We are awoken at 8.30am (there's a +1 hour time change) when the stewardess knocks on our cabin door. Both of us have slept fairly soundly since around 4.30am. Prior to that I dozed fitfully and Iain was wide awake. We seem to be having problems sleeping on trains this trip.

I get dressed and organized while Iain sleeps (for a change). Unfortunately I somehow miss the coffee that’s being offered around. I watch Moscow suburbs through the window for a while, with trepidation of being back in Russia. We arrive on schedule at 9.30am and Iain has a frantic five minutes getting dressed/washed/packed. The first class carriage is at the back end of the train, a long 11-car walk to the end of the platform - not very good for the privileged! I do feel wrong in first class - with the uber-cool. It's horribly swanky when others are begging.

We emerge blinking furiously into the bright Moscow sunlight, which is dazzling on lots of glass kiosks (though the buildings remain concrete). The street is extremely busy - we realise it's rush hour. A colleague at home told me that five years ago there were virtually no cars in the cities; now they can't move on the wide boulevards. We orientate ourselves by asking someone who speaks no English (welcome back to Russia) for "Metro". She points in the wrong direction, and Iain does some excellent navigation. The woman at the Metro kiosk doesn’t like me, and neither does the barrier, which automatically closes at high force on my legs. The metro is packed, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people, like a football crowd. Apparently it carries more people per day than London and New York combined. This isn't too easy to negotiate with luggage, and concern for pick-pockets.

We get off at the right station, but the map looks very wrong. Crossing the road to where we think we might want to be is a nightmare, ten lanes of crazy beeping traffic. We head for Макдоналдс hoping someone young will speak English. We find and ask a group of students, who lay our map out on the table and discuss. They think the map is out of date and the road names have all changed - as happened on our arrival in Sofia a few years ago. The group discussion in two languages gets confusing. A smartly-dressed couple appear who are fluent in English, overheard our problems, and who offer to take us in the right direction. They are the young high-flying new rich, wearing expensive designer clothes. They're extremely helpful, and take us us the right way (the opposite direction we initially walked). The hostel's "ten minute walk" is nearer twenty. We’re tired and fed up.

It's in a residential area, with block after block of grey state high-rise apartments. We locate the hostel on the tenth floor of one of them. Thank goodness the lift works. We're glad to arrive, but the hostel is a bit dingy. I reckon it's the worst one we’ve been in, and it's also the most expensive. Moscow is a very expensive city for food and accommodation. The receptionist is helpful, though, and we buy a map and get our visas registered. We decided to sit in the common room for half an hour reading papers and watching Sky News to chill out. We chat to a British girl who hates Moscow - I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't. It certainly has some interesting sights, but it's busy, smelly, dirty and crowded - much like London!

[St. Basil's Cathedral]

[Kremlin and Lenin's mausoleum]

[GUM]

We head back out at 11am, and follow a slightly shorter route to a different Metro station, as advised by the above backpacker. It's harder staying in big cities when hostels tend to be further out - commuting in adds to tiredness and risk. We walk down a main road, one of the major routes into Moscow, then get the metro towards Красная Площад for a hopefully easy start on our first day when we're tired. The metro is less busy but still hot, humid, oppressive and smelly. We get out at a central station (there are a few), thinking we'll be right by Red Square. You'd imagine it to be easy to find - look for the big red wall. Hmm. After guesswork, some wrong turns, and a fair bit of map reading we find something that looks like it could be a bit of Kremlin wall but turns out not to be. We climb some stairs through a gap in it, and head for a church in the distance which looks important (no, I don't know how we concluded that). We see increasing numbers of matriochka (Russian doll sets) sellers and a few tourists, so we persevere.

[Kremlin tower]

[St. Basil's Cathedral]

[Red Square]

We eventually find a corner of it - cordoned off, doh! I'm hoping to go inside Lenin's Masoleum before it closes in ten minutes. We can see it, and the queue for it, 300 metres away but can't work out how to get to it. We eventually give up in frustration. There are scores of people milling and hanging around, a few people shouting into megaphones, loads of armed soldiers. It all feels a bit tense. There

[Inside of GUM]

[Inside of GUM]

are very few foreigners, surprisingly few tourists. We hear only two other people speaking English. Being in Red Square hasn't sunk in yet; we're too tired, and we're standing in a corner so we can't get a full perspective. We realise we're hungry and look for snacks for lunch. There are, for once, absolutely no stands or kiosks. Usually they're all over the place. We head into ГУМ, the former state department store, now containing western designer brand clothing stores. It's very Trafford Centre, but considerably more elegant, with three levels of open halls with walkways and bridges, all styled and sculpted gently in cream.

[Rostik's]

We find a chicken fast food place, the Russian equivalent to McDonalds. I've read good reviews and we decide to try it. At first we point to pictures of food on boards above the Russian menu, then someone produces an English menu, so we start again whilst the queue builds up behind us. We see a few other people struggling, and realise there would be no queues if everyone were Russian. People are kindly patient - I'm sure there would'n've been signing and a few comments in the UK. We get corn on cob, a veggie wrap (yay!), potato wedges, chicken legs and cokes. It's not very cheap at £8, but we over-ordered by mistake. It's our main meal of day, really nice for fast food, and the veggie stuff is great, which makes a nice change for Russia. Can't help noticing lots of pigeons trying to grab people's leftovers.

We walk back out onto Red Square, emerging halfway along, which makes it now seem bigger than it first looked. The barriers have now been removed, but we don’t know why. People are walking across the square. There are no longer any queues, just people taking photos, walking, looking. That does feel strange now, I am used to seeing pictures of it crowded with organised rows of soldiers.

[River boat]

[The Kremlin, from the Moscow River]

[St. Basil's, from the Moscow River]

[The Kremlin, from the Moscow River]

[The rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour]

We walk out of the other end of Red Square looking for boat trips, and find a jetty, one bridge away. It's insanely hot, and we want shade. Unfortunately, none presents itself until the boat turns up, and we wilt on the top deck.

[Monument to Peter the Great]

[Moscow University, one of Stalin's "Seven Sisters"]

[Buran prototype in Gorky Park]

[Kiev Station]

[Getting across the road in Moscow]

The boat trip takes us past such Moscow landmarks as the Hotel Россия (a flagship Soviet concrete nightmare), the Kremlin, re-built Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a cheerfully insane statue of Peter the Great, Буран, the prototype Russian space shuttle rusting in Gorky Park and the Olympic stadium. The boat gives up at Kiev station, just before the White House. We half-heartedly walk in its general direction and then decide we’ve seen it and can’t be bothered to get any closer. Instead, we navigate down Кутузовский Проспект for food and toilet reasons and end up in a Макдоналдс.

[Outside Kiev Station]

And after that, we go back to Киевская Metro and head to ВДНК Metro. (And if you thought that was a maze of Cyrillic, you should try being there.)

[Space Monument]

[Entrance to VDNKh]

The first thing we see when we emerge from the metro, is the huge monument to Soviet space achievements, surrounded by roller bladers. After gorping at it, we head through a brief scally market and find outselves face to face with the entrance to the ВДНК.

The ВДНК is the All-Union Exhibition Centre, opened in 1954. It was originally opened in 1939 as the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, but in its later incarnation as ВДНК, it became permanent and sprouted 80 pavilions spread over 578 acres. They were intended to demonstrate the economic and technological achievements of the Советский Союз as well as representing the different republics of the Union.

[Looking towards entrance]

[Obligatory statue of Lenin]

[Central Pavilion]

[Central Pavillion]

["Fountain of the Friendship of Peoples"]

We nip through the triumphal archway, which is topped with a gold statue of two farm workers carrying a wheat-sheaf. The park is filled with this sort of Soviet architecture ("Stalin Empire" style, apparently) and it's really the first time the buildings have really matched what we were expecting to see. No matter how many guidebooks point out that Moscow has a far longer history than just the Soviet era, its recent history still dominates our knowledge and impressions of the place. So while we're not quite expecting to see furtive spies and decomposing Политбюро members, the European architecture and Western clothes and brands weren't always what we were anticipating.

[Pavillions]

ВДНК is the antidote - with its statues of Lenin, and extravagant pavilions, it's the image of Soviet architecture that I was expecting. While many of the monuments to Soviet progress now host electrical goods markets, the impression is still of excess - the gold-soaked Fountain of the Friendship of Peoples is noticeably unrestrained by budget or taste.

Now it's a place for people to hang out on a Sunday afternoon. It's quite full, mostly with younger people. I have a go at transliterating the building signs, but I only manage АРМЕНИЯ and ПАВИЛЬОН.

We call that the end of the day - the park's signposted to close in fifteen minutes (not that anyone else is looking like leaving) and we're hungry and generally tired of walking. Moscow is a big city despite the comprehensive Metro system. We scan the market for presents and food on the way back, but there are few vegetarian opportunities.

Back to hostel, we watch Sky "News" (which is the only thing on besides S4C and an incomprehensible Russian cartoon starring purple blobs) for news of the recent air crashes, not least because we're flying home on a Туполев-154.