Ian Rambles
I'd heard uf "GUM" - the state department store - from its reputation in soviet times. I imagined grey and solid. It isn't. Built at the end of the 19th century it is beautiful and functional. I spent ages looking at the roof structure. Spanning 14m the construction is so elegant that, even seen from one end of its 250 m length , the roof doesn't darken in the distance but remains clealy made of glass.

Fiona's Journal
We stayed in a three star hotel in the outskirts of Moscow; our first night was part of the Trans-Siberian package and we treated ourselves to two more days there rather than moving on to a cheaper hostel. We enjoyed the luxury of en-suite bathrooms and flat-screen TV and big beds and also the excellent and plentiful buffet breakfast included in the price.
Ian and Arthur tended to go for the English style breakfast dishes of bacon, sausage, fried egg etc whereas Harry and George appear to have missed breakfast cereals and so went for heaped bowls of cocopops with fresh cold milk. Personally, I couldn't get enough of croissants and bread rolls with lots of butter and marmalade. We were all heading back towards our European way of life one way or another, I feel, and what you eat is a surprisingly important part of that.
We got Yelena as our “Russia Experience” guide for our first morning in the capital and she was a great bonus. She first introduced us to the metro system and organised a couple of twenty trip passes for us, so that we can hop on and off at will for the next couple of days. She speaks faultless idiomatic English – I was so impressed when she pointed out that we could easily recognise our home stop on the metro because it was the only one with a “double-barrelled” name on the grey line. I mean “double-barrelled” is a pretty obscure description when applied to a name rather than a shotgun, I would have thought. She is in her fifties, I would think, and just really good company quite apart from having a wealth of knowledge about her home city. She told us a lot about how things had changed in Russia during her lifetime. How she loves to travel and has visited many European cities (of which Stockholm and London are favourites) and how impossible a dream that would have seemed when she was growing up. How no one except the super-rich would expect to own a house in a Russian city, apartments are the norm, but that many middle income people can afford a dacha in the country to escape to for weekends and holidays. She showed us a huge, five storey, 19th century building that had been moved back 14 metres overnight, as part of one of Stalin's plans to improve the city and widen the main streets. Of course, no one needed to be consulted or even informed so neighbours emerging from their homes the next morning must have been somewhat disorientated! Dictatorship is the way to get things done obviously.
Yelena lead us into a very grand and expensive Art Deco hotel restaurant and into an elaborately decorated 18th century building (now an upmarket delicatessen), to admire the architecture and décor and to take photos, without the slightest pretence that we were going to buy anything. You could see the glee with which she strode boldly into these places, which were once forbidden to all but the political elite of Soviet Russia.
The home of the Bolshoi (which just means Big) Ballet is undergoing a major refurbishment and so is covered in scaffolding. They have kindly covered the scaffolding in scenic canvas on which is painted a rather convincing (from a distance anyway) full size reproduction of the façade of the building for us tourists to admire. Another example of nothing being quite what it seems in Russia!
Finally Yelena introduced us to the very beautiful GUM (pronounced goom) shopping arcade and recommended we try eating at Stolova No. 57, a re-creation of a soviet era workers canteen. She then left us and we took her advice and joined the queue for lunch. The queue was long but fast moving and the system relies on every one deciding what they want quickly so we started planning our choices as soon as we were close enough to see the food. Then we each slid our trays along the counter and ordered the components of a light lunch, largely by pointing, and paid at the other end. We took our trays to a table and sat down to eat. The food was hot and really delicious and cost us only £25.00, which for five people in the very heart of an expensive capital city seemed remarkable. It is really just the motorway service station model but so much better food and so much better value. I think it works so well, only because there are large numbers of people all coming to eat over a relatively short period of time and so throughput is really fast and no food hangs about long after coming out of the oven.
We got expert at Moscow's metro system over the next couple of days as we whizzed around the city and some of the stations are really beautiful, some very elaborately decorated and others very simple but arresting. We were overjoyed to find that Moscow, like Prague, mounts its advertising posters perpendicular to the line of the escalators, as opposed to vertically as we do in London. Since most of the escalators are very long, very steep and much faster moving than ours, you soon experience an interesting, vertigo-like, sensation as all the passengers on the opposite escalator appear to be leaning backwards at 45 degrees (if they are descending) or forwards at 45 degrees (if they are ascending) and you can't help but try to compensate for this unless you resolutely avert your gaze!
As to the famous sights of Moscow, St. Basil's is magnificent in a totally overblown sort of way – I am glad to have seen it (and Red Square) in the flesh but would not want it on my doorstep.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier moved me more than any other war memorial I have seen. The simplicity of a discarded greatcoat and helmet lying across a very plain marble slab, an eternal flame burning nearby and the constant protection of two uniformed sentries, seems to say all that can be said about the profligate waste of nameless young lives that war always entails.
Within the walls of the Kremlin my abiding memory will be of one beautiful church, every inch of its internal walls painted with beautiful colours and exquisite images. As I entered a really wonderful choir was singing in glorious, unaccompanied, four-part harmony and it made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle because it was just so perfect. We never did get into the Armoury, despite three attempts, because each time I went to the ticket office we had just missed the “ticket buying slot” for one tour and were too early for the “ticket buying slot” for the next tour – don't ask me, I didn't understand either! That's Russia for you.
Apart from the sight-seeing our only other excursion was when I took Harry and George swimming in a rather good leisure pool, in the middle of a shopping centre, on the outskirts of the city. The only really memorable bit about that was the rather terrifying return journey to the metro station in a completely clapped out car, posing as a taxi and driven by an Asabaijani who was too busy trying to have a conversation with me to look where he was going.
Oh, and on our last afternoon in Moscow I went to the permanent market, not far from our hotel, to buy some boots (having lost mine earlier in our travels and now suffering rather cold feet in my summer shoes). The first of the many shoe and boot stalls that I stopped at had a rather nice pair of sturdy, brown leather boots but after much (incomprehensible to me) sales spiel and rushing round to find a pair in my size he finally deigned to write down the price – a whopping 9,000 roubles which is about £200! Since I had set myself an absolute limit of 3,000 roubles there was no bargaining possible, so I left a pretty disgruntled stall holder there. At the second stall I tried, I was propelled bodily off the premises as soon as I said I was English and did not speak Russian. Third time lucky, I found a pair of low heeled boots that I liked and got them just within budget, so I walked back to the hotel in them. Only in the pursuit of footwear would I have been so tenacious!

Arthur's Log:
We arrived, were picked up, and taken to the hotel. Just like the Red Wall it was too posh for me - everyone wearing suits and sitting with good posture on the squidgy leather couches. We passed the last of the day somehow and went to bed.
We were ready to go by 9:30 and were shown round Moscow by a woman called Yelena who got us underground tickets and all the other things we needed.
She took us down the main road telling us about all sorts of things - including a house built of rock that was going to be used to make a momument to Hitler ('cause he was so confident of his sucsess) and a building that had been moved back 14 meters because Stalin wanted a wider main road. The stories just kept coming so eventualy I shut off to keep my brain from exploding.
Saint Basils cathedral was amasing and not what i was expecting. Other than that we just wandered, got our bearings and drank russian coffie!

Me and mum did the Kremlin, whilst Harry & George got PC withdrawal out of their system.
We saw "Tsar the bell" the biggest bell in the world and "Tsar the cannon" the biggest cannon in the world. They were both huge, and had a story.
The bell had been struck by lightning and fell out of the tower to were it lies on the grass today.
The Cannon was used to execute one of Poland's best spies. He was placed in the cannon and shot in the direction of Poland. They reckon his skull would have made it out of the outer city walls if it survived the blast.
We got a taxi to the train station and hopped on a overnight train to Finland, via some of the worst chips ever! They were the worst things I have tasted on this entire trip.