From Russia With Love

After our first impressions of Moscow yesterday we were then taken out by Jane, a city guide who did her best to show the best side of the city. The first thing to be done was a lesson in how the Moscow Metro works and how to decode what all the cyrillic means. The underground is as noisy and shabby as the London Underground but the carriages are wider, the trains rattle along faster and the stations are higher and more cavernous. They are also highly decorated and ornate, and although we saw a couple of amazing examples of chandeliers, Jane gave us the locations of some even more impressive ones to explore later.

We then walked around the city centre and took in the sights of the Bolshoi, the old wall and the outside of the Kremlin. Moscow’s heat wave continued unabated, and although it is a lot cooler than the week before, it still stated 38C on thermometers and it felt just about as hot as Bangkok gets at Songkran. We dived inside what used to be a sumptuous dance hall salon, but is now a Muscovite version of a Tesco metro, past statues and monuments and down to the gates to Red Square. Unfortunately they were locked (see next post) but Maisie and Harry made a wish on a traditional golden square outside the gates. You flip a coin and if it lands eagle side up, then your wish will come true- both Harry and Maisie were lucky! Maybe their wishes were granted, as we headed for Moscow’s biggest toy shop, spread out over four floors.

We were pretty exhausted with the heat and had tried drinking copious amounts of water, summer smoothies and ‘kvass’, a kind of non alcoholic beer made from bread. We dived into some shade in a little restaurant behind the Bolshoi and I felt a little better after a couple of glasses of ice cold Baltika beer. We had a lovely meal, sitting outside and people watching (every few minutes Maisie would point at a questionable dress sense and shout ‘Fashion Police!’). Then the waitress brought out some deserts as a ‘gift’- how lovely! And delicious they were too. We headed back to Chekovsplaya Metro and took the Metro back to the hotel, exhausted, but glad we’d seen another side to Moscow.