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I left the obshezhitie as early as I could this morning to take the elektrichka to Moscow. There was just enough time to queue for a ticket at the train station and find the right platform before 10.15. It was another journey of three hours - the scenery between Tver and Moscow is ugly, with factories and dirty grey buildings on both sides of the track with only a dozen pretty wooden villages to make amends.

A life less ordinary.

Jonathan Campion
2006-08-21 11:50:36

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something routine and I appreciate it more whenever I am here. British people living in Moscow are my role-models and I envy their lifestyle, but I don't feel confident enough in myself to join them.

We walked to the end of ulitsa Tverskaya. The area near
The horse fountain, Aleksandrovskii gardens. Full Image
Pushkinskaya metro is essentially a giant billboard, with neon signs advertising Pepsi cola, Rambler internet and Nevskoe beer on the top of the buildings. The last time I spent an afternoon the temperature was minus 5 degrees and icicles were starting to fall from rooftops; today it was plus 15, with a cool but heavy breeze.

Outside the National Museum, near the horse statue, two Lenin impersonators were entertaining the crowd. One was eerily similar to Vladimir Ilych, with a black cloak draped over his shoulders, a pointed beard and the passionate hand gestures as he stomped around. The second was a fat man in a suit who had dyed his beard ginger.

The minute we walked through the gate to Red Square I found out that I had left my memory card on the kitchen table. Of all the places in the world to have a camera in your hands but not be able to take a picture! I will come back on thursday, to take some photos and break up my week of essay-writing. The courtyard looks different from how it did in winter, it is bigger now somehow, but is still as magnificent as ever and is packed with people. From Red Square we walked through Aleksandrovskii garden, a park with flowers and fountains that borders the Kremlin.

We lost track of time and had to rush to the nearest metro station so I could try to get back to Leningradskii vokzal for 6.30. With ten minutes to go we were still on an escalator, and I decided that for the sake of getting back to Tver a bit earlier it wasn't worth the stress of running from platform to platform. So we gave up the chase and said goodbye at Tsvetnoi Bul'var - Helen was going to a banya (sauna) with a friend in the evening - and I walked around on my own for an hour.

When 8 o'clock came I slumped into my cold metal bench on the elektrichka, rested my head against the window and put my feet on the seat opposite. Moscow always makes my head tired. I was almost asleep when a man shook my shoulder and told me to move so he could sit down. Then he patiently stared at me until I wiped my footprints off the seat for him. If he wasn't twice my size I would have told him that the carriage was half empty and he could find somewhere else. The rest of the journey was as dull as it was on the way.

It was midnight before I got back to the obshezhitie. It felt as if I had been away for a weekend, it didn't seem possible that I had only left in the morning.