Huh…??
My best experience in Moscow could easily have been my worst.
“Would you like to come to dinner with us at Café Pushkin and then see the Spasskaya Tower international military music festival in Red Square?”
“Yes, I’d be delighted.”
“Shall we meet you at the restaurant at six thirty?”
Oh, dear. My heart sank. It was my first time in Moscow, and I had only one hour to make sense of the Moscow Metro system all on my own.
My clients had kindly given me the equivalent of an Oyster card and an iPhone with a local SIM card in it, but I had to get to the station first.
The nearest one was more than 15 minutes’ walk away, so I decided to try and get the bus. The only problem was that I didn’t know whether my smart card would work.
Fortunately, it did.
The next problem was knowing which platform to use in the Metro. I don’t speak Russian, and all the signs and the names of the stations were in Cyrillic, so it was no easy task!
Even when I got on the right train, it was very difficult to know where I was. There are so few signs on the Metro stations that it was almost impossible to see one and decipher the station name as the train flew past.
Even the announcements over the PA system were no help, as I didn’t even know how to pronounce the names of the stations en route!
I eventually had to make do with counting them. That worked out fine, and I got off at the right one, only to get lost again…!
I thought I’d be safe with Google maps, but the network was so slow that my phone wasn’t telling me where I was but where I’d been five minutes earlier!
The weather was so poor that I couldn’t navigate by the sun, and there were so many major roads and slip roads that it was impossible to cross them without taking the underground subway – which was even more confusing!
When I finally reached the restaurant, I was lucky enough to see my clients on the steps.
Phew! Never again…
The food at Café Pushkin was delicious, and my clients Dimitri and Yana encouraged me to try the local specialities and generously paid for my meal.
Before we left for the festival, their son Boris showed me round the gorgeous antique interior.
He was 12 years old, and I had come to Moscow for three weeks in September 2013 to help him prepare for his entrance exams at various private schools in England.
Everything had happened very quickly. From being told about the job to getting on the plane had only been seven days!
During that time, the only real obstacle had been getting a visa.
In return for a couple of hours online and a visit to the Embassy (involving an obligatory lie about being in full-time employment), I was given my Russian visa name. This is similar to your pornstar name, except it’s decided by the Russian Embassy. Mine was NIKOLAS UILLIAM ДЭИЛ, by the way…
Despite the travel nightmares, that evening with Dimitri, Yana and Boris turned out to be the highlight of my trip to Moscow.
After dinner, we walked to Red Square from the restaurant and spent the next couple of hours watching a succession of international marching bands play music and go through their parade ground drills in front of the spectacular backdrop of a floodlit St Basil’s Cathedral.
Better Red than dead
It was my first ever visit to Red Square, and it was quite an introduction.
I was keen to take as many photos and videos of the event as I could, and Boris was doing the same sitting next to me.
By a freakish coincidence, he had almost exactly the same camera as I did (the Nikon D800E), so we had plenty to discuss that night and for the rest of the trip when it came to photography.
The only disappointing thing about the evening was that the family decided to leave early. I only discovered this later, but there was a firework display at the end of the show. How spectacular would that have been to see fireworks over St Basil’s?!
Sadly, I missed out, and I don’t think I’ll ever have the chance again…
The bad news continued on the photography front when the weather stayed cloudy, misty, rainy and miserable for the entire trip.
I had been keen to see St Petersburg and the onion-domed churches of Zagorsk and elsewhere, but there was no point in those conditions.
One consequence was that I didn’t have very much to occupy my time. There were a couple of people that I’d planned to see, but it wasn’t possible in the end, so I spent a lot of time in my hotel room.
I got on with Boris and his parents reasonably well, and Yana very kindly provided me with lunch most days (although I could have wished for something other than borscht and black bread almost every day!), but it was a bit lonely sometimes.
I’d have been pulling my hair out if I hadn’t found a free VPN service that gave me 24/7 access to Sky Sports!
My agent Andrei was also just a quick Skype call away to sort out any problems or just to pass the time. I really appreciated that, and we met up for a curry when I got home to cement our friendship.
I did take a few photographs while I was over there. I’d seen a nearby church out of my hotel window, so I walked over there on my day off and captured the onion domes for posterity.
“It’s like an onion…”
There was another old church just across the road in a residential gated community, but the security guards at the entrance wanted a bribe to let me in!
In the absence of any exciting landscapes or architecture to shoot, I decided to be a bit more creative. I was up on the 23rd floor of the Astrus Hotel, so I got a good view down Leninsky Prospekt. I took a few ‘miniatures’ of the tower blocks first…
Mini Moscow
…and then I went a bit ‘arty’ with my zoom!
Trabants and Mercedes as you’ve never seen them before…
The only other pictures I took were of one of the receptionists downstairs called Polina. She bizarrely felt she had to ask permission from her colleagues before she would agree, but we ended up having a good chat.
We’re even friends on Facebook now, so perhaps I should’ve plucked up the courage to talk to her a bit earlier. Who knows what might’ve happened? You know what they say about Moscow girls…
I have a few other memories of my trip:
the phenomenal upload speed of my hotel’s DSL connection (23.36Mbps!);
the water pressure in the shower – which made me feel like a rioter being hosed down by a water cannon;
seeing a picture of Boris Johnson on his bike on the bedroom wall of my student Boris;
finding a Russian medal on the kitchen table that Dimitri had won for his service to the motherland;
seeing an abandoned car in the middle lane of Leninsky Prospekt;
getting through the Moscow traffic honk-a-thon every morning, when my driver would get so close to the other cars that the parking alarm would regularly go off;
trying to negotiate the return of my laundry in English with an old Russian woman speaking German!
All in all, I’m glad I had the opportunity to go to Moscow. The family were very kind and generous and easy to talk to, and I made a good friend in Andrei. It’s also another place I’ve been able to tick off my bucket list.
Now, where next, I wonder…?!
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