Day 207: Something fishy's going on...

Having 'done' Red Square yesterday, we weren't entirely sure what to do with ourselves today, so we opted for a relatively relaxed option – checking out Pushkin Square, which was a pretty short walk from the hostel. So, after another delicious pancake breakfast, we headed away from the hostel in the opposite direction to usual.

After quick stops at an ATM to get some more roubles and for Zoe to launch a coin into a fountain while making a wish (a habit she has recently acquired – the coins she finds herself, mostly 10 kopeks each, the equivalent of about 0.01p) we stopped at a kids' playground for a while. The girls have stubbornly refused to grow out of begging to explore every playground they come across, no matter how age-inappropriate they might be, and given that they spend an awful lot of their time being dragged from pillar to post by parents who've refused to grow out of wanting to visit every new country they see, we feel it's only fair to indulge them as regularly as we can. 

We then walked up a very pleasant linear park between two busy roads until we reached another playground... After dragging the girls away from this one, we found ourselves in an area populated by small Christmas-market-style wooden huts. The huts were all set up for selling fish, so we assumed that this was a local fish market. There was even a tank containing several sturgeon, a few catfish and what looked like a type of mullet.

We were getting hungry by then, so in the interests of furthering the girls' cultural education, we visited the McDonald's across the road – apparently the first and largest in Russia. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, so we got takeaway and returned to the park, which was thoughtfully set up with tables and chairs. 

Temporarily sated, we then explored an unusual installation nearby – a maze of enormous coloured pencils, many of which bore plaques relating to types of fish (what the connection was between coloured pencils and fish we're still unsure). Crossing the road into Pushkin Square proper, we at least partially solved the mystery of all of these fish-related goings on. Apparently tomorrow is the first day of some sort of 'Russian Fish Week', and Pushkin Square itself had a large stage on which concerts and the like were due to take place. 

 

Several of the huts' inhabitants were firing up grills but we were in a hurry to move on, so we returned to McD's for some lunch and then headed down towards central Moscow, eventually ending up outside the Bolshoi Theatre and then passing the headquarters of the State Duma (the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly). As we got back onto familiar ground, we entered a large building that Kate and I had earlier assumed was a bank but turned out to be a very large and impressive toy store. The girls descended on the Lego section, which had a couple of colour-coded boards that you could fill in with blocks - a bit like painting-by-numbers. Kate joined Zoe in working on a picture of a dog and quickly became obsessed, continuing long after the girls had gone off to pay with Barbies and racing cars.

We then headed down to the upmarket supermarket downstairs to grab some supplies for tomorrow, when we will be undertaking the first leg of the trans-Siberian railway.

Registering confusion

Kate has a bit of a thing about breaking rules – let's just say that she isn't keen. And if there's a fine involved, well, it turns into something akin to a phobia. So Russia isn't really the place for her.

For the past few days, she has been completely consumed by a piece of archetypally Russian bureaucratic Catch-22-ism. Since 2007, all foreign visitors to Russia have been obliged to register their visas within seven working days of entering the country. If you move around, you have to register again in each place in which you spend seven working days or more. Under normal circumstances, this is a pretty simple process, as it's actually your hotel that's supposed to do the registering, so you just have to pay a small fee and they'll sort things for you. If they fail to register your visa, both you and they are subject to a fine; the hotel also faces losing its licence and you may be banned from re-entering Russia for up to five years.

Unfortunately, what we're doing doesn't count as normal circumstances. Although we'll be in Russia for a few weeks, we're not staying anywhere for more than three days, and the law is distinctly unclear about what that means for us. Unsurprisingly, none of our hotels know what to do with us. So far, the two places in which we've stayed have refused to register us because we haven't been here for seven days and aren't staying with them for seven days – as far as they're concerned, we don't have to register our visas because we haven't fallen into any of the relevant boxes. But pretty soon we'll have been here for more than seven working days without having registered, which is when we fall into a box we don't want to fall into.

Unhelpfully, there's no official website that explains what to do in a situation such as ours. There's no helpline we can call, no email address for us to write to, no FAQ we can consult. There are numerous online discussion threads that offer wildly conflicting advice ('Don't worry about it, no-one ever checks, and if they do, just explain things and you'll be fine'; 'Be afraid, be very afraid'). But if a policeman takes a dislike to us, we could be in pretty big trouble.

The good news is that Kate has convinced one of the hotels we're due to stay in to register us. We'll still have to get through a few limbo days before then, but it we keep our heads down and make sure we're carrying all of the important documents with us (passports, ferry boarding cards, train tickets, hotel booking details – I mean, really!), we should be okay. Fingers crossed...

Day 206: Squared up

After a lovely breakfast of Kate's pancakes at the hostel, we retraced yesterday's steps to the metro station and then kept on going towards the towering red walls at the end of the road – the Kremlin. From there it was a short loop around to Red Square, which was, well, a tad underwhelming. It's such an iconic location that I guess I expected to be amazed, but it was a lot smaller than I imagined - certainly a lot smaller than Palace Square in St Petersburg – and just a bit meh. As we wandered around, we realised that we were standing in front of Lenin's Mausoleum. Kate had read horror stories about the potential pitfalls of getting into the tomb – guards pulling you out of the queue and asking to see your passports and generally harassing you, tour groups pushing in front of you and then setting the guards on you when you complain – so we had resolved to give it a miss, but the queue to get in was so short that we decided that it had to be done. So, after counselling the girls on the behaviour required of them – no talking, no laughing, no mucking about – we went through security (our bags checked by a widely smiling guard – not at all what we had expected) and then made our way into the tomb... where it was really, really dark and we all walked very slowly as we waited for our eyes to adjust. We then slowly filed past Lenin's body, the girls fascinated by how well preserved he was and Kate and I slightly surprised at how poignant the experience was. 

 Back outside, we walked to and around St Basil's Cathedral and then across the square to the GUM (Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin; literally the 'main universal store'), the main department store in Moscow. Commissioned by Catherine II, the glass-roofed building's façade extends for more than 240 metres along the eastern side of Red Square. It was built between 1890 and 1893 and by the time of the Russian Revolution, it contained about 1,200 shops. It's an incredibly impressive building, with three long arcades, each filled with shops facing each other over an open central section that's crossed by walkways and bridges. 

 

Back outside, we stopped for a coffee and then visited a large underground shopping mall, where we had a pretty dire lunch of Italian fast food at Sbarro. We then walked back to Old Arbat Street, a pedestrianised thoroughfare in Moscow's historic centre. At various times one of the most prestigious places in the city in which to live, it's now a soulless tourist trap, lined with a succession of Russian and Western fast food outlets, so after a while we walked up a side street to our supermarket and then back to the hostel, where Zoe played with Arina, the daughter of the woman who worked on reception, who was roughly her age, the two girls using Google Translate to communicate with one another. 

Day 205: Made it to Moscow

Up with the alarm at 5.30am, packed and out the door – waking the poor woman on the reception desk. Walked up to the main train station, where a friendly newspaper delivery man guided us to the trains – ours a nice, new fast one that got us to Moscow in just four hours. There, we found our way to the metro station, bought some tickets and then found our platform. Luckily, we only had to go five stops, because very few of the stations are actually identified in any way, so it would have been easy to miss ours. But we arrived okay and then made our way to the surface world again, where it was snowing lightly.

Our hostel had provided us with some very helpful directions, complete with captioned photos, but Kate's phone managed to lose the email right at the vital moment, so we had to rely on a relatively rudimentary map we had picked up on the train. Thankfully, we were able to orient ourselves easily enough and found our way without any real difficulty and were soon checked in and unencumbered again. This was a proper hostel, with a shared kitchen and lots of dorm rooms – and a lot of Russian guests. We had booked out a whole room for ourselves – bunks for seven, including a double for Kate and I – so we had lots of space in which to spread out.

We then headed back out for some lunch, found a supermarket and bought what we needed for a basic dinner of pasta with a jar of ready-made sauce (pimped with some fresh tomato and basil) and a tasty bottle of Bordeaux. While we ate, we watched an interesting pair of TV shows where two young Russian presenters flip a coin and then experience the budget and luxury versions of travel in various parts of the world (in this case somewhere in the USA and Naples). It was fascinating to see the Russian take on these Western destinations (the girl taking the budget option in Naples was horrified by all of the litter – and understandably so, as Moscow is largely litter free), and also to see the shameless product placement in the shows – at regular intervals the presenters would stop to plug the smartphones they were using to find their way around, or the credit cards they were using to pay for their meals etc.

Day 204: Day at the museum

This morning we walked back to the Winter Palace, but this time we joined the rather long queue to get in (although from what we can gather, it was actually a very short queue compared to high season). Luckily, an announcement in English (itself a rare thing) alerted us to the fact that there was another (shorter) queue on the other side of the courtyard, and not long after, we were inside.

After handing our many coats and bags over to the seriously overworked old woman in the cloakroom, we headed into the Hermitage Museum proper – and our jaws quickly hit the floor and stayed there. Grand doesn't even come close – this is a palace first and foremost, with all of the ostentation and finery that that implies. But of course, it's also one of the world's oldest and largest museums, with the world's largest collections of paintings, not to mention the various antiquities, armour and weapons, jewellery, furnishings... It's actually all rather overwhelming – an assault on the senses and the psyche – and unlike any other museum you'll ever visit. I think you would really need several child-free days to properly do it justice. We didn't even come close.

But we did our best, slowly making our way from room to room, taking in the Leonardos, the over-the-top furnishings, the mosaics, the statues, and the rooms themselves.By the time we reached the far end of the building, the girls were pretty over it all, so we started to head back towards the entrance. I should point out at this point that we only really explored the first floor, which houses the European fine art and the 'palace interiors'. Most of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century art – which is usually displayed on the second floor - had been moved elsewhere (see below), but in its place was a pretty impressive temporary exhibition of screenprints and lithographs by artists including Dali, Picasso, Miro, Braque and Matisse.

By the time we had checked out that exhibition, the girls were really flagging, but we did manage to get them to quickly tour the museum's also very impressive Egyptian collection on the ground floor, which included an unwrapped mummy – much to Zoe's horror – and some amazing sarcophogi. Then, after gathering up our bits and pieces from the still-harried old woman in the cloakroom, we headed across the square to the General Staff Building, which is where the modern art was currently being displayed. There, we eventually (the building is a right maze and there was little rhyme or reason or signage to suggest where things could be found) found an impressive collection of Impressionists, post-Impressionists and others – Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Gaugin, Kandinsky, Matisse, Degas (in most cases, a room of each).

And then, finally, it was time to return to the hotel. Despite the fact that it was a Sunday evening, our lovely supermarket was still open, so we went back in to grab some stuff for dinner. Kate was horrified that her beloved beetroot coleslaw was no longer available, but did manage to find an alternative version (and was horrified to discover, back at the hotel, that the alternative version came with chunks of pickled fish – which I, personally, think was an improvement). And so, finally, back at the hotel, we ate in our room as a light snow began to fall.

Day 203: Seeing St Petersburg

After a late breakfast in the hotel, we walked down to Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg's main shopping street. It was a lovely, sunny day, but quite cold – about 6C, with a biting wind. Kate has taught herself to read the Cyrillic alphabet, and as we walked along the street, dodging the young men dressed in animal costumes handing out fliers, we could hear her quietly sounding out the street signs and the names of the shops. 

Looking up a side street, we spotted a big, impressive church – one of St Petersburg's most impressive landmarks, the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, said to have been built on the exact spot where Emperor Alexander II was severely wounded and died in March 1881. We turned off and walked down to the church, stopping off on the way for a really good espresso made by a man with a generator-powered coffee machine in the back of his van. At the church, we bought the girls some candyfloss, which took an age to make, probably because it was so cold. 

Continuing on, we soon reached the Neva River, across which we could see the impressive Peter and Paul Fortress. We walked along the river until we reached the Winter Palace, which houses part of the State Hermitage Museum. There, we bought some hot dogs from a street vendor and then headed across the enormous Palace Square and back to Nevsky Prospect. 

On the way home, we headed back off the main road to explore some of the back streets. We were getting pretty parched by now, so we stopped in at a little supermarket, which turned out to be housed in a series of small brightly lit rooms connected by narrow corridors. This made it rather difficult to actually find anything and we did a few circuits before we came across the section with the bottled water. Our next conundrum involved figuring out which was still and which sparkling – Kate eventually tried asking one of the ladies manning the checkouts, using a combination of hand gestures and the odd 'nyet' and 'da' to elicit the required information.