Sunday morning we woke up early and headed to Moscow. Chad had all kinds of paperwork ready for any sort of mishap with our visas. He did the foot work for this trip since I wasn’t really all that excited to be leaving home again. This may have been the best trip we have taken. Definitely scores high up on my best trips. And I didn’t even have to take any vacation time.

Chad was working from the Moscow office with a group on Gmail. It’s a small informal office. Everyone assumes that everyone else there understands Russian. Chad and I gave a lot of blank stares this week. But he does a pretty impressive job of sounding out Cyrillic. I opted to join him for as many meals as possible since the hotel we stayed at charged $70 for breakfast. I got the impression that they expected us to be high-rollers or something since we were staying in their hotel. But we like to save ourselves as much extra cash as possible.

Most of my days were spent walking around the city, catching some of the sights, reading, with a little school work on the side. My only real complaint about the trip is that I didn’t get to see and do more of the sight seeing with Chad–but we really had a great time when we were together. I got home from work and usually just wanted to watch a DVD with Elisa. Most of our evenings involved relaxing in the pool area, watching a movie and vegging out. It was great.

Saint Basil’s was down the street from the hotel. We walked through Red Square most days. Basil’s Cathedral is so great! I have really looked forward to seeing it and was not disappointed. It was bigger than I thought it would be and small at the same time. It seems to shrink when you walk towards it. It seems that most of my first impressions of Moscow reminded me of Europe’s version of Texas state. Except prettier.

Overall we had a really great time.

• Photos of Moscow