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I knew was that after a long and unfortunate sequence of standard Russian restaurant mishaps (the English menu being out-of-date, the Cyrillic menu being, as Philip put it, more of a guide to food the restaurant has historically served, a total lack of language skills on the part of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.