Vodka! Vodka! Vodka! Oy!

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Nadia, our Moscow Buddy, meets us in the lobby after the breakfast of semolina and honey (actually quite yum). I’m relieved the guide is her and not the spivvish guy with scary eyes who’s wandering round. Outside it’s a glorious day, already hot at ten o’clock. It’s only 7am in Ireland but I’m not feeling it. I feel fine.

As we walk to the Metro she tells us she comes from a city where everyone works in aviation, which wasn’t shown on the map until a few years ago. There were perks to living in a secret city - they didn’t have to queue for food as long as people elsewhere did. I tell her both our parents worked in Dublin Airport, but it’s not quite the same. (If Swords were a secret the world wouldn’t be missing much.) We surf into town on the Metro, all wood panelling and the lights going on and off. Nadia gives me a map which I peer at, trying to puzzle out the signs, and then we come up above ground round the corner from Red Square.

By an obelisk with the names of the heroes of Communism is the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where Nadia stops to tell us about her grandad. He was serving in Vladivostok when he was called up to fight the Germans way over on the other side of Russia, and at some point he had to swim the Danube to flee. His gun was weighing him down, but he couldn’t let it go because under Stalin you got shot for losing your gun. He managed to save himself by finding a log and stabbing his bayonet into it to hold on. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it much,’ Nadia says.

Red Square really is red. Lots of the buildings are painted a dark crimson colour. It looks exotic and cool and what with all the gold spires and domes and stars on top of buildings in the brilliant sunshine, my head is spinning a bit. Groups of soldiers horse around, laughing and having their pictures taken with girls. Lines of schoolkids troop towards Lenin’s tomb, an ugly pile of pink marble, and - weirdly - brides are everywhere, floating about in their sunstruck white, surrounded by wedding parties as dressed-up as themselves. Nadia shows us the GUM shopping mall with its tall glass-roofed arcades full of light, the Tsar’s Tower where he used to watch executions, and a clock tower which once had a clock divided into 17 hours. We look across the square at the tomb and wonder if that’s really Lenin’s body in there or if it’s just a waxwork. ‘I believe it’s really his body,’ Nadia says with touching faith. ‘It’s been there eighty years, it’s not going to look natural.’

St Basil’s Cathedral is amazing. It should look silly, with all those colours and swirls and zigzags like a kid gone mad with crayons, but it really doesn’t. We try to screen out the bits covered in scaffolding and the guy in front with a pneumatic drill. It mostly works. I ask Nadia why she went into tourism and she says it’s a good way to meet people - though she says most of the people she shows around don’t ask her about herself. And it helps her appreciate Moscow. ‘Until I was a tour guide I didn’t notice the architecture,’ she says. I expect that even this could become boring if you saw it every day, but now, with all these gold stars in my eyes, I can’t imagine it.

And we walk - across the river Moskva, past the 3000-room concrete lump of the Hotel Russia which looks more like a TV station, through a park with surreal sculptures of Adult Vices which Harm Innocent Children (‘War’ is holding a bomb with the head of Mickey Mouse on it), and up to the House of Tears. It’s a sprawling grey apartment complex, every apartment the same, which was built for Kremlin employees. It’s called that because in the late forties, during the purges, many of the residents got taken away in the night by the KGB, not necessarily for doing anything. Being a distant relation of the Tsar’s family would do it. ‘Children were left without parents,’ Nadia says. ‘They would be adopted by the other people in the building or go in orphanage with name and surname changed.’ Apparently the apartments are still very ‘prestigious’, despite the place’s reputation, but just looking at it is creeping me out a bit and I’m glad to get back over the river. Nadia shows us to an underground food court where we say goodbye. I give her a postcard of Dublin and we get confused about who’s tipping her and probably give her too little.

We point wildly at a menu and end up with a strange pancake stuffed with dill. Then we try to get into the Armoury museum to see the Fabergé eggs (Nadia described one called the Trans-Siberian egg, with a little mechanical train inside it!), but there’s a big sign up saying ‘no Armoury tickets today’, so we go round the Metro instead - all the way round the Circle Line, the brown line, that connects all the others.

It’s like they said, all plaster mouldings and chandeliers, mosaics of strapping workers, sculptures of great scientists, shining marble walls. Moscow Metro ads are like I imagine Western ads were a couple of decades ago - no matter what they’re advertising, they all have a pretty girl in them. We take photos of ceilings till we’re all ceilinged out, and get out to explore several times along the way.

Gorky Park is horrible. I was expecting a sort of spy-thrillery atmosphere. But there’s no actual park, just a cheesy funfair full of people yelling into megaphones and Muscovites staggering round under the weight of the massive pink polyester teddybears they’ve just won on the coconut shy. But in the subway underneath it there’s a stall that sells PROPAGANDA! Piles and piles of old Soviet posters in glorious red, black and white. I love the way they’re designed. I buy a noble worker-woman under a revolutionary flag, an adorable Red Army soldier and some heroic nurses, and Ivan finds a goddess of beer and a bloke in swimming trunks who we think is saying ‘keep your body fit for the glory of the USSR’.

Komsomolskaya’s economy is based on porn DVDs and snowglobes. We wander around the racketing stalls and peer in through the railway station fence at the trains, wondering if one of them is ours. A cute, smiling guy makes a kebab to my exact specifications despite the fact that we can only communicate in gestures, while behind him an elderly lady, also smiling beatifically, plays the accordion for us. We sit on a window ledge eating and talking about clubbing. There’s a place called Art Garbage in the guidebook that sounds sort of indie-cool, but considering the dire radio so far it’s too much of a risk. (Example playlist: Bon Jovi, Andy Williams, balalaika music, Justin Timberlake, a klezmer version of Mambo No.5 in French.) A guy comes by with a battered cardboard box on a trolley and points at a funny dark-brown coin in his hand. We try out “ya ne panimayu” (I don’t understand). He tells us how to pronounce it right.

Prospekt Mira hasn’t much except awful buskers and McDonald’s. (We don’t go in.) It’s the sort of area that seems to exist in all cities, with tall grey buildings closed to the public where dull business things go on, and the occasional shop which sells things both unaffordable and undesirable. Five minutes there feels quite enough.

We walk back from the Metro in the dark, having Really Deep Thoughts. In the hotel yet another wedding is happening. Downstairs in the bar the wedding guests are chanting ‘vodka! vodka! vodka!’ like a Russian version of Born Slippy. Then they start into Havah Nagilah. I’m sitting here smiling at the photos we took and thinking that tomorrow evening we’ll be on the train at nine, trundling eastward - just about as far as eastward goes.

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