Five days later. Five more days of toilets and five more days of Moscow. Added together, they come to this: I would like to leave now. Moscow is probably a fascinating place to live in, but for visitors, it's not easy.
Not that it has not been fascinating. I have met Malaysian toilet architects, a Sri Lankan who is installing sanitation in tsunami-ed areas, a Russian professor of hydraulics who arrived for an 8.30 meeting with a can of beer in his pocket, and a South African with a school-toilet cleaning company. His name is Trevor, but he became known also as either The Only Black Man in Moscow or the Walking Tourist Attraction. Trevor walks and Russians stare. There must be Africans and brown people here because I read reports of them getting killed and beaten up by racists regularly, but they're probably, sensibly, in hiding. Trevor, therefore, stands out:
The Sri Lankan and the Malaysians preferred to travel with at least one white person because they felt uncomfortable. V., the Sri Lankan, had an unpleasant experience on his first day. Trevor always took taxis. This is a shame, as the metro is my favourite thing about Russia. The tickets cost a pittance, the trains come every two minutes, they are old but clean, and the station decor is extraordinary. My morning commute took me from Partisanskaya - huge marble columns - to Ploshad Revolutia, with massive bronze statues of strapping young Soviet men and women, including this man here, who I had a crush on (calculating that bronze men are as responsive as some of the real ones I choose):
There are many more images of Moscow metro stations from the site that I nicked that image from.
Saturday was a toilet tourist day. First, Star City, Russia's Nasa, which is closed to tourists, but which clearly has plenty of delegations passing through, as there are videos in English. Our tour guide was from the economics department but dearly wanted to be an astronaut. If he thought it odd that his visitors were more interested in the space toilet than the wonder of space exploration, he didn't show it. Star City was deserted, as it was a Saturday, but it also looked as though it hadn't been used for twenty years. That's probably why it needs space tourists to spend $20 million for 8 days on the space station. Then they could at least get the decorators back in:
