Moscow, Central Russia, Russian Federation
October 12, 2013
So today was the day I headed from St Petersburg to Moscow.
It’s a shame to be leaving St Petersburg as the place is beautiful, especially this time of year as the trees with all their vibrant golden and red shades really bring the place to life and give it that extra splash of colour and life everywhere you turn. I started to get to know the Russian folk in the hostel a lot better as well and they are the most friendly I have come across so far. Russia hasn’t really been what I expected so far. It reminds me a lot of London. If you don’t people they don’t seem to want to know you. You see friends out together and couples but they hardly seem to mix or be friendly with people they don’t know.
Shop keepers aren’t the most friendly either. But like any other town or city they are just like you and me and trying to get through their day the best they can I guess. I started off with breakfast sat at the hostel window watching the world go by below and it was funny to see so many blokes just wandering round at 8am with a can or bottle of vodka in their hand, drinking as they walk along. I’m not talking your average looking alcoholic tramp here either, I’m talking well dressed blokes in suits carrying brief cases etc, all very bizarre but hey its Saturday, I guess the drinking culture in Russia is even more hardcore than our own in the UK.
My bag is all packed so off to the train station it is to head to Moscow. Russian train stations or at least the one in St Petersburg are a bit weird as they have no platform numbers. Making sure you catch your train is a challenge in itself but eventually once putting my bag through an xray machine, showing my passport several times and being scanned for weapons I was pointed towards my platform to wait for my train…..and what a train it was! Their transport system like many across Europe really puts us Brits to shame. It looked more like a futuristic jet fighter than a train. Once on board and in my seat I settled in and was impressed by how immaculately clean it was, they even have a team of people at the station to come and clean the windows while its waiting to leave, all very impressive. Once under way it hardly felt like we were moving, it was so quiet and didn’t seem to be going that fast at all until I looked up on a fancy display system only to find we were actually moving at 217 km/h!!!!
What really got me once in the countryside is the amount of small settlements nearby to the rail lines. Dotted about all over these communities are small rows of homes built from nothing more than scrap wood and corrugated metal, smoke billowing from their little chimneys, women pushing their babies along on the gravel at the side of the tracks. I guess there are a lot of people in this country that live like this and it makes you wonder if the state are really aware of them, I almost felt guilty tootling along in my modern clean comfortable metal tube but that is life and the contrast is unbelievable between those that live comfortably and those that obviously struggle for the most basic of essentials.
That said the countryside itself was quite stunning although noticeably flat in this part of the federation. As with St Petersburg the countryside was alight with golden hues between the dark greens of the pine trees and deep blues of the lakes and I sat there taking it all in while listening to my music. A very relaxing and comfortable train journey which did not feel like the 4 1/2 hours it was as before I knew it the landscape changed from the vivid natural colours to dull miserable greys as we started to enter Moscow.
The general population lives on the outskirts of the city in massive grey multi-storey housing complexes and although still travelling at 100 km/h it took a full 20 minutes to pass this mass of grey housing before we finally hit the Leningradsky train station. I grabbed a taxi and got my first real glimpse of Moscow. The place is just vast, it’s a metropolis of grey concrete massive structures everywhere you look, you simply can’t get away from it and as I made my way to my digs the contrast between St Petersburg and Moscow was easy to see. Moscow has none of the colour, character and vibrancy that I saw further North. It is bland and looks soulless at least from what I have seen so far and it reflects in the locals faces more than St Petersburg. It is a very developed and modern city but looks very entrenched in what you imagine the old communist Soviet Union to have been like. It tries a little too hard to keep up with it’s western counterparts and seems like it has lost a lot of character as a result. The only buildings to break up the grey concrete are the usual suspects…Starbucks every 100 yards, McDonald’s, Subway etc etc. Western consumerism culture is evident everywhere.
Hopefully tomorrow will show me a different side to Moscow that is out there somewhere.
