First day in Moscow

One of Stalin's seven sisters buildings in background

Tuesday morning we headed out into the unknown with our map. It's so funny when you are somewhere completely new as you can't get you bearings at all....you don't know what direction you are walking in and you look madly for anything that will help your cause. Our first landmark was the river - the hotel is on the river and so I made us all head for that as I felt secure I could get us into the centre from there. Sadly, as we approached the river we came across a 5 lane road with traffic flying across it with no pavements and no walkways to get across. We stood looking at the river from across the road in a longing fashion but then realised there was no way we could carry on in this direction as being splattered by a car was high on the agenda. 'There must be pavements' I kept shouting and then looking at the map again decided we had to go the long way round. It is at this point that we realised to get across many of the huge busy roads you have to go up and down underpasses - with hundreds of steps. Oh what joy with a pram. We kept trying to find a ramp for prams but no such thing exists. If you are in a wheelchair then I would advise you not to come to Moscow as it might be quite a bumpy ride and don't expect people to come rushing to your aid.

So we found the main road into town from where we were and just walked and walked and walked. We spent the whole journey practising our Cyrillic - reading out signs like 'Karaoke' - quite a lot of those signs - seems to be quite a past time here. There is a real mix of old pre revolutionary buildings and new tower blocks. We finally reached the Kremlin but couldn't seem to get across the road to reach it. No obvious crossing points and there are 5 lanes of traffic going at 90 miles an hour past your nose. We then realised we had to use the metro tunnels to walk under - only another 550 steps carrying the pram up and down. when we reached the other side we walked through some gardens outside the Kremlin but decided we were knackered and just wanted to get home to eat and lay down.

On Metro

 I found a Metro station on the map and we headed down the stairs sweating with exhaustion with pram. Well, what a shock we got...even trying to manoeuvre the pram through the Metro entrance doors was a nightmare - Graeme stupidly stood there with the door open letting people through trying to polite, not realising that people didn't care and that he'd be there for the next 5 years. Through pure agitation I started shouting 'Graeme let got of that bloody door and get this pram through for f*ck sake - that's your priority - these people don't care that you are being polite!' Anyway - we knew where we had to get to but stood in the middle of loads of people coming and going trying to translate all the Cyrillic signs....mmmm, after about 10 minutes of silent worrying we both realised that we had no idea what we were doing and also realised that we would have to go to a desk to buy a ticket - 'you do it, 'no, i don't want to, you do it.' 'no, i don't want to either' - 'Should we just leave', 'okay then.' so, we turned around and fought our way through the doors again and then carried the pram up 550 steps to end up back at square one. As you can imagine, we were both exhausted and annoyed that we'd turned into complete idiots but then we saw the infamous MacDonald's sign. Oh how glad we were to see the golden arches....never in my life did I think I would be so happy to see such a sign and in our fear and loathing we practically ran to the door. It's weird when you have a cultural shock like the Metro experience that you then need something recognisable to make you feel secure again - sadly it was Macdonald's that became our safety blanket. We both ordered a big mac as it was the only thing we could understand and sat like two startled stoats eating a Macdonalds as our first meal in Moscow....no, not what we'd planned but heh, our sanity was at risk.

Gardens outside Kremlin

We were both exhausted and Arthur was getting hungry (yes, we did feed ourselves in front of our starving child) and so after the food we felt that we had to attack the metro again as we were miles away. We found a station that was only two stops from where we needed to go. We headed down in fear but found this time it was much simpler and we managed to get back to the hotel in one piece. Hurrah! First day survived....only a few exhausted tears shed.....tomorrow will be better.

Gates to the House of Government