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.