Moscow free-write

I got to Moscow at 7am on a night train and the first image I saw seemed to be St Pete train station; the same large rectangular room, the same statue in the middle, Then out in the streets instead of the 'boom, crash, wow!' and bold colours and rough rude glamourous Moscovites of the communist capital, of the site of battles who's parliament sounds so very much like 'gremlin', there were quiet becastled streets and polite people dressed modestly in jeans and flat shoes. The sun seemed to rise, athough it had already risen and was merely emerging slightly from cloud cover.

Me and my Russian friend walked on and on down a straight straight street reminscent of Mosckovsky prospect(as one may expect) but could only find the same inspid banal chain establishments restaurants, russified  versions of the Costa coffee concept, as in St Petersburg. Oh, and a Starbucks and Mcdonalds to mark how far Moscow was from it's anti-capitalist past. Then we spotted a My-My, a Societ style cantene mentioned in the guidebook and sitting down to soup, sirniki and and a rich cheese and mushroom dish to accompany post night-train coffee we wrote without limitations our impressions of Moscow.

Moscow. What is there, but towering skyscrapers and primitive Latvian castles squatting be hind the train station; a mirror image of St Petersburg and you can drink coffee in the St Petersburg Café and take the metro to Mayakovskaya or Puskinskaya (semantic shift in operation)? The main problem is walking for a very long time with a heavy bag amongst Moscovite towers and the side-streets are not full of squats (skvots) unless you coud say the side-streets are squatting and ALL THESE PEOPLE (what people, what metropole? I can’t see any.) have space to move through the boulevards. Café is all she wanted and it’s the word she proclaimed loudly and proudly and angrily, holding her arms up to the Slavic gods. ‘Café, café.’ There were no cafes , only bars and late night dives and then Mcdonalds. The stars were unsympathetic. The little known god of Coffee Houses however peered down from his barista’s ledge in the sky, near the moon, and took pity on this unglamorous Moscow night, in the civilised light. Suddenly, in this industrial town, a café fell from the sky and inconveniently blocked the entrance to Mcdonalds. The goddess of tearooms forgot her long-running dispute with the Coffee god and laughed seraphatically at this triumph over fast-food. The muscovite, who   was  wearing   jeans   even  though   she   was   long out  of her teens, strolled into the café which boasted an excellent selection of wholesome cakes and ordered the special brew before blowing the café to smithereens and emptying the pockets of a few groggy customers. She had been inspired by the ribald diction of pulp fiction and this divine intervention was a lucky twist of fate.