Another told me how he transited through Moscow and it was rather unpleasant.

And I even know of a friend from uni that got arrested there.

WHAT AN ADVENTURE WE'RE GOING TO HAVE! 😆

I remembered that some guys at uni got a taxi, kitted it up and undertook the challenge of breaking the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's longest taxi journey (It's on the Meter - Wikipedia). Part of their route went through Russia and there's a book of their anecdotes that I gifted to Tony when we first got to talking about trip antics: It's on the Meter: One Taxi, Three Mates and 43,000 Miles of Misadventures around the World: Amazon.co.uk: Archer, Paul, Ellison, Johno: 9781849538251: Books. I vaguely remembered they had a load of videos of each leg on YouTube so sought out the clips for the towns that we'd be going through. Alas, this was a good while ago (a decade, I can hardly believe!) and the content seems to have been taken down since. I got in touch with one of the guys that went on the trip to see if he had any pearls of wisdom and figured it was time for me to do my own research...

One of my closer friends at work had also mentioned a book he had on Russia that he brought into work for me and I ordered a couple of Lonely Planet guides (Yes, I know we have the internet but I'm much more of a paper-in-between-my-fingertips kinda gal).

Girl's got some reading to do!

I have a tendency to go IN (too deep) and have had to go careful not to gorge/over do all of this research (Gorge is coincidentally Tony's nickname so there's a little play on words in this entry's title :-D) but my daddio's words echo in my mind: "forearmed is forewarned".

I've stickytabbed and made notes of a few things I'd like to do/see from the railway book (we're doing the route by van but it follows through towns along the same path, more or less) and I've started reading The Big Read Train (the book my friend brought into work), that was published in 1978 (Soviet era).

Just from what I've read so far, I'm fascinated. This country has such an interesting, complex history and I'm really looking forward to seeing and feeling this through its diverse infrastructure and architecture.