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I went back to Moscow with Liisa this morning, to take the photos that I should have taken on saturday. We took the early elektrichka at 8.30 and were so tired that we barely said a word to each other for the three hour journey. For as long as my eyes were open the scenic route made a pleasant change to the industrial one, especially when we crossed over the lake.
My first chore was to buy my ticket to Lugansk on the 17th, from Kievskii vokzal. Travelling from and around Russia is very affordable, so much so that a journey of about twenty two hours in a sleeping train with a bed cost me less than 500 roubles. Having said that I did ask for a place in the most simple carriage, so it will be a far from comfortable night.
We picked a metro station at random and stepped up onto the street to buy a coffee, to take with us to meet Helen. It turned out that the cafés on Prospekt Mira don't follow the price scale of the trains, so two small cups of foam left me 200 roubles poorer. We went back onto the
metro and met Helen and her friend Ania at 2. We had lunch at the Tibetan Kitchen, a left turn off Tverkskaya Ulitsa near Red Square. The food wasn't quite as good as on christmas day, but still very tasty. It surprises me how such a fantastic restaurant in the centre of the touristy area of Moscow is always empty.
I spoke to Ania and it made me realise a lot of things about Moscovite life; firstly I might have judged too quickly when I said I couldn't live here because I like it more every time I come. Secondly I could never belong to the ex-pat community, with the gossiping and English-speaking that it involves. We had another 'small world' moment, as Ania is going to visit a friend of ours in Petersburg tomorrow, who she knows from university and who I was at sixth form with.
When we said goodbye to Helen and Ania myself and Liisa walked to Red Square, which we could only admire from behind a fence as it is closed off already to prepare for the Victory Day celebrations on the 9th. Afterwards we walked behind G.U.M (Gosudarstvennyi Univermag, the millionaire's mall)
and found a quiet district with cobbled streets that was out of the sun, and then went to Aleksandrovskii gardens. All of the soldiers must have been occupied with stopping people getting onto Red Square, as no-one shouted "nel'zya" as a couple of schoolgirls jumped into the fountains! We both envied them, as the temperature in the capital was a smog-assissted 23 degrees with barely a cloud in the sky. Finally we crossed the motorway onto the bridge over the Moskva river, to look down on the Kremlin from as high as possible.
We bought bottles of lemonade from a lady with a stall in the street, and sipped them as we walked back up Tverskaya Ulitsa. In the evening we met Kaisa and her mum outside Dinamo metro, and walked to the CSKA basketball stadium. We caught rush hour earlier on the metro and as we were pushing through the crowd to get onto a train the door shut in my face - all I could do was watch Liisa speed off into the dark and wait for the next tube to catch her up.
Until I took my seat at the game I didn't know that
Kaisa and Liza.
One of Moscow's quieter streets. CSKA (Tseskà) are the new european champions. They beat a team from Israel in the final last week and before the match they played messages from everyone in the team on the big screen, thanking the fans for their support. The one Tseska player I already knew was their american J.R. Holden, who is the one black player in the Russian national team. His clip was in Texas-English with subtitles running at the bottom of the screen. It was one of the most positive moments of my time in Russia; I hate how this country is so racist, so the huge cheer when his face apeared on screen restored some faith. 500 fans cheered like 5000.
I'm not a basketball fan so the game didn't inspire me too much. Tseska were obviously playing with a post-final hangover but still beat Rostov 80-something to 70-something. After the game we dashed back to the metro, found Leningradskii vozkal and bought our tickets back to Tver.
As soon as the elektrichka emptied after Kryukovo I laid down on the metal bench and used my jumper as a pillow. I must have slept for most of the trip, and woke up with
The horse fountain.
Looking towards Okhotnyi Ryad. a sore head and toothache. We took a taxi to obshezhitie and got to bed at 2.
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