Stories from the North of the East (part 2)

The second part of this blog is devoted to Moscow. Ana was more than willing to skip Moscow, but you cannot go to Russia and ignore it's capital. And, Ana will confirm this, it wasn't bad at all. She warned that the city would be coldhearted, unfriendly for tourists and just not nice to people in general. Nobody was more surprised than her when our first encounter on the subwaystation was a young girl asking us if we needed some help finding directions. That was after a more than pleasant trainjourney from Minsk; a train where the carpet in the hallway is covered with carpet (to protect the carpet, probably).
Funny story; Ana was buying the sleepertrain-tickets in Minsk and the railway personal wanted my middle name.
Ana: "She doesn't have one".
RWperson: "How come she doesn't have a middle name?"
Ana: "Because she's Dutch, she just doesn't have a middle name. It's not in her passport."
RWperson: "But we have to fill in something...?"
Needless to say, the section remained empty, but according to Bellarussian regulation my proper name would be Therese Jan-Jaap Klok.
She also had to fight to get us bottom-beds. They were there, they were available, they didn't cost anything else, but it was just uncommon to give a duo two bottombeds. Lucky for me Ana is very determined.
The best part of Moscow, was the 'Vassily' Basilic; saint Basil's Church. It was magic, you only see that fairytale building for the first time once. Laying my eyes on it, looking up from my tourist-guide, with it's gorgeous round domes ('raindrops' I said, 'onions' Ana calls them), small towers, colourfull decorations and religic icons to finish it off.
So, we got lucky with the journey, the people, the hostel (Fresh Hostel), the weather and the subway. As in: we didn't get lost in that spiderweb of 12 different lines and 185 stations.
We only stayed in Moscow for two days and one night, but I got to see a good part of the city; Red Square, Kremlin, 3 McDonalds, Arbat street, loads of subwaystations and their subsequent pieces of art, the changing of the guards and heaps of schoolchildren imitating those guards, kicking their legs up in the air. We went to VDNCh, I didn't put some consonants in random order here, the park is actually called VDNCh. Please skip this hellhole of a carnivalesque fair. I should have read the description in my travel guide better; I skimmed the text, picking up words like; glory, architecture, fountains and youths. If I read more closely I would have read: misplaced glory of the past, kitchy architecture, flashy fountains and masses of skateboarding youths whizzing by. Well, it was clear from the start that the people who wrote the travelguide, which describes both Moscow and St-Petersburg, clearly were more fond of the latter. We spent our last (and second) night in Moscow on the busy Leningradsky trainstation, amidst hundreds of other fellow-travellers. We waited there for several hours, entertaining ourselves with music, Keith Richards' Life, machine-coffee and Russian Sudoku, before boarding the sleepertrain to St-Petersburg.
Moscow was awesome, but I was in for more treats in St-Petersburg, coming up in part 3.