Early

Well, it would appear that my body-clock is well and truly hosed. Since it's around 6am on Monday morning and I'm wide awake, some thoughts on Moscow, and a couple of things from Kamchatka I never got around to writing about...

I can't remember whether I mentioned this before (in the, apparent, ten-and-a-half thousand words I've written, thus far!), but just about every building in Petropavlovsk looks totally dilapidated. As Michael Palin said, 'Where paint can peel,it peels. Where metal can rust, it rusts...' The state of the buildings is, however, only half the story. I never had the chance to for a stroll around the local town, but I'm told by a couple of guys that did that most of these seemingly-derelict building house decidedly plush supermarkets and boutiques! This was certainly the case with the 'Italian' restaurant we visited (a long story, but it's not actually in any way Italian) – the waiting times aside, it was a classy and expensive establishment, but hidden in what, from the outside, appeared to be the basement storage room of a block of council flats. Why was this, I wondered.

In what was a bit of a 'light bulb' moment for me, my friend Rachel (mein host in Moscow) explained that in Russia – and, I guess, particularly the farther-flung parts – there is little concept of shared ownership or responsibility. Historically, the State allocated you somewhere to live, and The State would take care of anything that no individual was directly responsible for. This was, she said, the reason why they tended to dump refuse and cars everywhere: The State would take care of it. Sadly, they haven't shaken off this concept yet, and The State ain't taking care of it anymore. In the UK, all the tenants of a block would be paying a service charge, with a committee or freeholder taking care of repair and maintenance costs. I do wonder, though, what would happen if some particularly enterprising tenants in Petropavlovsk were sufficiently motivated to pool some funds and have their building renovated? Would that, then, make it a more attractive proposition and push up the prices? Or is the attitude so entrenched that locals don't even notice the state of an exterior? Then again, I saw no evidence of estate agents, property advertising, or indeed any sort of trade in housing, so maybe it's all academic.

Moscow, then. Rachel's apartment is on a very busy road which may or may not be called something like 'Fash-ny-a, Fash-ny-a'. It's covered by an enormous Citroen advertisement over scaffolding at the front. The building is being renovated, but Rachel tells me that it's purely a scam by the mayor to take commercial revenue for the he advertisements. It's true to say that any scaffolding around here is covered with impressively-epic adverts. Oh yes, to clear up another 'is it just me?' issue, apparently most restaurants have no clue how to serve food – it comes when it comes, sometimes mains before starters. This is completely normal.

So, we took a stroll to Red Square. It was raining, and Red Square is about a mile or so along the road we're on. As I've said before, it's a real experience being in a land where a) I know so little of the language (currently surviving with 'Spat-zee-ba', which means 'thank you) or b) they use a semi-alien alphabet – cyrilic, in this case. This means I can't even take a stab at a word I see written down.

Dex and I are rubbish tourists. Possessing no form of phrase book – not even the handy laminate, we struggled to find something for lunch. We eventually happened upon a traditional Russian canteen. Luckily, they had a big, back lit menu displayed behind the counter, so after much gesturing, 'niets', and 'das' (and a liberal sprinkling of 'spatzeebas'), we managed to secure some victuals. Mine consisted of some sort of reconstituted beef between three layers of bread, with some green vegetables and lots of sauce. This was served with a large carton of carbonated drink and some sort of thinly-cut salted, shredded potato dish. Dex managed to get one containing what appeared to be chicken. It wasn't exactly haute-cuisine, but it filled a gap, and it felt good to have finally managed to order some traditional local food on our own. The large yellow double-arch-shaped logo looked strangely familiar, though...