Travelog

This diary tracks our progress along the Silk Roads, with episodes appearing in date order, most recent first.  You can get to earlier entries by turning pages at the bottom of the screen.

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Category: Travelog

I am fighting a cold war in Moscow! Its a real stinker and I'm sure means that I'm rotten company.  Bah humbug.

Actually Moscow is continuing to be fantastic.  The night before last we had a huge thunderstorm - the sky was lit up and thunder cracked for hours.  The mugginess of the day before vanished completely leaving fresh sunshine the next day, when we failed utterly to get into the Kremlin.

We did manage it today though and it was fantastic!  However the star of the show was the Dresden green diamond, part of a temporary exhibition in one of the catherdrals that we were lucky to catch.  Plus I got to see real Faberge eggs that are very beautiful.

I'm very excited becuase tomorrow we travel for almost 3000 km (27.5 hours) by train to Yekaterinburg, the gateway to Siberia.  I've never been on a train for that long and given my cold it will be chance for some much needed R'n'R - I've bought a Pratchett (Thud) specially!

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We had a lovely indian meal last night at the local veggie Krishna cafe, Andy had a huge thali and I had lovely veg pakora with mango sauce, and best of all, they did BURFI (slightly Russian style, with pine nuts in).  A top meal all round, slightly preceeded by us buying some books in the English bookshop opposite for the 27hr train journey we have tomorrow to Yekaterinburg. 

Andy has a stinking cold at the moment, but that hasn't stopped him insisting that we try to get across Russia without going on the trans-siberian train route.  Does this sound like the Andy you know and love?  Anyway, needless to say we are booked on the No 16 train at 4pm tomorrow which goes south throughthe Urals and is very beautiful apparently, but not at all trans-siberian.  I'm sure there is more fickleness to come.

We went to the Kremlin today, having lunched it out badly yesterday.  We paid about 850 roubles each to get in.  That's most of todays money gone then!  The cathedral square has more cathedrals than are strictly needed in any one place, but they are very beautiful, with delicate C17th murals depicting biblical scenes in surreal and bizarre ways, right up to the dimness of the roof far above.

We also decided to try our luck getting into an exhibion that we weren't sure we had paid for.  More bling than you could shake a gangsta rapper at.  We saw the Dresden Green diamond.  We did, we did!!!  It was beautiful, delicately coloured HUGE diamond in a hat pin thing.  Really, really sparkly.  There were lots of other things there, but that not only took the biscuit, it absconded with the entire luxuary assortment.

We also went to the Kremlin Armoury, which was almost equally fabulous, but we were quite treasure-fatigued by this time and enormous gold plates, massive emeralds the size of stones in my garden, more pearls than rain and more diamonds than stars in the London sky were just, y'know, things.  Nice things, mind.  We missed the Diamond fund exhibition with the really good stuff in though, due to the fact that you don't know it's there or that you have to spend another 300 roubles getting in until you pass the exit! 

Off home now, might go to the market to get omething to eat for dinner, otherwise, it's catfood.

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The Russians seem to have a passion for shoes.  Definately, shoes take up quite a lot of the Russian psyche.  Every other shop is a shoe shop, selling the brightest, most teeteringly high heeled and pointy toed stillettos you can imagine.  Or vertiginous wedgies, or outrageously spangly sandals soaring across the window, or eye-watering designer trainers, or lofty boots with lacing and fake fur in improbable designs, or different scandalous sandals with things that tie up your leg and more diamante, chains, and metallic leather in strange colours than you can really, by rights, fit on a strappy sandal and still walk.  Even the men's shoes are pointy and come in heels and colours that no respectable Englishman would conceive possible.

I know why UK fashions are called, at best, stylishly restrained, or possibly really dull, depending on your point of view.  Although lots of people here wear jeans (when I came 20 years ago, we stood out a mile for wearing jeans, now I stand out because I'm not), lots of women, of all ages and especially in the 'burbs, wear skirts, tops and dresses so bright, frilly, lacy, flouncy, sheer, patterned, laced, leather, floaty, leopard skin, crocheted, whatever, often all at once, that I feel like I am walking though a completely outré wedding.  Well, often I am walking though a wedding.  The tradition here is that the wedding party goes to local landmarks and has photos taken. I saw a bridesmaid in a tigher-than-skin fishtail dress with train, bright purple, only some very thin lacing up the 'back' (read: anything that's not actually front) between her and gravity, wandering though Red Square with her party, stillettos slipping on the cobbles.  Now that's a change from the Gorbachov era.

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I keep having "that wasn't there last time I looked" moments.  I'm not talking about  obviously modern buildings, or small time changes.  This huge church wasn't there 20 years ago.  No, really.  Or this city gate with the two pointy roofs. Right by Red Square.  I'm sure that I wouldn't have missed it in 1987, no matter how much vodka I had had.  It's quite disorientating.

General notes to self...

Moscow underground turnstiles are vicious.  Andy and I both got some inconvenient bruises and an unshakable tendancy to sidle though them nervously, before we got the hang of them.  But the metro is lovely and art nouveau as ever.  It is amazingly big and apparently carries more people each day than the London Underground and New York subways combined.  Which made it something of a small miracle that we bumped into our host, Anna, at a random station last night on the way home. 

Russians like cakes (like they like shoes).  Pictures will follow, especially for Nic!

They also like pharmacies, called Apteka (think apothecary).  Shop ratios are roughly Shoes:Apteke:Cakes:anything else 10:7:2:1 as far as I can tell.

 

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Well the market in SP bore good fruit, specifically: tomatoes. Huge deep pink fleshy beef tomatoes the like of which I have never tasted before.  We ate them at Peterhof which we did go to by boat, and it was indeed splendid and in the same vein as Versailles.  However we were so focused on the fabulous tomatoes that we didn't notice the supposedly impressive fountains and water features being turned off, which we therefore missed.  Ah well.  Oh - and I fell out of a moving bus.  Nothing broken except my pride, fortunately, although Ellen rather ungenerously suggests that I cracked the paving slab that stopped my fall.

On Thursday we spend a good couple of hours in the hermitage museum in the afternoon, which was nowhere near long enough.  Many visits are required for this amazing place, which is set partly in the former imperial Winter Palace.  When it comes to lavish opulence the Tsars had certainly cornered the market - huge marble rooms with malachite pillars, lapis lazuli urns taller than I am dotted around, beautifully patterned floors and more baubles, trinkets and assorted Russian plunder than it is possible to count.  I was quite awe-struck by the place and then spotted the arrow upstairs to 'Eurpoean Painters'.  Well, I thought, I'm in Russia and the Russian stuff is pretty spectacular, but the Eurpoean art can't be up to much - its just an add-on.   A couple of second-rate watercolours at best.  So there I was a few minutes later speachless in front of Matisse's now-iconic 'Dancers' having just walked through 2 huge rooms stuffed with Picassos.  Not any Picassos either, but really cleverly selected examples from each of The Master's main periods, so it was like walking through PP's life.  It did occur to me that this is particularly unfair; I mean, how is one's mind supposed to cope with this?  To be already dumb-struck by the sheer opulence that is The Hermitage, only to be hit with a collection of the finest 20th century masters at the end?  It is not possible to remain sane after such a killer blow.

The evening was an emotional one for different reasons.  We met again with Ellen's father's very lovely friend Elena who took us on a walk through some gorgeous woodland to the north of town up to Piskarevscoe Memorial Cemetry, where lay unnamed graves for those who dies in the war.  Next to one of these I noted its size - about 25x10 yards.  I was staggered to learn that in this space 20 thousand people lay, and when I looked up identical squares extended out to fill my field of vision in all directions.  In some ways more horrifying even than Aushwitz, maybe becuase of the sheer anonymity of lifes destroyed.  I was left thinking firstly of how much power so few men had that they were able to send so many - some towns here were utterly devestated of blood lines - to their death with just a few commands.  Secondly that this told a different story to that of Hollywood or modern western media:  the war was not won just becuase America graced us with their presence when it was almost too late; the victory was paid for in blood, and so much of it was Russian blood.