Moscow

At my lovely friend Romy's Christmas last year, she, my other lovely friend Harri, her brother Tom and I got chatting about Russia.  I'm not 100% sure how this came about as we were a fair few bottles of wine (or vodka, or whisky, or something) down, but the four of us agreed in a general sort of way that we would really love to go to Russia some day.  That was that, we all moved on with our Decembers and forgot about it until just after Christmas when out of the blue the rouble collapsed.  Harri, who keeps an eye on things like currency markets, rang us and asked if we'd trust her to make all the arrangements for us while the rouble was cheap and the iron was hot!  We couldn't have been more delighted for her to do it (hehehe, someone else to do all the work) and left her to it.

Romy getting Russian with her hat!

A few days later she came back to us and gave us our tour itinerary - we were going to Moscow for two days, spending the third day travelling up to St Petersburg, and then spending two days in St Petersburg before flying home on the sixth day.  I was insanely busy at work right up to the day we went so truth be told I could barely remember what we were doing or where we were going.  Luckily the others had a lot more of a clue, so I just followed the crowd onto the plane and settled down into my seat blankly.  By this time two of our other friends, Rachel and Flora, had also decided to come along so we were a crowd of six, but we were scattered through the plane (so that everyone got the benefit of us, lucky them!).  Romy and I were sitting together in the middle and aisle seats respectively.  This is an important part of this story, because it led to our first taste - literally - of Russia.  As Transaero brought us our hunks of bread and cheese (honestly, it was worse than SleazyJet), our Russian neighbor in the window seat gave it a look of pure disgust, very politely asked us to move, reached up into the overhead cabin and pulled out the most enormous Caviar House and Prunier bag, rammed full of different types of cavier and breads, together with a couple of bottles of wine.  Having brought it down, he returned to his seat and began to sort it all out.  Once he had a few bread-and-caviar combinations and a bottle of wine on the go, he got chatting to Romy who was next to him.  I was far too involved in attempting to chew through my bread roll (which was possibly and indeed probably made in about 1982) to listen until I heard Romy exclaim "Oh, but I had a poster of you on my bedroom wall when I was about eight, you were my hero!".  This was enough to get my up from my bread roll and start listening properly.  It didn't help me much because I'm not a soccer fan, but it turned out that our seatmate was Andre Kanchelskis!  I have to admit that even after I learned this I didn't know who he was, but Romy and he were chatting all things soccer for the rest of the flight while he shared his caviar and wine with us.  It was definitely an improvement on the plane food and also, as it turned out, marked the start of a running theme for our holiday, which became a little more soccer dominated than you'd think a cultural tour of Russia might be ...

Shopping in GUM

Russia's history is absolutely fascinating.  It's been tumultuous ever since the beginning, with the rise of the tartars and the Mongols, then later in time having to contend with Tsarist rule, the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin's Communist policy and Stalin's gulags.  Thereafter it's had to entirely reinvent itself post glasnost and perestroika, which were introduced from 1985 under Gorbachev and then the revolutionary Yeltsin reforms in 1991 which in theory made it a democratic republic.  This means that in the last twenty five years in particular the entire country has changed dramatically and it's fascinating to be able to see it now, when aspects of the Communist regime are still obvious but it is very much a Western country all the same.

Harri's taste is amazing, so we stayed at the Hilton Leningradskaya ... all I can say is please please stay there.  It's the most amazing hotel, just across the road from one of the main train stations (Leningradskaya) and underground stations (Komsomolskaya).  From there, we could either hop on a train straight to Red Square, or we could walk the 3 kilometres or so in.  We arrived quite late, so the first night was just spent settling in and then finding somewhere for supper.  The Leningradskaya kindly recommended a Georgian restaurant to us, which was about a five minute walk away, and also booked us in since neither our Russian nor our Georgian was up to the task of booking ourselves in!

Once we got there, we discovered something about Russia that to us was really weird, but was definitely a THANG that flavoured our time there.  You know how we all moan when Christmas decorations come out in October?  Well, Russians play Christmas carols and sell Christmas decorations all year long.  That meant that, in April, as we sat tucking into our meal, Now That's What I Call Christmas was playing in the background.  We found it a bit weird but actually I liked it a lot - what's not to like about Christmas?!  So with Away In A Manger going round our heads, we tucked into our food.  I LOVED the Georgian food!  It was definitely stodgy, but with cheese pies, dumplings, chicken and pasta, followed up by sweeter dumplings for pudding, I didn't feel like it could go wrong.  The place itself was lovely - it felt like being in a little log cabin in the middle of a storm!

Moscow Underground

Once supper was over, it was home for an early night before we set off into Moscow itself the following day.  We woke up to the snow falling so we caught the tube in.  All by itself that was a bit of a novelty ... an underground that works in the snow?  Wow!!  The tube is, all by itself, a tourist attraction in its own right.  The stations are absolutely stunning, made of marble with statues and ornate gold leaf finishing them off.  Each one is different and they're all absolutely gorgeous.  We set off from Komsomolskaya and found ourselves in Red Square about 15 minutes later, having navigated the underground.  I'd love to say I'm proud of this, but it was super easy!

Red Square

Although we popped out of the station on the wrong side, we managed to get ourselves right and enter Red Square through the arches of the National State Museum at the opposite end of the square from St Basil's Cathedral.  The snow was coming down properly by then, but it made the sites even more amazing as we came in ... the enormous GUM shopping mall on our left, the Lenin Mausoleum and the back of the Kremlin on our right, and St Basil's looming up at the far end of the square.  Although the square is absolutely enormous, you get less of a sense of that than I'd thought, because it's narrow by comparison to its length and it's slightly cambered towards the north and south ends, so it doesn't look quite as big as it is.

Our first disappointment was that the Lenin Mausoleum was not open until May, so we wouldn't, as it turned out, be going there!  We made up for it by a warming coffee (and cooling icecream - which literally came out of the freezer exactly as it was, cone and all) in GUM and a look around the SUPER posh shops.  We went at a time when the rouble was worth very little compared to sterling and yet we still couldn't afford anything apart from the coffee and icecream!  Luckily Harri at least was  very very happy about the icecream ...!

Ice cream!

Once we came back out into the snow, we headed off to St Basil's.  St Basil's was unlike anything I've ever seen in my life - obviously, I knew that the outside was pretty unique, but I had no idea what the inside would be like.  In fact, it's as mad as the outside - it's made of seven separate churches around a central core, completed in about 1551.  Each of the seven churches is unique - some are plain, with just brickwork inside, others are ornately decorated, some have museums in them and some look almost derelict.  There's absolutely no rhyme or reason to getting about, so every corner has something new in it.  The highlight of St Basil's for me was finding a Gregorian chant choir in one of the more decorated churches - their voices were amazing and it was lovely listening.

St Basil's Cathedral

Once we'd finished up in St Basil's it was time for LUNCH!  This was definitely a highlight - Harri had pre-booked us into Nobu.  It was about a ten minute walk away, but we got to see a fabulously different side of Moscow on the way, passing by the Bolshoi Ballet (and popping in for a quick look around, but we couldn't see much) and some lovely pastel buildings around it.  We found Nobu with no problem - Moscow is super-easy to navigate! - but we were a bit early, so we popped next door for a few cocktails in the local pub.  The cocktails were brilliant - not only were there almost as many warm cocktails as there were cold cocktails, they had the most fabulous names.  All I can say is that I had a Hot Gay Honeylove.  That is all.

When we finally got into Nobu, it was DELICIOUS.  Nobu is no doubt the same worldwide, but we managed to have three courses and every single one was amazing.  The highlight was definitely Tom's dish which was a taster of loads of different things.  It looked big enough to feed the 5,000 but he rose to the challenge and managed to finish it off.  Well done Tom!

Kremlin

After Nobu we headed back to Red Square to check out the Kremlin.  To get there, we walked through Alexander Garden, which was stunning, but it was difficult for us to appreciate it given how cold and wet it was.  The Kremlin is HUGE (no surprises there, everything is enormous in Russia) and absolutely stunning.  I hadn't known what to expect but it's absolutely gorgeous, with shining white buildings and golden roofs all over the place, cobbled streets and carefully tended gardens.  The buildings contain all kinds of things, from the armory to Russian Orthodox churches.  The very last building of all is the Armory itself.  It's a two storey museum with a massive mix of things from old state carriages to historical clothing to gold and silver relics.  Truth be told, it wasn't really my thing - I whipped through it in about twenty minutes and then had a well-earned rest!  The only thing I quite liked about it was that you had to wear shoe covers.  I have absolutely no idea why, but it let me do a sort of skating motion over the carpet that was a lot of fun.  I don't think this was the intention.  I should say that the others liked the museum much more than I did, it's just that museums in general aren't really massively my thing.

By that time, it was 18:00 and we were knackered after a long day.  Harri and Tom were hardcore enough to decide to walk back through Gorky Park, but Romy, Flora, Rachel and I were of the view that the underground was a much better option.  After a quick reviving shower, we headed back out again - this time to Cafe Pushkin.  Cafe Pushkin is AWESOME!  It was opened because in the 1950s, a French songwriter, Gilbert Becaud, wrote about a cafe which he had made up in his head, called the Cafe Pushkin.  People so often asked where it was when visiting Moscow that eventually, in 1999, Cafe Pushkin opened (and Gilbert Becaud sang at its opening).  It feels like you're in an old antique bookshop, and the menu is exceptionally good Russian food.  After a delicious starter of baked pies (love them), I moved onto pelmeni, or Russian dumplings.  I can't even with the food ... it was lovely, but even more than that, the atmosphere was amazing.  Friendly waiters, good wine ... it was perfect!

We only had one more morning in Moscow before heading off to the sapsan train to St Petersburg in the afternoon.  We were all keen to do our own thing, so while Tom went back to Red Square and Flora, Rachel and Romy relaxed and checked out the spa, Harri and I headed up to Ismailovsky to check out the baby Kremlin and the covered markets.

After a few misadventures on the underground, we finally found ourselves at Ismailovsky.  We couldn't quite believe what we were seeing - it was like a whole complex which was basically a cross between Disneyland and the Kremlin.  The weirdest thing was that no-one was there.  It was a proper ghost town, so apart from the odd businessman we really saw no-one as we wandered through the little streets and checked out what was on offer in each of the buildings.  The most fun thing we found was a chocolate museum where you could learn to sculpt chocolate, but we hadn't got much time so reluctantly we chose not to sculpt chocolate, and instead pottered over to the covered market.  I'm so glad we didn't spend much more time at the baby Kremlin because the markets were amazing!  There was soooo much to see.  The very first stall we saw had the ubiquitous Russian dolls, but we also got to see how they were made there because the owner was half-way through sculpting a new set.  The thing about Russian dolls is that we're used to the standard ones that look like, well dolls.  However, that is NOT the end of it - in Russia they have them in the shape of all kinds of things, from dogs to cats to rugby players to satirical versions of Putin and other world leaders.  They're loads of fun, but both Harri and I preferred the standard version for ourselves!  We did buy a cat version for our buddy Selina who hadn't been able to come with us though.  As well as the Russian dolls, you could buy almost anything you could ever think of - furs, rugs, Christmas decorations (of course!), furniture, homewares and jewelry.  We stuck to the dolls, but only because we had to carry everything!

The sapsan to St Petersburg leaves from Leningradskaya which was perfect for us.  Back to the hotel to collect our luggage, a quick stop in the station to pick up some lunch for the train, and we were in first class on the train being whisked off to St Petersburg at - extremely - high speed.

It was a whistle stop tour of Moscow and with retrospect I wish I'd stayed longer, as there is so much there that I'd like to see.  My major impression of it is that it was such an exciting city - not necessarily the most beautiful or with lovely architecture or anything like that, but so buzzing and lively.  It had a similar sort of feel, to my mind, as Rome or London - a city with such a long history that was constantly adapting to its next phase, and the people in it excited to adapt with it.  I loved Moscow and I can't wait to go back!

Me and Flora trying to keep warm and dry
 ... not massively successfully!