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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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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.

I arrived to the chaos of Moscow Leningradskii at 1.15, and only got lost once on the metro on the way to see Helen. My route is usually from Komsomolskaya to Novoslobodskaya and on to Tsvetnoi Bul'var so the stations are familiar, but all the same whenever I get on to a train there is still some luck involved in whether I end up going in the right direction or not. For someone who sees the Communist mosaics on the ceilings and the rush of Moscow life only once a month rather than twice a day the experience is too surreal to concentrate on anything practical.

When we met neither of us had much news but we talked a lot anyway. We had
The River Moskva and the Moscow Kremlin. Full Image
lunch at a pizzeria on ulitsa Tverskaya, then went to a bookshop next door to find some books for my project. I bought two books, one called 'Personality and Power' with short biographies of Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin, and another book about Oligarchs.

Every so often I regret not choosing to live in Moscow for part of this year. It is a city of 20 million people and as many different stories. Life here is fast-moving and modern; I'm sure that fewer days would have passed me by had I moved here in February. Maybe I would speak Russian in a different way too?

On the other hand it is good to have had the capital on my doorstep for the last nine months, a treat to look forward to whenever I have had some free time. This way walking around the city has never been ...

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