space dogs.

'Bolik', and 'Substitute for Missing Bolik'* are just two of the great Soviet space dogs. Bolik's replacement was rounded up in Moscow when Bolik escaped, not wishing to be sent into orbit in a tiny capsule with nutritious goo for food, no room to turn round and just a saucer-sized window from which she could get a view of the earth no dog should ever have. The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was surely one of the bravest men to have ever lived, but he couldn't have done it had it not been for Bolik and her friends.

There were actually more than 50 space-dogs rocketed up by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the space race, in various Sputniks, at a time when the USSR's space agency was years ahead of NASA. Bolik's most famous friends were perhaps Belka and Strelka, two little jack-russelish strays that I had the pleasure of meeting last Sunday (in taxidermied form… much like meeting Lenin really). Belka and Strelka returned safely to earth, as did most of the other space-dogs including Little Curly and Little Blackie. Despite their survival, it's hard for a dog lover to be too enthusiastic about these Soviet efforts when you see the size of the capsule these poor little buggers were crammed into for their missions.

At least they are now suitably commemorated. Above the Moscow Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics is a vast obelisk and the wee beasts are the first thing you see when you actually get inside. The Explorers of the Cosmos monument was actually put up following the successful launch of the world's first satellite, but I do wonder whether a little bronze Bolik and a Substitute ought to have been added to its crowning protuberance after their grandest of adventures.

*remember to check your balls.

matryoshka adventure to kazan: part two

After that, the weekend was very lovely. If you ever find yourself in Kazan, definitely go and see the following things:

The Kremlin. Philip and I now expect there to be a kremlin in a city in the same way we once expected there to be clean tap water. A 'kremlin' (or in Russian, 'krem-l') is a 'citadel or walled centre' found in Russian cities and they were historically administrative and religious centres, sort of a tiny city within a city. The most famous one obviously is in Moscow but other important Russian cities have still preserved theirs – in fact, the kremlin in Kazan is a UNESCO world heritage site (the Russians were clearly proud of this and presumably that's why they got the word 'UNESCO' engraved all over it.. slightly missing the point maybe, but never mind).

The interesting thing about the Kazan Kremlin is that by far the most striking building is a mosque. Well, all the cathedrals in Russia have the trademark Sultan-of-Arabia-style onion domes and so arguably they all look a bit mosque-y (not my finest observation but whatever) but the real mosques had a very different quality. Still obviously treasured buildings, but much simpler. Apart from the one in the Kremlin though, which looked like the Soviet era, the Disney corporation and Islam had decided to share headquarters and while in theory they all agreed on 'GIGANTIC PALACE' they had all ultimately been forced to make some stylistic compromises.

I liked it! Philip did not. But the Annunciation Cathedral and the Syuyumbike Tower were pretty spectacular too, and it was a windy day, sun lowering, dark clouds rolling across the sky = ideal epic photo shoot conditions. I was delighted. We haven't had epic photo shoot conditions since we climbed Kilimanjaro and I couldn't really appreciate it then because of minor irritations like the fact that there was no oxygen and my brain was shutting down.

The unexpected cathedral. I don't know what this one was called or even really where it was (note to self: never write for travel guides) but during a Sunday morning walk around the city we followed an increasingly shabby road and ended up quite far out of the centre in what looked like a huge construction site where nothing was actually being built – and right in the middle of it was this:

We walked up some stone steps that appeared to lead to nowhere in particular but were ideally placed for a better view, and stood on a platform with an old Tatar man who was standing so still that it looked like he'd been posited there by a tour operator to make Tatarstan look more authentic. And we met a gorgeous stray cat, which kept nudging my boots with its face and winding itself around my legs. Stroked it, looked out over the cathedral and the big mess that surrounded it, and felt very peaceful. You know, in that stroking-a-cat-and-looking-at-an-unexpected-cathedral-from-a-height sort of way.

National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan. The building itself was beautiful 19th century affair, much like so many of the buildings in Kazan, which give the city a crumbly Venetian sense of once being magnificent and prosperous and now tragically.. not. With a judiciously-employed money injection from the government and a bit of a tidy-up tourists would be flocking to Kazan in droves and the Lonely Planet would be referring to it as the Salzburg of the North, or whatever. At the moment though, it's a bit seedy.

Anyway, back to the museum. For a museum where all the information is written in either Cyrillic or Tatar (Tatar being the equivalent of Welsh, in that signs etc. are written in both languages in a kind of pointed way) it was surprisingly interesting! Mostly because they showed you examples of national dress through the ages and I loved what the women wore. Particularly stunning was a 17th century shin-length pleated fringe skirt and velvet waistcoat in baby pink and wine - so hot right now. There was also a small but fantastic collection of Russian art tucked away on the top floor, which alone would have made the trip worthwhile.

So yes, some wonderful things to do. But equally importantly, definitely do NOT:

Book tickets to a jazz concert called 'L.O.V.E.' because you can't find tickets for the opera or ballet. The lead singer of the band will be drunk (apparently very common at local concerts in the provinces, no matter how prestigious the concert hall), he will swagger about as if he is the next Frank Sinatra even though he has less charisma than a paper clip, or a.. pencil sharpener (yes I am writing this at work and casting about my desk for inspiration - fail) and no matter what note he tries to sing he will always hit the same one. Bad times. Luckily he let his hugely talented backing singers do a couple of acapella arrangements and they were so good it was almost worth going. And I always enjoy watching elderly Russian women knock back pre-concert vodka shots at the theatre bars. If Philip makes me go to any more jazz events I will start doing the same. No really.

Use the toilets in the shopping centre. Again, Kilimanjaro springs to mind. Except that was waaaaay up a mountain in Tanzania, and this was in a self-professed European city of culture. And just.. how can a shopping centre with an Ecco and cafes serving freshly squeezed apple and carrot juice also have a long-drop? How?

Go for longer than three days. We arrived on Thursday night and by lunchtime on Sunday, it was definitely time to leave. It started to freak us out after a while, the combination of familiarity and strangeness, trying to understand how and why it was like Western Europe but not, and like Russia but not, and sort of Asian but not. The novelty of it wears off when you realise that you're about to get on a plane, not to straightforward old England where you can reflect on everything and have a mug of Ovaltine, but to equally complicated Moscow, which is also like Western Europe but not, and like the rest of Russia but not, and admittedly not at all like Asia, but you're still just as embroiled as ever and the word 'Ovaltine' means about as much as 'accountability' or 'public enquiry' or 'road safety' or 'reasonably-priced, non fur-trimmed item of clothing' and for some reason everyone thinks that sushi is the height of sophistication à la the eighties and that mullets are the height of cool à la never.

And that was our weekend in Kazan, and another tour-de-force blog post from me. I keep meaning to make them shorter and more punchy like Philip's and totally failing.

matryoshka adventure to kazan – part one: fail

Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, which is a Russian federal state. Who knew eh? We decided to visit for the following reasons:

Reason 1. Last week it was Unity Day in Russia. Or National Unity Day. Or the Day of People's Unity. No-one seems very sure about the translation, or even the point of the day. I just asked Alexei, a guy from work, and he said:

It used to be celebration of Bolshevik Party in 1918, but now it is just celebration of unity of people. And also celebration of when Polish invasion was defeated in 17th century. It is historic day basically.

And then we both nodded for a bit. Alexei looked confused. Anyway the point is, it meant we had a four-day bank holiday weekend (hooray for unity!) and it was time to do a mini-adventure, or an adventure within an adventure, or what we in Russia like to call – that's right - a matryoshka adventure.

Reason 2. All the accommodation in all of the little towns closer to Moscow was fully booked, and we had been reliably informed that people generally quite want to go to Kazan since other people have reliably informed them that it's supposed to be nice there.

Reason 3. The guide book explained that it's an Islamic part of Russia where 'mosques and cathedrals curiously inspect each other from the tops of minarets' and I found this anthropomorphising of buildings hugely appealing. A crap reason, but there it is.

So off we went!

Our hotel was called ''KORSTON HOTEL AND MALL KAZAN' – and that's what it was: an enormous, overstated, over-marbled shopping centre, the type with information points and far too many opportunities to buy freshly squeezed juices and smoothies. A Tatarstan Westfield, if the Westfield Centre had a hotel in it, and also a selection of shops all selling that classic combination of Turkish national dress, tobacco pipes, hip-flasks and stuffed wolves. But never mind, because outside there would be a world of mosques and cathedrals curiously inspecting each other from the tops of minarets! Wouldn't there?

By the end of the evening on the first day, I didn't know and I didn't care. All I knew was that after a long and unfortunate sequence of standard Russian restaurant mishaps (the English menu being out-of-date, the Cyrillic menu being, as Philip put it, more of a guide to food the restaurant has historically served, a total lack of language skills on the part of everyone involved, me being so faint with hunger that I was about to eat the tablecloth and maybe even Philip) I had managed to accidentally order – and I can hardly bear to post this photo but in the name of Journalism I bloody ruddy will - THIS:

Note to everyone in the world: never order food at a restaurant if you don't know what it is. When it arrives, you still won't know what it is. When you eat it, you still won't know what it is. You'll think it's two large meatballs made from unidentifiable meat. You'll wonder why the meatballs are hollow. You'll crack a joke about how it looks like testicles. You'll realise as you're speaking that that's what it definitely is, and your entire life will come crashing down. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but every meal you have from then on, for the rest of your life, will remind you of the time you chewed and swallowed the fennel-covered bollocks of an animal.

Which by the way had a single cherry tomato placed inside each of them. There's something beautiful about how grotesque that is. It moves me to nausea and inspires the beginnings of retch-reflex. And when the waitress brought out another, fourth, meal that we hadn’t ordered, some sort of hideous white-cheese slop hiding whatever was underneath (the aborted foetus of a sheep? the anal passage of a cow?) and then gave us the bill for four meals, only one of which we had actually intended to order, I nearly cried*.

So we woke up the next morning with absolutely no expectations for the day ahead. Stay tuned for part two of our matryoshka adventure to Kazan, where I reveal: what happened the next day! And! What happened the day after!

*I did cry.

forest fire

I'm not really a city person. If I don't get out into the countryside regularly I start coming apart at the seams. This means that when the offer came to go and plant trees in the Russian forests that were damaged by the vast forest fires this summer, I accepted for mostly selfish reasons. I slightly rued my decision when it transpired that getting to said forests would require a three hour mini-bus journey at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Still, faint heart ne'er won fair maid etc.

I hadn't realised that in fact the fires are still burning… underground. I'm not really sure how that's possible, but all around in what's left of the woodland, smoke is pouring up through vents in the earth. My Russian friends set about pouring bottles of water into these to try to extinguish them. I stood back and inwardly praised their optimism. Acres upon hundreds of acres of silver birches have had their roots burned away from beneath and then toppled onto one another, so now their white bodies are sprawled everywhere, with their obscene blackened feet naked and on show. It is a sombre sight.

Our job, on a patch of farmland, was to plant seedlings which will be transferred into the forest once the land has been cleared of the fallen and our new trees have grown into stout saplings. We managed to plant over 4000 between 6 of us, which felt like a good day's work, until the farmer told us that his two sons have each so far (since August!) planted over a million trees. Both sons also work full time. After our now feeble-seeming exertions our host (whose purple-upholstered tractor, slightly smaller than the man himself, you can see here) rewarded us with pickled mushrooms.

Some wisdom gleaned from my experience:

1. Farm dogs and cats can be best friends, given the proper encouragement.
2. Never eat berries you find growing in the Russian countryside.
3. Never pickle mushrooms you find growing in the Russian countryside.
4. Never try to put out a forest fire with a small bottle of Evian.

five things

I've loved everything about the last couple of weeks (except for work, obviously.) Not even sure where to start, so instead, here's a list of 5 arbitrarily selected things I love about Moscow.

1. The first one is actually a view. You reach the gold-domed and magnificent if slightly chavvy Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, walk around the back of it, cross the bridge and all of a sudden you're faced with the most incredible panoramic view of the city and whatever difficulties or problems you've encountered that week all seem insignificant because at that moment you can't help but think, oh my god LOOK AT THAT GHOST SHIP.

ssome quite impressive Russian poses from Filye and Felushka

2. The opera. We went to one and I loved it. I think. Sort of. It involved a fat man dressed up as some sort of Arabic peacock (arguably camel) and I'm quite sure it wasn't supposed to be a comedy but it was VERY funny, unapologetically mad, and when the crowd took their bows there was this ridiculous, triumphant technicolour explosion of fireworks, dry ice and glitter pouring down on to the stage, wonderful. It was like my life had been massively lacking glitter and I hadn't realised it until that moment.

The audience though.. their applause was the most bizarre thing I've ever encountered at a performance. No real applause.. they just clapped along to the music. So the exhausted cast were bowing with these fixed, weirded-out grins on their faces and for their efforts they received an unsmiling audience stoically clapping along to the reprise music, beat by excruciating beat. No resurgent breaking into appreciative we're-going-now-but-well-done-again applause. Just: smack, smack, smack, smack, and then it stopped, and everyone left. Soviet era clapping. So that was totally weird. But not as weird as...

3. THIS DOG:

which I felt the need to mention only because it is one of the most stupid-looking things I've ever seen. They abound in Moscow, these tiny pseudo-dogs peeping out of their mobile handbag houses on the shoulder of their adoring bejewelled human mothers.. but they're not normally as bad as this tiny Yoda-bunny dog-gerbil. The owner: when I asked if I could please take a picture of it, she stooped to the ground, put its ludicrous little rabbit-hood up, propped the dog itself up on its hind legs and beamed at me. I took the picture and then thought.. yes. That was an extremely unusual moment.


4. The supermarket. Admittedly it has been a bit of a love-hate relationship with supermarkets so far, mostly hate. But I was in a particularly bad mood when I wrote that last post and my poppy seed phase had probably reached its zenith - the thing is, yes it's difficult to find things like cheddar cheese and worcester sauce, and yes they usually only stock ONE LEEK AT A TIME, but these things become much easier to forgive when the supermarket itself looks like this:




And sells drinks like this:

(which I bought, because cheddar cheese or no cheddar cheese, it obviously wouldn't feel like home without my favourite "English Traditions Manchester Gin & Tonic made with London dry gin".)


5. And finally, Zara Moscow. A shop I have no strong feelings about in the UK, but that's because they're not completely unironically selling THESE:

Did not buy. Massively regretting.

poppy seed cake and the deli counter: unfriendliness, rage and shame

After some dedicated weeks of scouring supermarket shelves and google-translating cyrillic I had nearly gathered together all of the ingredients required for Rachel Allen's poppy seed cake, which was the most Russian-sounding recipe I could find that didn't involve fifteen different layers or have the phrase 'bird's milk' in the title. I now had all the ingredients except for poppy seeds. Fail. I'm determined to make this cake to the point of insanity. I don't know why. I just must make it. My quest is now a long drawn out and ridiculous one that involves me going into supermarkets, picking up bread with poppy seeds on it, finding the least hostile-looking member of staff, pointing to the poppy seeds and saying 'You have?' like a retard. They don't have. They never, ever have. They glance around dully as if there might be some scattered around on the floor somewhere, and then they say 'Nyet.' And with every stony-faced nyet, part of my dignity crumbles. They don't care about my poppy seeds. Literally nobody does.

On Sunday, as a final effort, I decided to seek out the famous Eliseyev supermarket: chandelier-lined cereal aisles, gold-plated fridge sections, jewel-encrusted carrier bags; it really was stupidly ornate, and surely they since they had all sorts of totally pointless groceries they might also have poppy s… nyet. The bloody woman couldn't even find it in herself to be nice about it. Not 'really sorry, we seem to be out!' or 'I don't think so, but perhaps you could try [useful information]', or 'I know poppy seeds is the Russian element in your cake, and here we are in the most quintessentially Russian supermarket in the world, and all we eat is poppy seeds on everything, but we just don't seem to stock them or sometimes even know what they are – weird!' Just another stony-faced nyet.

So now I was depressed and so hungry I was starting to feel dizzy, and I knew that what I needed most in the world was an uplifting snack and as quickly as possible. So it was against this background that I went to the deli counter. I queued for 15 long minutes. Finally, deli counter woman looked at me humourlessly. I brightened. My uplifting snack! It was coming!

'Um,' I said, gathering my thoughts and summoning the word for 'I would like' – and then an Odious Witch bustled in and barked her order at the deli counter lady, as if my presence in the queue in front of her was an inane fact that had absolutely no bearing on her life! Like a football score! And I could just be brushed aside like some sort of small beetle! My mouth fell open. The humourless deli lady regarded me for a moment - as if some social etiquette was niggling at the peripheries of her consciousness, something about common decency, but she couldn't quite… no, she'd drawn a blank – and the Odious Witch was duly served, and the beetle was not.

I had expected to encounter a lower threshold of unfriendliness here, mostly since all of the advice given to me before I left for Moscow revolved around the central premise that if I smile too much people will think I'm some sort of lunatic. But that wasn't a massive revelation, frankly. I was actually very confident that I had, over the years, mastered the art of not smiling in situations where to do so might sound alarm bells in the minds of the people around me. Overcrowded buses. Post office queues. A crowd of people gathered around a cyclist who is lying about 8 metres away from his bike. I'm usually quite adept at playing these things by ear. How different can Russia be, I thought.

No but seriously, they said.

Oh, I said. Well. Then maybe I'll take it up a notch or two, maybe I'll extend my repertoire of non-smiling situations to also include situations where I previously might have smiled if I was in a good mood! I don't know like, handing clothes back to fitting rooms assistants. The Waterstones queue. Standing up to allow someone to get to their seat. Where they might have had a smile in London, they will have a curt nod of acknowledgment in Moscow. I will conduct interactions with sales assistants and waitresses with an air of gravitas. There would be a distinct cooling of my general demeanour.

No, they said, as in, even when you meet people for the first time and you're introducing yourself, don't even smile then.

But that's actually just rude, I said, and thus began my struggle with the cultural personality of Moscow, which came to a head right at the moment when the Odious Witch pushed in front of me in that queue, and the Rage came, I knew it would, I tried to quell it but after a month of stony-faced nyets it was so evitable it was almost prophesized, and as I walked up to her I thought (so angrily that if this thought had been hovering in text above my head, there would have been flames blazing off it) 'Let's see how easy it is to ignore me when I do THIS' - and lightly shoulder-shoved her as I walked past. I think I meant to just pointedly elbow-knock her handbag, but I must have made real contact, in the way the you might if you were trying to get off the tube and the doors were about to close, because she actually oomphed. I've just done that, I thought. I've just shoved a lady. She oomphed.

The Rage fizzled out like a crap firework, quickly to be replaced by the Shame. I dashed out of the supermarket, genuinely mortified by the discovery that after years of believing that I was well-adjusted, I was, against all odds, an aggressive anti-social menace. What else might I be capable of? I caught up with Philip and examined him anxiously from the depths of despair, wondering if he would break up with me when he knew that I was unhinged. But apparently he already knew, so we spent the rest of the Sunday much like we had spent Saturday: not baking Rachel Allen's stupid sodding poppy seed cake.

Actually, we went to the zoo and it was quite fun. Maybe I should have been writing about that instead.

the eastern front

You might think it tricky to visit any museum about the Second World War and not leave feeling depressed, but the Museum of the Great Patriotic War is not simply an immersion in the horrors of the second world war. The way the loss of life is dealt with is quite beautiful (as Nish mentions below), and also the building itself is spectacular, even inspiring. The diorama displays are painted (with one or two exceptions) brilliantly and are almost worth the visit on their own – although you'd probably have to see them to quite believe that. I would.

As Nish also points out, this is also somewhere that plenty of people choose to have their wedding photos. This seems a peculiarly Russian thing – wedding parties climb into their white stretched Hummers and then drive to all the tourist spots around and have their photo taken at each. I saw the same in St. Petersburg, where some of the photos also included a baby black bear… I can't see this happening in Oxfordshire.

A number of the photo parties were grouped around the massive obelisk between the main museum's embracing wings. The obelisk really is very, very big indeed – 142m high, with each 10cm of representing one day of the war (the war on the eastern front being from 1941-1945). It's a modern, triangular Trajan's column, with its flanks covered in high relief scenes of battle, intermingled with comic-book block lettering listing Russian cities that suffered during the conflict. I think the effect is a bit spoiled by a bronze angel near the top that is so large and ponderous it looks ready to snap off and ruin the wedding parties at any moment. We're learning, though, that in Russia, big = beautiful, and this feels like just part of an odd kinship with the USA. Perhaps if Philip Pullman had set Lyra Belacqua's home in New York then its alternative reality would be Moscow.

However, for all its grandeur, artistic flair and surprising cultural comment, the museum did not fail in its primary purpose: something we won't now quickly forget is that the Soviet Union lost around 27 million of its citizens during the Second World War. This was around 15% of its population in 1940.

tsaritsino park and the honey festival

It was the most amazing weekend.

On Saturday we went to the museum of the great patriotic war (the second world war). It has a room called the Hall of Sorrow, which had 2,600,000 tear-shaped crystal pendants hanging from the ceiling - one for every 10 Russian soldiers that were killed in the war - and big leather bound books listing all their names. A very quiet, very beautiful place. And, as a mark of respect, parked outside the museum were two enormous white limos for two separate wedding parties, each complete with outrageous Sobranie-smoking meringue-bride and weedy new husband posing drunkenly against the memorial obelisk for photos. Everything about this was tasteful and appropriate and I hope to see many more tacky wedding receptions at similar venues around Moscow – in cemeteries, perhaps, or outside a hospice.

…apparently I'm supposed to be writing about Sunday. Philip's going to write about Saturday. Oops. We're such a well-oiled blogging machine.

So. As I was saying. Sunday. It was a glorious day. The birds were singing, the sun was shining. Philip, Felicity and I all hopped on the metro and made our way to Tsaritsino park, home of Tsaritsino Palace and the annual honey festival. It occurred to us as we came out of the metro that this might have been a terrible idea. For one thing, there was no park there - just a massive junction, a petrol station and an industrial estate. It was stop-a-stranger time and I was nominated.

'Excuse me, please,' I said in my best Russian, 'where park?'

'Forward forward,' he replied, and so we obediently followed his pointing finger for a long, long time, until finally, we saw crowds of people disappearing into a tunnel. There was nothing to do but join them and when we emerged from darkness, crushed and blinking in the light, we saw a sprawling, magnificent park, glowing in the sunshine. We've either found it or died, I remember thinking, but then I saw another tacky wedding reception and meringue-bride posing for photos and decided we were still in Moscow. Hooray! To the honey festival!

Except I only knew about this festival because a) it had been advertised in the Moscow Times online as 'On until October, or until the honey runs out!' in an article written in 2008, and b) someone at work said it might be on. Couldn't find any other information about it in English. Moscow: not really a place for tourists. But Felicity, who is the second most optimistic person I have ever met, was convinced it was there, and that we'd find it. It was stop-a-stranger time and Felicity was nominated.

'Excuse me please,' she said in her best Russian, 'Where honey?'

'Forward forward,' the lady replied, pointing towards a huge mass of yellow tents in the distance and people drifting away from it carrying bags of honey jars and looking really shaky. SUCCESS!

It was absolutely incredible. There must have been thousands and thousands of different sellers, each with their own twenty or so different types of honey, depending on the species of bee, the flowers that grew locally, the strains of pollen.. and everyone was so keen for us to sample as many as possible, clear and watery, yellow and buttery, slightly citrusy, one that tasted like green fruit pastels (according to Felicity), one that tasted a bit like brown bread (also according to Felicity, who obviously has a very developed palate), one so thick and dark it looked like treacle and tasted abnormally tangy. One that just looked like loads of dead bees crushed into a paste and put in a jar, which tasted like death and brought back terrible memories. And there we were, with our little white plastic sampling sticks, for hours and hours, dipping away, loving it.

That was until about 4pm, when we realised that we hadn't had any breakfast or lunch and that all we had eaten all day was honey, and that the only food we had with us was the jars of honey we had just bought for a million roubles each. I suddenly felt unsteady. Felicity was pale. Philip looked especially dreadful, since he'd also had an entire pint of kvas, the favourite drink of many Russians and not found anywhere else in the world because it's too, too disgusting.

We drifted away from the honey festival carrying our bags of honey and looking really shaky, and wandered up to a café in Tsaritsino Palace where we ate weird meat-filled brioche rolls, too weak to care what the meat was, or even what Tsaritsino Palace was. I think it was a very impressive building. I don't really remember.

I haven't eaten anything sweet since Sunday, or as the press are now calling it, 'honeygate'. It's too soon.

russian chocolate

hello rain (or in russian: здравствуйте.. rain)

I started to feel that carrying my umbrella around in my handbag every day was becoming a bit silly. Out it came.

We squelched into work yesterday (an office full of immaculate people) Philip with his hair all plastered flatly onto his forehead and me with my sodden Kurt Geiger heels and swamped in Philip's enormous bright blue windproof jacket which came down to my knees. We looked ridiculous.

The weather had better bloody well improve this weekend though because I have visions of bright, crisp afternoons surrounded by scenes of autumnal beauty. Autumnal beauty dammit. Not cold wet misery. That, and there's a HONEY FESTIVAL on! And it finishes at the end of September! How did I not find out about this sooner? I'm so excited!

In other news, my Russian is improving so slowly that I am forced to conclude that I am some sort of idiot. I am literally mastering one word every three days. I now know 'I would like', which is 'можно' (pronounced 'mojna') so today at Starbucks I actually said 'Mojnaaa.. a small earl grey tea, please.' RUBBISH. I know 'tea', and 'please'! But apparently I can only say one Russian word per sentence! Don't desert me now, language skills. It's not a good time.

part 2: ozymandias*

Question: What to do when your CCCP goes bust and you're left with a large collection of ideologically defunct monumental statuary? Answer: stick it in some wasteland to the south of Moscow city centre, lock the gates and forget about it. Then a few years later, once the emotional impact of perestroika and the fall of Russian communism have faded a little, open it to the public. This is just what happened during the eighties and nineties, and now the Moscow sculpture park has become more than simply a home for fallen Soviet icons, and is also populated by a quite large collection of contemporary sculpture.

The park is also right next door to the Tretyakov gallery of modern art, and home to a 100m or so long tent-cum-shack which is filled with paintings by local artists. Some are quite good:

and some are… not. Saccharin kittens and pots of flowers are apparently all the rage in certain Muscovite circles.

The Tretyakov gallery itself is a big secondary-modern of a place and mostly dedicated to Russian artists. There is some brilliant stuff in here. Some of the most exciting bits are in the 20^th century sections - no-one does propaganda quite as stylishly as the Soviet Union did and Vera Mukhina's 'Worker and Kolkhoz Woman' (a large maquette of which is in the gallery) is about as good as it gets. Alexander Deineka is another worth looking at if you don't know him (I didn't). The collection is based very much on figurative works, and doesn't seem to be home to much avant-garde stuff, either contemporary or historic. Having said that, we did half of the gallery at the charge as there was nowhere at all to eat in that part of the city, apart from an ice-cream kiosk, where we filed up on caramel megas – these are highly recommended - and a 'café' selling a couple (this was their whole stock) of slices of plastic white bread with a strip of smoked (with a cigarette) salmon and a hearty topping of bright pink cod-roe (or perhaps third-class caviar).

If you want to see all this, go soon. The park and gallery are soon to be obliterated by Norman Foster's massive Orange (really).

* please forgive the pretentious title of this post

in search of the arts (part 1): saturday, the metro and the arbat

On Saturday, we decided that the time had come to start exploring Moscow properly, especially while the weather was still friendly. Yeah that's right Moscow. I know what you're about. Yes, the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Yes, I have been uncomfortably hot in my coat every day since I arrived here, no-one else is even wearing a jacket, and carrying an umbrella around in my handbag has so far been entirely pointless. But I refuse to be fooled. The blizzards are coming. THE BLIZZARDS I TELL YOU.

The guide book told us of a magical place near the river: 'the Arbat'. Popular with tourists, it boasted market stalls! Street artists! Crafts! Cafes! Interesting little shops with Things in! A place for the arts, it promised, and as it happened Philip and I were feeling quite self-important, so, after about four hours of studying the Metro map and some google maps online, we were off. Sort of. The only street map we own is so enormous that it takes two people to fold it out and hold it up (and preferably a third person to actually examine it), which means that every time we go anywhere we have to put on a humiliating street performance of unfolding, refolding, rotating and accidentally tearing. We're feckless tourists, in other words.

Luckily, people are kind here. An old Russian man with mostly gold teeth and no English language skills shuffled up to us and offered help by pointing in various directions and looking very earnest. I think he was trying to help anyway. Either that or he was trying to distract us by pointing at random in the most half-arsed mugging attempt ever. But either way, friendly.

Oh my god, though. The Moscow Metro (pronounced myet-RO) is absolutely incredible. Metro stations here are all about palatial high ceilings, mosaics, chandeliers, trains arriving on time, Muscovites looking smug. It's so reliable that the Russian police travel around on it and reformate into army lines on the platforms, and so classy that you can hire out whole stations for corporate functions and wedding receptions*. It puts the dingy, shambling, broken old London tube to shame.

The Arbat, on the other hand, was horrendous. So much for the arts: just shop after shop of lurid arcades, cheap souvenirs, hundreds and hundreds of painted Russian dolls with wide eyelashioed - I know this isn't a word - eyes in ever-diminishing sizes, Soviet-style military hats for all our Communist role-playing needs, hideous puppets in traditional Russian dress hanging limply from walls, rows of small dead weasels and foxes marketed as fur scarves, and 'antique'.. crap. 'Street artists' turned out to be the shifty-looking people standing next to stalls displaying weird pictures of boggle-eyed animals or washed-out celebrity portrait sketches. It was like Blackpool had decided to throw a Soviet-themed party and no-one had turned up.

Bewildered and faintly disgusted, we saw a MOO-MOO cafe replete with cowprint sofas, cows all over the walls and even a big toy cow looming over the dining area. In we went. A world-famous milkshake, please, to lift our spirits! Philip said. Milk-what? they replied, looking utterly baffled, and thrust a bottle of very dark Czech beer at him. He accepted it as a plausible alternative, drank the first half and then just stared at the second half. We went home.

And that. Was the Arbat.

That evening, we watched 'A Single Man' while making raspberry jelly and drinking port. Not sure why I have either of these things in my flat (as opposed to basic necessities like bread and clean water) but whatever.

*not true

Красная площадь

Sometimes you visit a place that you have seen hundreds of times on the news and in films, and the reality sadly fails to meet expectation. Not so Red Square. James Bond, Michael Burke and Arnold Schwarzenegger had totally failed to prepare me for it.

Nish and I found a quiet back-street route on our first proper tourists' jaunt, and arrived after sunset and a good beef stroganoff. Our first glimpse was of the glowing red star above the crenellated wall by Lenin's mausoleum. That had to be a clear signpost to the centre of Russia. We crossed a garden of fountains, and then entered the vast red-brick entrance to the square itself. St Basil's (of lurid onion-domed towers fame) sat at the far end, a huge light studded edifice on the left, a massive curtain wall with eastern looking fortification on our right. The square shouted 'Russia' in a strident voice, and loudly. It must be one of the most impressive architectural spaces in the world.

Curiously, the 'Red' of its name has nothing to do with communism, or with bricks. The Russian name for the square is Красная площадь (Krásnaya plóshchad), which is rooted in an old form of the language – the proper translation of the name is 'Beautiful Square'. It's certainly impressive… but you'd have to make your own mind up on the beauty question.
I looked at the light encrusted monster and made out the letters УМ, and thought, "ah! The Russian parliament!", but actually this was the major shopping centre of Moscow: the ГУМ, (Gum), not the ДУМА (Duma) at all. Actually, perhaps my mistake wasn't far from the truth… This is by far the most extravagant and impressive shopping centre I have ever been into. It puts London and New York equivalents into the shade. A good symbol of what modern Russia is trying to be, and presumably something that sets Lenin spinning every day in his squat angular tomb opposite.

Another thought, while on that point. It's perhaps surprising that the message of this place seems to be so clear – that this is Mother Russia and it's not going anywhere – when in fact the symbolism is very mixed. All over the place you can see the old Romanov crest of the Tsars, right alongside emblems of the Soviet Union (hammer and sickle), and the new capitalist state (Zara). Perhaps that's actually why the whole is so effective. In one five acre area it gives you a pretty good idea of where today's Russia has come from.

Philip.

Hello everyone! I am now the second author here in sunny (yes, sunny) Moscow. I will be helping to keep you posted about our Russian adventure.

I will warn you in advance that I am a por typist so this will be riddled with spelling mistakes... but hopefully the content will be less flawed...

babushka

In other news, the old lady/babushka/porter in the reception of Philip's building keeps trying to talk to us. She has a ghostly pallor and a burning question to ask us. Perhaps it concerns an ancient prophecy in which we unwittingly play a crucial role, or the key to the happiness and wellbeing of the masses, or the whereabouts of a family heirloom, but whatever it is it's clearly important because she asks it over and over again, rephrasing it in every possible way and becoming increasingly more upset with us. But it's not English. It doesn't involve the words 'hello' 'thank you' or 'my name is'. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to us. We politely wait for her to give up and then say 'goodbye!' and leave. It's awkward, frankly. I just hope it's not something like 'why do you English bastards keep turning up where you're so emphatically not welcome?' or 'are you aware that if you use the lift one more time the building will implode?'. Or worse, maybe she's not even the porter. Maybe she's just a little old lady who can't remember where her house is. Oh my god. I absolutely must learn how to speak this language.

more incompetence, philip's arrival and moscow by night

The supermarket. I found it. It was an enormous triangular beast of a building, '24' in neon lighting, trolleys outside, people lugging shopping bags to cars and looking deeply unhappy. Unmistakably a supermarket. I'm not sure how I had failed to find it even after a week of aimless meandering and deciphering. Decided that yet another and perhaps the most important reason for looking forward to Philip's arrival was that he had the Moscow city guide book. (I bought one for the whole of Russia, which is probably the least useful thing in the whole of Russia.)

Inside was a shopping arcade: a glittering three floors of arbitrary ware-peddling, shops selling everything, antique clocks displaying the wrong time, big slabs of wool, pen-knives, clothes, brass.. items (as in, old trombones, fruit bowls, old-fashioned steam kettles complete with hanging chain, pocket watches displaying the wrong time), dried fruit and nuts. A fresh fruit juice and smoothie stall. A shop devoted solely to teddy bears, all lined up in rows like a school choir, staring through the glass shop front, judging me with their beady eyes. You've been walking around in here for a long time, they said, and you still haven't seen the supermarket, have you? Damn you bears, I thought, you're right. Where the hell is it?

And forty-five minutes after first entering the building, I actually found it. It was on the basement floor next to the car showroom (where else) and it was divided into three sections: Alcohol, Meat and Misc. Fish were decapitated, vacuum-packed and displayed next to a tank of live fish swimming about nervously and looking a bit sick. A box of cereal cost roughly £6. Many things weren't priced, and when helpful members of staff told me the price I just nodded and reflected upon how unfortunate it was that I hadn't learnt numbers yet. It was a high-stress situation from beginning to end. But at least I have more bread and cheese for my fridge now. Yay.

Then on Saturday, Philip finally, finally arrived. It was like I was in Inception and my spinning thing had fallen over. I could stop purchasing random fruit and talking to shop window bears now. Everything was fine.

We had just enough time to get ready, jump into a taxi (ie. nervously negotiate our way into a taxi) and meet all the other trainees at a bar called Soho Rooms, which, from the guide book, sounded unimaginably excessive in a horrible but fascinating way. It was. Swimming pools, marble floors, roof terrace, sparkly girating ladies on tables, high-end hedonism in all its tacky glory. This is what Moscow transforms into at night. During the day, everything seems subdued, slightly shabby and totally dominated by billboard-driven consumer frenzy of the "aspirational middle-classes" (euphemistically so-called by almost every description of Moscow I've ever read). But at night, everything lights up in the most spectacular way, and all the average-looking people seem to shuffle back into their houses to make way for the immaculate, shimmering Russian elite who are so wealthy that they can probably settle any bill just by smirking at it.

Our approach, apparently, is to accidentally leave without paying. Oops. Just one of a million reasons to never ever go back there.

the watermelon

A sad time. My supervisor (who’s a Scottish Moscow-enthusiast, and speaks Russian with a Scottish accent in a way that I find quite disorientating) asked yesterday if I knew where the supermarket was.

And I replied ‘yes, yes’ in a reassuring sort of way, even with a little laugh in my voice, ha ha, how hilarious, imagine that, imagine if I hadn’t found a supermarket yet and I’d been living here for five days without being able to buy even the most basic groceries, hoo hoo, oh dearie me. Priceless.

NOT SO FUNNY WHEN IT’S TRUE THOUGH, IS IT. I should of course have said, ‘actually no – is there one near here?’ like a normal person who has been rendered faint and slightly woozy after living for many days solely off the stodgy white bread and processed cheese that was in the fridge upon arrival. So many days. So many cheese. So many bread. And cheese. Breadcheese. Fridge.

‘Ah, good, he continued, ‘and have you seen the street kiosks?’

‘No actually – is there one near here?’ I NOW replied, (to compensate for before? to check I was capable of framing this question? why?) and it turns out that there are many street kiosks in Moscow and that they all sell fantastic seasonal fresh fruit, peaches so sweet they taste like mangoes, watermelon picked in the Southern Republics such a stunning deep red and so crisp, cherries so.. but by this point I had drifted off into a world of exotic fruit, Madagascar maybe, or one of the “Southern Republics” (whatever the hell they might be) a glorious land of flavours, colours and textures, miles away from my flat and the fridgebreadcheese.

Anyway, by this point, I must have been starting to lose my mind. Three days of living on my own, malnourished, with just my own mind keeping me company somehow led me to believe that I had to go to a street kiosk after work and purchase a Seasonal Fruit. It was like I'd been hypnotised. I soon snapped out of it at about 7.30pm on Monday when I found myself laden with a plastic bag containing a watermelon about four times bigger than my own head and heavier than a professional bowling ball tearing into my hand. I heaved it all the way back to my flat, staggering along in my heels and ignoring the pity on the faces of onlookers - and set it down on the floor. And then sat on the floor next to it. Realised for the first time that I was now going to have to sit, by myself, in the kitchen, and eat watermelon for dinner. And dessert. And breakfast the next day. And all of the next week. Numbly, I lifted it up and launched it into my quite small fridge, which now looked as if it had been bought to house the watermelon. A lesser person might have cried. I just closed the fridge door quietly, wondering what would have been wrong with peaches, and walked away.

Tonight I’m going out for dinner with some of the other trainees (which might hopefully allay some of the dislocated first-week weirdness) but tomorrow is Find a Supermarket Day. It has to be.

tweezers, starbucks and moscow: day one

I left my flat today for the first time since my arrival. I had to, really, because I had accidentally left my tweezers in London and it was a stark choice between either venturing out into a world of Cyrillic to find a replacement pair or growing my eyebrows out and eschewing the possibility of making friends here. So there I was, on a road, map in hand, and there it was.

Moscow. Wow. How often as a little girl did I dream of one day living in an enormous, noisy city full of traffic, militia and alienation where no-one understood a word I said, everything was written in code and every fourth woman on the street was tall and whorish? But years of hard work and arbitrary life choices later and finally, finally, here I am! It just goes to show, doesn’t it.

The map was in phonetic Russian and the street signs were Cyrillic and I had no brilliant ideas about where to start so I wandered about hopelessly for a while, stopping every so often to squint at street signs, side-stepping the Muscovites charging past me, looking from map to street sign and back to map, enunciating letters very slowly to myself and wandering around more or less in circles until I happened upon a Starbucks, felt a disappointing surge of pure joy, and skipped inside.

Dangerous amounts of sugar and cream and caffeine later, everything seemed wonderful. Sod the map, I thought, thrusting it back into my handbag with wild abandon. It’s not like it has an arrow on it labelled ‘shop that sells, amongst other things, tweezers’ – in fact, it’s totally incomprehensible and all it’s really telling me is that I’m in Moscow, and I have definitely come to terms with that fact now*. I’ll just walk! And look around! And maybe go into that clinical-looking, mint-green-coloured shop that is clearly a chemist! And yes I will inevitably be forced to mime plucking my eyebrows to a bemused member of staff, but I will embrace this deeply awkward and embarrassing encounter as a delightful quirk of my new life in Russia, and I’ll also be able to buy some toothpaste at the same time, and that will qualify today as a resounding success story.

Generally though, I think I might be facing the weirdest six months of my entire life. Just one day of relentless confusion and I’m totally exhausted. Philip gets here on Saturday, by which time I hope to have:

1. successfully navigated the metro system at least once;
2. befriended the daughter of an oligarch;
3. completed a week at work without offending or alienating anybody; and
4. found out where the supermarket is.
   

Although, realistically, I can probably strike off 1 and 4 right now.


*This is a lie.