There are few cities in which I have felt more alien, and yet been more enthralled, than Moscow. It's a city that's both tantalisingly familiar yet foreign, somewhere you feel you somehow know, yet feel utterly lost in.
As you drive into the Russian capital, the exotic otherness sweeps you off your feet: the golden fairy-tale domes soaring from medieval towers into blizzards; the acres of grey, Soviet era apartment blocks that march monotonously towards the horizon; the beautiful women scurrying on icy pavements in stilettos. But, unlike other cities, in Moscow the longer you stay, the more strange it seems to get: the more convoluted the cultural knots become, the wider the red tape, the more appearances confuse. Peel off a layer and another appears to discombobulate you — to remind you you're in a city like no other.
When you look at a map, Moscow is not dissimilar to London: a conurbation set around a meandering river, lined with an odd mix of the bizarre and the Baroque, cathedrals and crenellated castles, ugly concrete blocks and towering glass skyscrapers. It has an efficient Metro system and old-style buses on which to nip around. It offers museums and art galleries bursting with treasures for every fan: space, revolution, modern art, history, Tolstoy. Like Bond Street only more so, its shopping streets glitter with the trappings of the nouveaux-riches — diamonds the size of quails' eggs, coats crafted from the fur of exquisite, doomed creatures, shoes sparkling with hand-polished crystals — and restaurants hand-painted like Louis XIV chateaux and hung with French chandeliers and million-pound art.
But there the similarities end. Unlike St Petersburg, whose European links are evident in everything from architecture to food, Moscow is unmistakably Russian. Want a tourist office? Good luck finding one. A museum with signs in other languages? Sorry, all signs are in Cyrillic. And just to trip you up yet again, because the city is evolving so quickly, many supposedly hip places you tracked down before you came away have already shut down. After struggling for a week with a guidebook and maps, slipping on ice, going the wrong way on Metro lines, looking blankly round museums with no idea of what's what, and mistakenly ordering meat rather than muesli for breakfast, I give in and book a guide.
Like most good things, one of these experts (I booked my guide through Abercrombie & Kent) doesn't come cheap, unless he or she is organised as part of a package. But within my first hour of being with the charming Tatiana Solomagina, I start to relax. Here, I soon come to understand, the best access is granted only to those who are connected — and this glamorous, eccentrically bejewelled, former Intourist employee has been guiding so long that she is entrusted with visitors such as European ambassadors and royalty, including Prince Michael of Kent. Tatiana not only knows everyone and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything Russian, but she also understands what foreigners want: nuggets of history and culture, packaged with enthusiasm and humour. I'm in good hands.
