It seems i am becoming a Russian because the 31h long train ride from Ekat to Moscow flew away very fast, a never thought about that it was too long, and even disappointed when arriving to Moscow at 6am. In Moscow i was a little but undermotivated to do anything, so i went to park Pobedy (Victory Park) to chill out in the nice weather, i visited war technics open air museum, that's quite interesting and objective (vehicles from all sides with adventages and disadvs.). I stayed in a not so good hostel, on the second day i went to the center to buy some missing souvenirs and hang around Kremlin. In the evening i left for Minsk, the trip is not so long there (8hrs), and (sorprisingly for me) there is no border control.
I had no idea how Minsk looks like (i didn't even know the corrency and the time zone), but i was radically positively surprised. The center of Minsk is as clean and developed as any western european city (even cleaner). I don't tell about Minsk more, i just strongly recommend everybody to stay one day there (or two), the visa costs 20 euros, lot of things are written out in english and tourist sites are very well maintained.
In the evening i took a train to Vilnius, the border crossing was not easy on it. The Belarus girl, how was performing the joint Russian-Belarus control, had a lot of stamps and a lot of visa-passport originality checker devices as well. unfortunately she did not really want to use the stamps, just the devices, for more then 5 minutes in my case. So the train was running late and in Vilnius i had 11 minutes to run to the bus station, ask how much the ticket to Tallinn is, run back to ATM and withdraw the naccessary Lithuanian money and run back to the bus. I made it, so in the morning i was in Tallinn, 11am in Helsinki after Viking Line ferry ride. In the afternoon the summer course bus departed to Vierumaki, the next post will be about the course and about Vierumaki.
