Moscow sight-seeing April 24th KM 0

We spent today doing a whirlwind tour of Moscow. Sight-seeing is sometimes best done at high-speed. It makes use of the brain's ability to process a boggling amount of inane trivia 

in a short amount of time to be then later unpacked and made sense of. That's usually why you end up feeling so knackered after a holiday. Well that and the fact you've probably spent most of it on the

 lash.

Moscow is a pretty expensive city all things considered. It has this wonderfully infernal metro underground. Like most East European

 undeground systems I have experienced, as far as train punctuality goes they are impeccable.  The problem that M and I found is where the trains go.  As we had discoverd the day before, each station has various sign-posts on it, always in Cyrillic, but the name of the station depends on what line you are on. So even if you arrive the correct underground, one end of it may well be called a different name than the other. Whilst we were still trying to transform our ж's into zh's, B's into v's, and P's into r's, this made finding anywhere much like doing the lottery.

Our fist task was to book our onward train to Irkutsk 5185km east of Russia.  In order to do this we needed to find Yaroslavsky Station.  After a quick breakfast of lard and potatoes, we managed to navigate our way through several underground lines along with the thousands of Moscovites.

One thing I feel I must mention here - well several things actually - is the small differences between the underground in Moscow and London.  For instance: by default the turnstiles you walk through are open, whereas in London they are closed.  It is only when you fail to swipe your ticket do the stiles close. Close, as it were, in a frenzied demonic fashion as if some creature from hell is trying to disembowel you, however this fact notwithstanding, think of how much energy is saved by not having to open the stiles each time a person enters or leaves.  Pretty efficient I must say.  Another thing I noticed were the doors into the station.  They operate manually.  Also they are counter-weighted swing doors.  This means that everytime you push and let go of a door it flies back - with considerable speed - into the face of the person behind you.  Now from the point of view of a repressed, neurotic, English person (who has been brought up an Irish Catholic (you can imagine the guilt weighing on my mind here)) who spends their life holding doors to people out of politeness - as we are so taught - imagine, if you will, holding on for dear life to a door that at any moment could wrench from your hands and knock several front teeth from the gums of a 10 year-old kid going shopping for turnips with their mum of a morning.  Needless to say I spent some time hanging on to doors...

We finally found Karzarsky Station: A small quaint little place, somewhat larger then Waterloo and Victoria put together.  We began to hunt for an office from which we

 could purchase our onward tickets.  This ended up being no easy task.  In fact it turned out to be an exceptionally difficult task as nobody, and I mean nobody, had the slightest idea of what we were asking for... it didn't help either that we were in the wrong station.

... We are very close to giving up.  This is not working out.  M is so frustrated she is nearly in tears.  There are thousands of people milling around us and yet no-one is willi

ng. or able, to help us.  I remember vaguely reading somewhere that there is no-where quite as lonely as a city of millions of people.  In this case, we don't speak the language, but in cases before, and places I'll visit in the future, sometimes the loneliest places on earth are not the deserts, the mountains, or the open expanses of sea.  They are where you are surrounded by human contact; in the middle of a crowd, in a restaurant, or a bar, and yet you cannot speak to anyone, hug anyone, laugh or share your emotions with a single soul.  I often think this is why people give up.  Not because they've lost their jobs, or their fortune, instead in one sweep of fate they have been disconnected to the basic humanity we all take for granted.  They have nothing to share their lives with.  Until you have experienced this isolation you will be unable to comprehend it.  It is truly awful.

However right at this moment, our deepest concerns are tickety ...

We managed it eventually.  We booked our seats Kupe class to Urkutsk.  Four days on a train.  It left at 11:30pm that very evening.  We headed back to the hostel pretty exhausted for a respite.  Then we went to take in the sights

 It turned out to be a short stroll down to the Red Square from the hostel. It was well worth it. I felt all a bit surreal being in a place I had seen so many times on television, I'd actually never thought I'd set foot here.  The square is vast.  A huge expanse of concrete containing the Kremlin, the National State Museum, Lenin's Mausoleum, and St Basil's Cathedral.  We spent a reasonably fun, if not chilly, afternoon wandering around taking the sights in.  

Apparently the Red Square is a very popular place for wedding photographs.  Every now and then a bride and groom - usually with an troupe of guests - would appear and begin elaborate photo shoots.  One couple even turned up with a cardboa

rd box full of doves.  Unfortunalely Lenin's Mausoleum was closed.  It was a like the tomb to a saint.  I still find it weird that a republic so vehemently opposed to religion has all the ardent reverence of the worship ingrained in communism.

After doing the tourist thang for three hours we retired to a glass of wine and some food.  I can't remember exactly what I had, but I am pretty sure it had cabbage in it.

Then we hot-tailed it back to the hostel to pack.  It was here we bumped into Andy and Chris: two brothers who were just beginning there year long trip around the globe.  They were doing te double-ard bastard journey of Moscow to Beijing.  No stops... Six nights on the train.  We decided to share a taxi to the station.  We rocked up and got a beer and sat and waited until we could board our home for the next 4/6 days respecti

vely.  It loomed out of the chilly Moscow night like a huge insect.  I couldn't wait to get started.

... Andy, Chris, M, and I are boarding the train, beer in hand, in high spirtits.  The corridors are a spacious and the carriage appears very modern.  We are chatting away and at the same time looking for a cabins.  They are in 14a and 14b and we are in 16a and 16b.  Andy reaches his and pokes his head inside.  He engages in a brief conversation before retreating into the corridor.  "There are two other people in our cabin."  We were hoping to get a half empty cabin so we could hang-out as a group of four.

"Ok no worries.  Let's check ours out." I say.

Andy is at the head of the group.  He walks down two cabins and stic

ks his head into our compartment.  He pauses for a minute then turns back to us with very dead-pan look on his face - one I will come to know in future as his poker face - "Good luck with that!"  

We walk past him and poke our heads round the door.  Inside are the bright faces of a newly-married Russian couple and their fifteen-month-old baby...

April 23rd, Moscow, KM 0

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.". So waxed Mr Churchill in a radio broadcast in 1939. Russia has always existed in my mind from before the fall of the Iron Curtain: frozen in time as a place of mythical oddness. A distopian state of uniform ideals that didn't quite work. A place of turnips and Ladas. Of cold, dank, streets and endless blocks of dreary buildings filled with people with their souls crushed. Dark-eyed and haunted people who move as if asleep, their realities forced into someone elses waking dream, that has become their waking nightmare; much like B&Q on a Sunday morning, but without the elevator music. Things have changed just ever so slightly...

We got into Moscow at around 9:30am. The train was late. Some deep - and probably misplaced - stirring sense of patriotism felt a bit grateful that at least the UK wasn't the only country in the world that had problems with trains. The night had passed uneventfully. Apart from passport control at around midnight. We were boarded by some very stern looking female soldiers who proceeded to scrutinise our passports and luggage before giving us our entry forms to fill in. I was surprised I didn't get my head patted at the end of it. Getting a Russian visa even now is by no means, easy, or cheap. It also required us to get an invitation from someone within Russia. This turned out to be something we could get from a hostel. The invitations were emailed to us for the trifling price of twenty hinglish pinds. They looked like something my 2 year old cousin could do with mspaint. The joys of being ripped off via cultural differences.

Moscow is an amazing city. To say it is vibrant doesn't really do it justice. Perhaps vivacious, colourful, resounding, pulsating, thrusting, sonorous, vigorous even! these words may be more apropos. God, I thought, why am I describing this place using sexual metaphors? I need to lay of the Viagra. It has been inhabited for over a thousand years. Razed by the Mongols in the 13th Century it was slowly rebuilt and in 1326 it was made the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was enlarged greatly during the reign of Ivan the Great and further flourished under a great many successive Tsars, most famously Ivan the Tewwible who ordered the construction the weird and wonderful St Basil's Cathedral, known to Victorian travellers as the Pineapple. Napoleon sacked the city in 1812 during his invasion. He crossed the Niemen river with 650 thousand men in his Grande Armée. less then 200 thousand returned. Many died after the victory, during the retreat back along the road to France. Walking on frostbitten toes, they marched out of Russia, rags of uniforms hanging from diseased infections. Walking cadavers, insanity and hunger driving them off the roads into the forests, where wolves and Cossack soldiers were waiting. Must have been fun. Napoleon was the last to do any serious damage to the infrastructure of the city. Most of the city's buildings come from after this period. The next major forming event here was the revolution of the late 19th century, and again in the 20th century. Heralding Lenin and his Bolsheviks, and then Stalin. Modern Moscow seems a bit tame in comparison. But hopefully fun to explore, however time, as always, is against us. We only have 36 hours.

We emerged into Kievsky Station looking for an Internet cafe. We'd booked ourselves into a hostel online and now we just had to print out the directions that we forgot to print out before we left the UK and then again in Latvia. This was our first obstacle. No speakski Russian, and no Internet Cafe in sight. We spent a joyous four hours walking around with 20kg packs on our fronts and backs, looking like the sumo wrestling puppets from It's a Knock-Out. We got to the Red Square, and still couldn't figure out where we were on the kack-map we had. we walked-up-diddly-up-up, we walked-down-diddly-down-down. Oh the fun we had.

...The map is next to useless. It's not to scale and the land-marks don't make sense. It's got nothing to do with the fact I can't read it properly. We are looking around for the umpteenth time for the Internet cafe marked in a shopping centre we still cannot find. Even though there
are signs everywhere saying it's here.
Why don't we just go down into this underground station and try and ask someone again?" I venture. M is beginning to look like one of Napoleon's doomed soldiers. We haven't eaten for hours and we are both exhausted.
"Ok." She says. I don't think she really cares anymore. We head down into the station and miraculously we meet someone who speaks English. He finally enlightens us as to the whereabouts of the Manezh Shopping Mall. It's subterranean; we've been walking on top of it all morning. Nice. Oh, but the Internet cafe is closed...

We finally got some food and our bearings, not to mention our marbles, and located the hostel; four and a half hours after arriving in Moscow. We checked in and promptly passed out for three hours in our room. I woke up first, feeling more than a little disorientated, and decided to get a beer - well, I was on holiday. Ten minutes later I had to have another lie down again. M got up about an hour later and we both had a sit down and a pow-wow about the next 3 weeks. We realised we had not really planned a decent itinerary for our trip across Siberia, and given the amount of time we had to play with, things were going to be pretty tight. The main problem we realised was that train departures from certain cities - such as Urkutsk and Ulaan Bator - were subject to fixed, bi-weekly, timetables that could potentially affect where we could stay. So that evening, instead of sight-seeing, we sat with pizza and beer and did some serious planning. The hostel was pretty busy that evening as a group of models had booked in for a photo-shoot. They spent most of the evening prancing around half-naked and draping themselves in door-ways and looking sultry; and that was just the men.

... M and I are trying to sleep in a dorm-room full of chaos. There have been people in and out all evening. We have been watching Dexter - the American TV black-comedy about the serial-killer - and now we are trying to sleep. I have been woken up again, this time by snoring. I am pretty sure it is the rotund American guy we were chatting to earlier on. It sounds like a hippo on heat. I lift our little tent-flap we have fashioned for some privacy to discover it is actually one of the models, a female one, (about a size 6). I spend the next 10mins digging out my earplugs. How did she manage to fit a pair of lungs into that torso? ...

April 22nd 23rd Riga to Moscow

We jumped on the train at 14:30. We were due to arrive in Moscow early the next morning. There are typically three types of class you can travel on through Russia: 1st class 2-berth cabins (spalny vagon ), 2nd class 4-berth cabins (kupé), and 3rd class (platskartny) open-plan bunks. We decided we'd travel kupe class (our budget was £500 for travelling and kupe fell round about into this price range). Unfortunately we booked the wrong class first off and ended up in platskartny. This actually turned out to be quite fun as we got exposed to a lot more people. The cabins are quite spacious although we were booked on the upper bunks, which are quite a pain to reach and when you are 6ft2" your size 12 feet tend to stick out into the aisle and threaten people as they attempt to go to the toilet.

The immediate, and only lasting problem we found with travelling this way was storing your luggage. Fellow travellers seem to ignore any luggage restrictions and bring with them everything from pets, tents, to suitcase upon suitcase of personal belongings. We weren't travelling to lightly ourselves.
M and I are sitting playing cards. We are drinking some vodka I bought in a supermarket in Riga. I thought I was buying something similar to Dubrovnik (bison reed) vodka. It turned out to be some weird lemon flavoured stuff. It tastes ok but it smells like regurgitated rats urine. Well according to M it does, as she has just told me for the fifth time how rancid it tastes. She is still drinking it though. We've tried to offer it to the two ladies sharing a berth with us. The looks of horror on their faces superceded any need for lingusitical translation. They did eat some of our nuts though. Outside the window roll endless wet woodlands splashed with the occassional farm or mining town. It's a long way to Moscow...

April 22nd Lativa

... well with a small detour to Latvia.

We flew to Riga on Ryanair for 1p. In addition we had to pay £10 each for baggage and some esoteric fee that I never did get to the bottom of. Maybe it was underpants tax. In total though, we paid £18 each. Get in!!

We stayed in Riga for just one night, in a chilled out little place called the Argonaut hostel. We ordered pizza and drank beer and chatted to a couple of people we met in the hostel. One was a Kiwi guy, the other was a Swedish girl doing a round trip of the Baltics. The Kiwi was interesting as he was working for a NGO (he was being a bit aloof about which one exactly) investigating corruption in Russian society. When the Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism poured through the cracks of a rotten and decaying republic like cleansing water, however it carried with it a new kind of pathogen: gluttony; Good luck with that one. We eventually sloped off to bed leaving them chatting upstairs on the sofas. I think they got it on.

The next morning we checked out and went briefly exploring the city. We spent a couple of hours in the museum of oppression, learning about the occupations of the last century and what the Latvians had to put up with. The museum itself was something to behold. It was a huge rectangular building constructed and raised on concrete poles. It was made entirely out of bevelled iron blocks, protuding from its exterior like bits of lego. It looked like something out of a 1970's Dr Who episode.

Latvia, and all of the Baltic states did not fare to well in the last century. Stuck between a rock (Russia) and a hard place (Germany) they were contested, invaded, occupied, and decimated from the 1930s right up until the fall of the Soviet Union. Ironically the Bolshevik uprising in 1917 first granted them independence from the Russian Empire. However, 20 years later they were occupied by Stalin's Red Army, who suppressed murdered, terrorised and deported thousands of people to Siberia. They were then unshackled by Nazi Germany, but there liberation was short-lived as they realised the new rule was even more brutal than the last. This regime was toppled yet again by Russia after Germany was defeated and Latvia was consumed by the Red Army until their freedom was finally realised in the 1990s.

We had to cut short the rest of the visit to the museum as we needed to stock up on supplies for the first leg of our journey: From Riga to Moscow. 16 hours and 841km and the first leg of our journey across one of the most extensive rail networks on the planet. No sweat. We just needed to buy plenty of vodka...

Prologue Trans-Siberian Express

Tuesday 21st April
Oxford, Bristol, Riga

...It has been a hectic week trying to wrap up my life yet again without quite finishing anything. We've been running around with the composure of a desperados as we try to get ready to leave the country. Our passports are bulging with pre-arranged - full page - visas for Russia, China, and Mongolia. My end of year tax returns are still outstanding. Our train is booked for 12:27pm. That's ok though, because it is now 11:58am and I still haven't packed. M is developing a nervous tic...

Human motivation has a razor-sharp focus, somewhat like a spotlight. We work best with iterations. Some of the greatest inventions in history have been dubious at best. Fire, yes-yes-yes. That was more of a discovery, moreover a description. So was triganometory, geometory, biology, chemistry. Granted, the wheel was a fine piece of engineering; so was the toaster. What our species tends to feel more at home with though is expanding on initial ideas and refining them. The cutting implement, ceramics, plastics, farming, the motor-car, the tent, the watch, the computer, the plane, you-tube... ok Facebook is maybe an exception to the rule. We focus and we grip tightly and we never let go. That is maybe what defines reality for us. These rules keep the nuts 'n' bolts of things firmly riveted down so they don't start coming loose and leave us mowing our neighbour's lawn with our pants on our heads at 3am. It is normal when you are young to want poke the constraints of our reality with a stick, but why would we want to do so when we grow older? Why would you take some pale lancet and start to make incisions in what appears as normal? Things are fragile enough for goodness sakes. How do we define what makes sense to us? Maybe using some kind of scientific rigour, or religion, or drugs. It is still a grudgingly acknowledgable fact that most of the time it could be said we are making things up as we go along. The hardest of sciences continue to deal with hypotheses that constantly fail leaving the eminent experts in the field introducing concepts to fit the gap in methodologies that doesn't make sense. We might as well be modelling Langston's ant in terms of the perspective we can summon. Mmmm... 'well you see people we know that this ant will turn this way for n number of moves because we understand the rule structure and then... wtf! Why did the little arse buggerer just do that? he's only got two rules!!'

The truth is we don't really understand very much, we just have spent a long time refining rules that explain things up until a certain point. After that, it's pants on the head and gunning the two-stroke engine.

Deconstructing normal behaviour is, for a human animal, not taking the long view. It encompasses no small amount of upheaveal. In wildlife studies animals that cannot factor what they consider reality go insane. Parrots are prone to pulling their feathers out. Monkeys have been known to de-fur themselves, and cover themselves their own faeces. Me.. I've decided to quit working once again and travel to China through Siberia. I might even rub excrement on myself to gain some impetus. We'll see how the next 48 hours work out. Whatever happens though, it's going to be fun.