куда я хочу, туда и еду. (я гуляю как кот)

ok let's see if i can pick up from where i left it...kiev, ukraine...why you guys call it "THE ukraine" is beyond my understanding, but whatever...ukraine was fun and i was once more sad to leave kiev, where i had a good time although at the beginning the super-crowded apartment and the 2 cats kinda had me worried...oh and the sleeping on the floor...the cold shower was just a detail at this point...my hosts Y and A were really busy all the time, yet they managed to host me in the best way...i even got to go to this czech-ukrainian night at the national opera house with all these diplomats and stuff because Y works at the czech embassy as a translator...well, i ended up sitting right in front of this man and son from olomouc (cz) that i had shared my sleeping wagon with on the bratislava-lviv train! how funny!
kiev was nice, the churches and big monastery+caves really cool, although i hit my head really hard there (or was it at the internet cafe?) and i bought myself a ticket for a tour of the caves in russian, which i didn't understans anything of, when the caves were free...oh well, independence square was the best, the atmosphere there great, plus on my way to the train station i saw an amazing sunset on the dnepr (river) from the metro...
but then the train ride kiev-moscow cheered me up...from the train attendant lady smiling at me when asking me if i was from italy and trying to ask me all these questions on the train, to the fact that our "open bunk compartment" was almost empty, except for me and pascha, this cool kid who's a PR designer for a fashion company in kiev which opens up monobrand shops for several italian fashion designers...so it was cool to talk to him, and it was so much fun because he'd been studying italian for 2 months, so he was trying to use his italian and i was trying to use my russian...great times!
i have to add that almost nobody in russia or ukraine speaks english it seems, the chances are higher with younger people in general, but still very hard...plus nothing in ukraine or russia (except moscow or st petersburg) seems to be catered to tourists, because there doesn't seem to be many that are not from CIS countries, so it's frustrating at times...it's hard to read, hard to understand and people don't even make an effort to communicate it seems...they just give up when they see you don't get their answer...but oh well...plus ukrainian is kind of like russian yet different, which makes everything more complicated i think...anyway...
so then we get woken up by the immigration police for russia at 4am and i am afraid of what can happen but everything goes smoothly...and i get to moscow, the biggest city in europe, the 2nd in the world for millionaire residents (after nyc) according to forbes...
what struck me the most about the center is the evident wealth, the showing off of money and luxury and status, i can tell these are the nouveaux riches, that they recently became rich...so you can see plenty of super-fancy cars with drivers and bodyguards, H2's with the $ symbol on the rims, and tacky stuff like that...it's all about showing off that you own things and brands...it's funny because at the same time this kinda thing is aimed more at foreigners (fancy restaurants have menus in english, etc...) but at the same time even though everything is in english (the brands, the slogans, the ads,...) nobody seems to speak english here...i remember a stupid example at the nokia store, central moscow, with insane cell phones, 2 brits walk in and ask for any staff that was english-speaking...answer: there isn't any! haha
but moscow is itself is full of history, the kremlin and the red square saw everything that we learn about in history books...the red square particularly blew me away, i would be amazed every time i would see st basil's, the one church that seems to come from aladdin or something...plus it's daylight till 10pm so it's even more fun! the young hip crowds wearing italian fashion designer brands gather and play hacky sack all day, the tourists go about their visits, and policemen are always on guard...moscow in many ways reminded me a lot of paris, and for many reasons and places i'd probably put it in my top 5, if not top 3, european capitals...
there couldn't have been a bigger difference with moscow so close to it anywhere else than in the golden ring, which i visited the next day...the golden ring is the modern name for a series of little villages outside moscow that used to be, in the XII-XIII centuries, the center of Rus, when Moscow was still pretty much nothing...before the Mongols came and changed everything...
so i visited vladimir and then suzdal, rushing through the day from metro to train to bus, to another bus to then catch another bus...well, it was more like a normal minivan with 15 people and their luggage packed inside for 5 hours till nizhny novgorod, where i arrived last night in a sand storm that welcomed me to the volga region...yes, we're by the volga here, the longest river in europe...it feels like a very small town compared to moscow, although it has 1.1 mln people, also thanks to the volga that surrounds the city...i am being hosted by A and her friends and colleagues, who are awesome adventure travelers and run www.teamgorky.ru so i am enjoying my time here...i will have to leave again tomorrow night to explore the republic of tatarstan...yes i will be going to kazan, where it's supposedly much more central asia-like and there's plenty of mosques, yet it's still russia (although they're somewhat autonomous)...
it's always sad to have to leave places just when you're getting to feeling "at home" there...at home as much as you could feel in a place you spend 2-3 days in i mean...but still, just when you start figuring things out it's time to leave, onto the next unknown and never-seen-before place that you have to figure out only to leave it a couple of days after...
but this is fun! i also heard about the mavericks making the nba finals and i am stoked for them of course, although i am in the wrong timezone to be able to catch any game at all...coincidentally, the same day (june 9th) is when the world cup starts...world cup of what?? what do you mean?? ahhh :)