Moscow 2

I take it back - Moscow is no longer incomprehensible - we are starting to read the language with the help of a cyrillic alphabet and some common sense, as a lot of the words sound like the english equivalent. We have seen Red Square, walked around the Kremlin, loved St Basils cathedral (multi-coloured disneyesque), and even managed to find the International Christian Fellowship on sunday morning.

Evangelical churches as we know them are apparently few and far between and the city seems to be swamped in materialism (there are a lot of millionaires here, and the city is allegedly controlled by mafia) though the Russian Orthodox Church is still very popular and seems very warm hearted and worshipful.

We were invited out for lunch with a lovely american family from the international fellowship - a couple who run the school for missionary kids, and their daughter and son-in-law who both work for the US government. The amazing thing was, we checked out of our hostel that morning, and intended to find the next hostel after church. We accepted their offer of lunch, picked up our bags and followed them down this street, round a corner, up another road etc until we got to the restaurant they had chosen - looked up, and there right next to it was our hostel! They had led us right to the door.

This made us aware of Gods presence, which was a good thing in view of the discovery that the hostel was an absolute pit, filthy kitchen etc and i immediately wanted to check out. God got involved again however as (after a fruitless search for somewhere better to stay) we met in the hostel a great couple from Darlington who turned out to be christians (from a Baptist church no less) - Rachel and Doug. We managed to swap our dive of a room for theirs when they checked out (huge comfy bed instead of sharp springs and something dodgy stuck to the floor) and our hostel is therefore transformed into 'bohemian' rather than some sort of squat……. particularly now our underwear is strung up on a washing line over the bed. It is also the best location to be as everything is on our doorstep.

Anyway, i'm running out of battery so must finish this rambling story and go to bed. Tomorrow we get on our long-distance russian train to Siberia so no more blogging for a few days.

Love the emails and facebook messages – thank you J I’ve put a few photos on facebook now as it’s not so easy on the blogsite.