Myself at the Kremlin.
N.B.: This is a really big wall.

The Zarya is immense and empty in that somewhat stereotypical hotel way – in our triple room we were unsurprised at the lack of Bibles, but the absence of a Gideonovich Communist Manifesto was a letdown. We ordered some terribly overpriced dinner in the bar and sat pondering navigation and listening to some loud Americans talking politics before it arrived (my dumplings took forever, but were amazing.) Then to bed, to rise at 7:45 (which in our jetlagged minds was 3:45, and in Moscow time falls into that roughly-24-hour period each day called “Really Cold O’Clock”.

Fortified by all-you-can-eat brekky at the Zarya (which is going to be exploited massively this week, I feel), we rolled down to the Kremlin (Lenin is shut on Mondays, so we’re doing Red Square later in the week) on the Metro to Borovitskaya, popping out at the library and muttering some half-hearted Metro 2033 references before wandering towards the enormous fort. There’s something slightly surreal, slightly fairytale about it all: the walls are immense and ancient, the equal of anything I’ve ever seen (Kumbhalgarh aside… mostly), but the towers and crenellations look like elaborate toys. The palace blocks inside are stunning and ridiculously big, but something about the combination of white trim and flat, pastel colours makes them look a bit too much like cakes to be taken seriously. And the cathedrals! I’m used to English churches, which have a generally defined anatomy of sections building on each other logically, but these mad Russian godholes start vertical and just go up and up and up, great cereal-box things capped with clutches of golden onions. Inside the walls are vast murals and endless little pictures of beardy saints and biblical scenes, and inside the onions are gigantic scowling Jesus faces. And don’t get me started on the retardedly huge cannon in the impossible solid-iron carriage, or the sundered bell big enough to live in. Every part of the Kremlin makes me think it was put together from a slightly breathless description by someone completely colourblind: it’s too clean, too cartoonish, the proportions are too odd. I see it, but I don’t quite believe it.

I suspended disbelief long enough to go on the bell tower tour (one of the guides, who was very jolly in the way stereotypes insist that sober Russians aren’t, took one look at Tom and told him he looked like the last Tsar [he does]). We saw lots of sculpted bits of history and listened to a long, glib-voiced history of the Kremlin down the ages. Sadly, even the freezing air wasn’t enough to keep me properly awake and I can’t remember half of it; hopefully I will recover soon (insomnia is fine but I am fundamentally out of sync with Russia).

After the Kremlin, we went on a long, aimless meander along Arbat, being handed spam by people dressed as hamburgers and marvelling at how amazing all the buildings looked. Moscow architecture is something else; I always thought the Scots were past masters in large, solid, tastefully adorned public buildings, but Moscow makes the combined work of Scotland’s best look sick. Even the brutalist Kruschev-era nightmares had a style and a substance unmatched at home, and the Seven Sisters I want to steal and take home and hide in forever. Say what you like about Stalin, he encouraged some nice buildings.

After a stodgy potatoey lunch at some random snack bar (food, sadly, costs almost as much as in London) we found our way back onto the Metro, and headed for Sportivnaya in search of the Metro Museum. We went up at the wrong vestibule (metro stations almost without exception have two entrances, one at each end, with quite a distance between them) and so had to pay another ticket for the privilege of going back through the station, but Sportivnaya station is glorious so that wasn’t a problem. The museum was very well hidden, behind a side door, through an abandoned locker room and up a staircase past a locked door with children’s voices behind it. It was somewhat creepy and also felt like the opening to every Soviet-era low-dialogue drama you’ve ever seen. Once there, we met a very amiable Russian trainspotter with excellent English and a fantastically encyclopaedic knowledge of the Metro (it was only at turfing-out time that we found out he wasn’t actually an employee of the museum) and saw lots of old maps and metro stuff, including some great big public parades in the thirties cheering the building of the system (even if they’re all posed and there’s a commissar with a revolver just offscreen, it would be nice if every once in a while we had people with placards actually praising our public infrastructure improvements).

Pushkinskaya was full of communists when we arrived, with big red banners flying around and lots of nervy looking cops stopping punters getting too close, and it turned out that Google Maps had lied to us about the location of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. We spent quite a long time wandering semi-lost around Metro streets hunting for it before finding a convenient Marriott hotel; the reception gave us proper directions, which told us we had been heading in entirely the wrong way. It wasn’t a complete loss: we saw many fine buildings, a trollface in one shop’s Halloween decorations, and a policeman with an AKS-74U. Schlepping along the right route to MMMA, with cloth-covered lorries full of police going by, we found that both it and the cafe beneath it were closed until Nov 28, but managed to locate a terribly overpriced tea shop to drown our sorrows, go to the loo and plot our next move.

Our next move was the University, which like Birmingham has its very own station, all the way down the red line (past Sportivnaya again). Around the vestibule was a street market, with lots of sealed glass stalls (all Moscow street vendors hide in glass cubes with tiny pop-open windows to squeeze goods through, which seems incredibly sensible) and old women wandering around vaguely trying to sell balloons and melon gratings. Bill was feeling queasy and didn’t fancy the walk (the university seemed quite distant, especially given how massive it is) so after some fantastic 90RU kebabs from a happy little food-selling glass cube (the kebabs reminded me a lot of something similar in Granada, many moons ago) we Metroed back to Vladykino, warmth, weird Russian TV, and bed.

Day 1: success.

Next (hopefully): The Tretyakov and Museum of the Great Patriotic War.

The holiday got off to an inauspicious start: as soon as I arrived at New Street and started hunting for my train to London, I was informed that something had broken somewhere down the line and no trains were getting in or out of Euston (I have also found garbled, slowly-loading internet scuttlebutt that other unlucky passengers may have been menaced by a lion) so I was advised to go to Moor Street and take the slower train to Marylebone. Upon doing so, I found that a) the Moor Street trains had both power sockets and free wifi, b) someone had left an unopened packet of chocolate coins in the luggage rack. This seemed a fair trade for an extra half hour on the train.

London, as we headed to Tom’s after a rendezvous at the Cock, was gradually turning into the traditional Fifth of November warzone, thunder-flashes on the skyline and spouts of flame rising from every back garden. Although Islington Council sadly haven’t reinstated the Highbury Fields bonfire after calling it off twelve years ago (skinflints), Tom’s dad got into the spirit of things by firing some maritime distress flares off into the sky (you can tell he used to be a rock star) before cooking us all a scrummy veggie dinner. Then we watched the final episode of Generation Kill, which Bill hadn’t seen for some inadequate reason, and all went off to bed twitching with anticipation.

Up at 5:30 for toast and tea and traipsing through still-dark streets, riding down to Paddington in a bus that was congested in every possible sense of the word. Past various fine gasworks on the Heathrow Express, through all the usual tedious airport clichés and formalities, we found ourselves on the correct plane at the correct time, and mostly fell asleep. The flight was meant to be four hours, but runway tomfoolery at both ends stretched it out. Stacked up in a holding pattern above Domodedovo, watching the horizon burning that utterly beautiful red you can only get with serious air pollution, we descended into a dark purple haze scattered with cobwebs of city lights. The plane banked hard towards the dying sun on the last run, splashing red light across the wing beside me, and as it evened out I watched the shadow line run from the knuckle of the engine pylon all the way down the wingtip, vortex-fins glinting for a moment with my own private sunset.

It seems so far that everything is big in Moscow; the Aero Express certainly is. It’s a broader gauge than in Britain (though I think still not as huge as if Brunel had got his way), and the trains are massive in all senses. On the 45-minute run into Moscow proper, the train didn’t sway, it didn’t roll, and while it ground and vibrated it was in the same implacable way as massive factory machinery. Through the window I could see great stripy chimneys pumping out white smoke, and hundreds upon hundreds of semi-lit tower blocks.

The Metro deserves its own post and will get one, but is about the only part of the journey that went as quickly and efficiently as hoped, but after considerable navigation-confusion and traipsing around freezing Moscow streets in the darkness, we found our roost for the week, the Maxima Zarya hotel.

Tomorrow: The Kremlin.

So the original plan for The Bro-Holiday between Bill, Tom and I, back in the mists of time, was The Great American Road Trip. That sort of failed for lots of reasons, mainly revolving around the “road” aspect and the “student poverty” aspect. Less of an issue for Bill, who has a driving license, and is a comparatively loaded PhD wanker, but Tom and I are mere BAs stuck in the sculpture/gun mines, poor and incapable of operating a steering wheel. Moscow was originally an area of interest for profoundly geeky reasons, but as BROMERICA 2011 gradually became less and less likely, its somewhat briefer, somewhat cheaper, other-side-of-the-Cold-War counterpart became more and more so.

Short story shorter, we fly to Russia tomorrow.

We have advice and recommendations from such luminaries as the great Sarah Mcintyre and an awesome Russian student I kept bumping into at law events. We have an itinerary, a soundtrack, a camera, a pre-Kennedy phrasebook, a post-internet phrasebook, and bitchin’ winter coats.

where doing this bros
where MAKING THIS HAPEN

for additional brosterity & possibly panicked fact-checking