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Arrival and information
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Arriving by
train
from London, Berlin or Warsaw, you'll end up at
Belarus Station
(Belorusskiy vokzal), about 1km northwest of the Garden Ring. Services from Budapest terminate at
Kiev Station
(Kievskiy vokzal), south of the Moskva River. If you're coming from St Petersburg, Finland or Estonia, your train will terminate at
Leningrad Station
(Leningradskiy vokzal). To get into the centre from any of these stations, your safest bet is to take the
metro
, as
taxis
tend to charge whatever they can get away with, which can be quite a hefty sum after the last bus has left.
The main international airport is at Sheremetevo-2, 28km northwest of the city centre. To avoid any hassle, or if you know you'll be arriving after dark, the Travellers Guest House and most top hotels can arrange for you to be met at the airport. The fee ($40 plus) helps avoid haggling. If you have no booking, fight your way past the massed vultures at the exit to the official taxi stand, or the Taxi Blues stand, where the fee should be no more than $30. The alternative is to get into town by public transport , which involves a two-stage journey by bus and metro, and costs the ruble equivalent of under $1. There are frequent express buses into town from outside the arrivals terminal, most going either to Rechnoy vokzal or Planernaya metro.
If you need to pick up leaflets, maps and general
information
on what's going on in and around Moscow, you're best off going to the information desk of the
Metropol Hotel
, Teatralniy pr. 1/4 (tel 095/927-6000). The
Travellers Guest House
also functions as an excellent information centre. Russian speakers would do best to buy the glossy bi-weekly
Afisha
, Moscow's equivalent of
Time Out
. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Russian Federation,
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