Warsaw and Vilnius

Warsaw is a beautiful city.  However, we should warn you at this stage that if you are looking for a visitor’s guide to any places we visit, you may have to look elsewhere (we recommended Lonely Planet – other guide books are available). 

Leaving London - Baggage Issues and Train Seats

We finally said all our goodbyes last week and are on our way.  We do however have limited access to the internet and it really does feel like we have left our old lives behind for now.  We are currently lazing about in our hotel in Cologne waiting for the rain to stop before dumping our baggage at left luggage and exploring the city before catching our overnight train to Warsaw this evening at 10.28pm.

The Fear....

Paul is currently sleeping for England!  If it were an Olympic sport he would definitely have had a place on the podium!  It will be the last thing he does for his country before we head off and I am somewhat relieved that he practically collapsed from exhaustion following his last day at work.  Enforced relaxation is the only way with him.  Better that he sleeps now than when we are travelling across Russia, missing everything that he has worked so hard for.

We have moved everything we are keeping into storage - we squeezed everything into 35 sq ft and now just have a few things to sort out in the final week before we set off - I'm hoping this will help relieve the boredom and also keep us off Amazon searching for last minute "must haves".

It is a strange feeling waiting to embark on this adventure, not knowing exactly where we will be heading, how long the money will hold out, where we will be living in a year, and when we will be back in England.  It is a giant leap into the unknown and with that brings a certain amount of trepidation.

Visas and Vaccinations

It has been a while since we updated our blog but, to be honest, we don't really think much of what we have been doing over the last 6 weeks or so will be of interest to anyone (even us!).  However, we have been busy and are ready to go.  It's just a shame we have still to wait another 5 weeks.....

Visas

We applied for our visas in order of need and so once the Russian letters of invitation were received, the online application was completed and I duly trotted off to the Russian Visa Application Centre near Old Street.  The process was painless and I returned 5 days later and picked up our passports with our Russian visas firmly glued inside.

Booking Trains with the Germans and Chinese Visa Issues

The 90 day deadline before we depart London has been reached and we have therefore been able to book the trains for our journey to Russia.

After much research on an increasingly overheating laptop, we booked our tickets through the Deutsche Bahn website - incredibly easy, much cheaper and, as you would expect with Germans, very efficient! 

We leave London St Pancras on the Eurostar departing at 10:57.  This means arriving at the station just before 9.00am to check in and is much more preferable to hanging around all day like excited puppies, eager to be on our way!

Multi-lingual in 9 months?

We began learning Russian in the middle of January and our Russian is going from strength to strength.  Although we are making progress with the Chinese it is so much harder but it was always going to be a challenge!

We have our homework organised for the first three months of the trip which takes the form of learning the basics of two more languages: Vietnamese and Indonesian.  We have "Basic Conversational" level courses from Pimsleur and they are ready to be downloaded onto iPods.  We hope to complete the Russian course by the time we leave London but think that we will still be tackling Mandarin as we travel through Russia and Mongolia to Beijing on the Trans Siberian.  We won't even attempt the basics of Vietnamese until around October, so that's something to look forward to(?).

All things technical... and a note from the Wooky

After grappling with Twitter, Facebook pages and finding my way around the blog, most of the teething problems have been ironed out.  The Facebook page is talking to Twitter but not vice versa.  I think Twitter are having technical issues.  Either that or I'm just not doing it right!  Hopefully all this work now will make updating and uploading photographs much easier once we're on the road.