Final thoughts...

A few final thoughts on Moscow, or 'Mokba', as I've taken to calling it (whatever Dex says)..

Subway near Red Square

They do great cafe lattes, but they cost around four pounds fifty a pop. We found a place called 'Coffee Mania', which sounded dubious, but we gave it a go. You'd imagine anything with 'Mania' in the total to be a bit 'Ceraaaazzy!'. I guess I was expecting the barrista-equivalent of Timmy Mallett to come bounding up to us, it us over the heads with a sponge espresso cup and take our order, but it was actually very classy in there, with a dark-wood-and-classical-sheet-music theme. As Dex pointed out, it seems that in Russia there are always plenty of staff, but everyone has a job to do and they stick rigidly to it. So, we had a waitress to take our orders, then coffee from the coffee waitress, food from the food waiter, and the bill from someone else again. It all worked very well, though.

On a broader note, I guess I've always thought of Moscow as being defined by its communist past,with all the grim, utilitarian stereotypes that carries. Now I've had a very brief and limited look around it, I realise that that's only part of it. There are many beautiful, ornate buildings. I didn't take the Metro at any point, but some of the architecture there is wonderful, and makes some of the older efforts on the London Underground look ugly by comparison. The other thing I couldn't get over was just how wide the roads were. Keep in mind that we were within half a mile of the Kremlin, all the main roads were at least six lanes wide! I don't know whether Moscow's been demolished and rebuilt a number of times or the people that originally settled there had amazing powers of foresight (or, I suppose, they simply didn't like each other much, so built their houses apart), but I don't think I've ever seen such wide roads in such a central area. The traffic was all moving at speed, too, and it goes without saying that trying to cross (rather than taking one of the numerous subways) is tantamount to suicide. This did, though, lead to a number of situations where we needed to cross the road, but had to walk two hundred metres until we found a suitable crossing point.