I think this was the part of the trip so far that we were both the most excited about. We were to board the Trans-Siberian train in Moscow, and would not be getting off for over 5000km, a journey which would take 86 hours, spread over 5 days. We had a 2nd class 'Coupe' compartment, meaning we had a small room with 4 beds in it, basically a set of bunk beds at either side of a small room. During the day the bottom bed is used as a seat, there is a small table and storage space below the bed. Apart from that there is nothing else in the room. The compartment measures around 6 1/2" x 5 1/2". We had no idea who we would be sharing this with. There is a restaurant car to escape to if you fancy a break every now and then. Also the train stops every few hours for 20 minutes or so. During this time you can hop off and buy various foodstuffs from people on the platform. It's not a great idea to flash laptops and other expensive items around on the train, so this post will be a little different from the rest. ...

We arrived in Vilnius at 5am after an uncomfortable night of broken sleep and numb body parts on an overnight coach from Warsaw. The journey had been going well, we'd managed to get the whole back seat to ourselves and I'd been asleep for a couple of hours but at 1am I was woken suddenly by a scary lady slapping my legs and shouting at me. I guessed she wanted me to move up, so I moved over to sit with Andy and for the remaining 4 hours it was all but impossible to get back to sleep. The lady in the chair in front was rather large to say the least and every time we went over a bump, which was about every 5 minutes, her chair bounced back with the weight an banged into my knees. I thought the whole chair was going to collapse and she'd crush me. What a nightmare. We made it alive though and luckily our hostel, the Old Town Hostel was not too far from the station. We dropped our bags off and had a snooze in the common room until our room was available. The room turned out to be really nice. Practically a ...

We left Berlin from the Hauptbahnhof station which is absolutely incredible, like an enormous machine with trains on different levels and a central kind of hub of shops, escalators and lifts criss-crossing above and below you. It was all really well organised as well, you could pretty much guarantee the train was going to arrive exactly the minute it was timetabled to. The train itself was pretty cool, quite old school. We were in a carriage with two other people, one of which kept trying to talk to me despite the fact I clearly had absolutely no idea what she was saying. Going to have to get used to that I suppose. It was funny, I think crossing over into Poland was the first place I've been that really seems very different. An announcement would go off sounding like someone shouting something very important, but you would have no idea what. And every half hour or so a guard would come round to check you tickets, again shouting something completely incomprehensible. We saw this great sign by the emergency stop devise. Loving the translation. Before we left we'd joined couch-surfing and Warsaw was to be our first go at it, so ...

For the next couple of months Egg But will be switching back to a kind of foody travel blog as Andy and I have finally set off on the big tip we have been planning for so long. We've been on the road now for 13 days and are currently in a beautiful snowy St Petersburg meaning stage one of 'Big Trip' is complete, so it's definitely time for a post before we head off on the 86 hour train ride from Moscow to Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian. We've really been having a great time, and so much has happened though I'm not sure where to start. I guess it's best to just start from where we began, in Paris and some pretty exciting news. We spent the first couple of days in Paris with our friend Bruna wandering around aimlessly and drinking incredibly expensive beer. With an exchange rate of practically 1 to 1 the average price of a drink was about £6! And that was just for a half! Ouch. This was more than made up for though with the amazing magical atmosphere of Paris at Christmas. The Champs-Elysees had a Christmas market running the length of it and the ...