A long walk.

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I will tell people that a positive part of staying in Tver is how relatively close it is to Moscow, meaning it's easy to go there for the day whenever you feel like it. Having said that, every time I had been so far it had been planned a few days before, and I had someone to go with or meet me on the other side. So this morning when I woke up and had nothing to do I decided to buck the trend and go spontaneously, on my own.

Luck was with me as I got to Tver station at 2 o'clock, only 7 minutes before the next elektrichka. The only thing I brought with me was my book, as three hours with nothing to do was bound to make me work. And work I did, for the two and a half hours until Kryukovo without ever looking up from the pages. I read one paragraph five times, as it is so hard to understand any idea about economics in any language. I have shot myself in the foot with my title, choosing a hard topic to improve last year's grades and not knowing how to write about it. The girl opposite me kept smiling at me, and tapped my leg when I didn't notice my phone was ringing, but it didn't make any sense to introduce myself the week before I leave.

At Leningradskii vokzal I had a feeling of "this is as far as I've planned, what do I do now?". I wandered through the metro, went from Komsomolskaya to Novoslobodskaya out of habit and then to Prospekt Mira. I love the Soviet names of all of the stations (Sportivnaya, Akademicheskaya...) and the ones dedicated to the great writers - Dostoevskii, Turgenev, Chekhov. Walking through the tunnels, it feels as if nothing has changed for at least fifty years.

Just in case I end up back here in a couple of years I tried to imagine an underground commute, from the outskirts of the city to the centre; from Prospekt Mira I went south-west, past Kitai-Gorod and as far as Kaluzhskaya. On the surface it was just as I imagined, and just as Nagornaya was in November. High rise grey blocks of flats, a motorway crossroads with billboard advertisements on either side, and a park with a skateboard ramp. Almost as soon as I got there I went back, reading my book like seemingly everyone else in my metro tube. I didn't hear any English voices as I did with Liza last week, but two people I saw were definitely British: the girl in a mackintosh who got up from her seat a full minute before the train stopped at her station, and the man in a grey suit and bright white trainers.

Back at Komsomolskaya metro I bought a chicken shaurma for dinner from a kebab van and took it back to the centre, Okhotnyi Ryad. I would feel guilty for coming to Moscow and not seeing Red Square. It was fenced off still, and more seating had been put up near Lenin's grave, as if they were preparing for a rugby match not Victory Day. It looked magnificent in the late evening shade. I walked through G.U.M, then went back to catch my elektrichka home.

I would have worked again, but I chose a seat with a group who turned out to be not the most pleasant of Russian people. A man was doing a crossword with his little son until he got up to shout in my face for putting my shoes too close to his wife. Strangers using the familiar term of address with me while they're nagging is starting to irritate me. I also sat near two sleazy 40-something men, who found three girls younger than me to sit with who seemed to love the attention. I tried to sleep rather than read, the train emptied more at every station until only four people got out at Tver.

My last journey away, but a relaxing one.

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