keep on walking and don’t look back

Moscow! I landed in the late afternoon, then made my way to my hostel – lots of queueing and public transport.

Getting from the airport to the city was easy – a nice, simple train – but then I needed to navigate the Moscow Metro, which is intense. Paveletskaya is a busy stration: the entrance hall was just a solid mass of people, most pushing through to the barriers, some queueing. I wedged myself in a queue and shuffled slowly forward, while various people queue-jumped nearer the front. The machines were troublesome – although it seems part of the problem was people feeding them 500 ruble notes when they quite clearly (says the person who can’t even read Russian) took up to 100 ruble notes only. No really, guys, turning it the other way up won’t make the machine magically take 500s. But they also spat out plenty of 50s and 100s, which caused plenty of vexation. One woman had a long rant at the machine before storming off – after the length of the queue (she queue-jumped quite far back), I can sympathise. Fortunately the machine liked one of my lower denomination notes.

Ticket acquired, I descended.

I’m pretty sure Moscow’s subways are halfway to the centre of the earth. They’re also incredibly majestic, like buried palaces. I’m planning to spend some time exploring the Metro another day – without my suitcase, which even though it’s quite a small one (could have been carried into the plane cabin) was difficult to carry in the crush of people.

I quickly realised there’s no English underground. Fortunately I can read a reasonable number of Cyrillic letters, and I matched the transliterations of the stations I needed to various signs. If I didn’t find what I needed immediately, I kept walking, and suddenly the brown line platform turned into the green line platform! I’m still not sure how that worked. At the interchange station, later on, I went even further underground to the grey line. Coming out of the grey line at my hostel’s stop was one big escalator, on which I held tightly to the hand-grip. Vertigo, how you doin’.

Finding my hostel was easy, about which my only complaint is the over-softness of the mattress (sitting in bed now, with the excellent wifi). I actually like them hard. Where is my wood-hard one from Dunhuang? :<

After setting down my bags, I may have gone out and eaten Pizza Hut for dinner. >.> It was right there, and Russian Pizza Hut is about 10x nicer than British Pizza Hut, which is to say I actually enjoyed the pizza and haven’t added a new coating of grease to my heart. (I say that as someone who rarely enjoys pizza; yet, as with crisps, I seem to periodically go back to it, certain that this time I will love it.)

Tomorrow! Red Sqaure! Kremlin! St Basil’s Cathedral! Better food, I promise! More Metro! Walking! My feet and knee will hate me, but I will be happy.