After being up for 24 hours on the return trip we finally returned from Russia yesterday. We had a great time and even managed to hit some of the casinos in Moscow and St. Petersburg. My list may not be complete since the chips are still in Moscow awaiting shipment by my sister in law. I figured that it would be easier to mail them to myself than to try to get them thru customs with our luggage. As I said the trip was great! It is amazing how well preserved the old building are after 70 years of communism and they are making an incredible effort to restore all of the buildings. The old churches, cathederals, monestaries and museums have been fully restored and are ready for tourists. Even the subway system in Moscow is incredible. Each stop has a different theme and specializes in stained glass, bronze statues, marble carvings or mosiacs. Even the lights on the escalator going down have art deco bronze lamps. Unfortunately every site that you can see charges an entrance fee averaging about $10 per person. In Moscow a tour guide who speaks English is almost a necessity since there are almost no signs in English including many restaurant menus. St. Petersburg is more tourist friendly and there is a lot more English spoken as well as signs. To give you an idea of the quality of the museums, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg has 9,000 paintings and 300,000 other objects. Three rooms are devoted to just Rembrandt paintings and they have 2 Da Vincis. It rivals the Louvre in Paris. Anyway on to the important stuff. I was in at least four casinos in Moscow - Korona, Beverly Hills (Chuck Norris), Metelista and Alexander Blok. All of the casinos are incredibly small. Most have a few roulette tables, one or two BJ tables and a few Oasis Poker tables. Most of the casinos are no larger than 30' x 30' and Alexander Blok Casino is one room in a riverboat. In St. Petersburg I went to Panda and Taleon casinos. Panda was in our hotel, the Moskva. It is very difficult to get chips since there is no one playing at the table execpt you. You have to buy in at the cage and since they don't speak English they just give you the one or two chips that make up your buy in amount. The Panda casino had less than one quarter of the chip rack filled with chips and only had about 15 of the $.50 chips total. They even kept track of your buy in and they really looked at me funny when the chips started vanishing! Some casinos have very unusual denominations of chips such as .50, 1, 2.5, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 - all at the same casino. In Moscow, quite a few of the better casinos charge $40 or more to enter and give you a few NCV chips. There are also slot parlors separate from the casinos but none of them use slot cards. I did however get two player tracking cards after paying my admission fee. A word of warning to anyone who is thinking of going there to play. The casinos are owned and frequented by members of the Russian Mafia. You don't want to do anything to get them #####ed off at you. This even includes trying to play at the table they are at or staring at their girl friends. At Taleon Casino, the only low stakes BJ table had three chairs. The "Boss" was in one, the second was for his briefcase and his bodyguard was in the third. He was playing $50-100 per hand and 2-3 hands per round. After playing at the next table over(Oasis Poker) I asked if I could move to the BJ table or did he think that the guy wanted to play alone. The pit boss said "No problem". Unfortunately the Mafioso thought differently. As soon as I appeared he placed his bets on all seven spots on the table and glared at me. I took the hint and went back to Poker. Fortunately he continued to lose and left 20 minutes later. Thats all for now. I hope you enjoyed the story as much as I enjoyed going there to get it.