MOSCOW

For good and bad, I love this city.

From the dry chilled air to the warm friendly people, this city has it all. Over my last 8 weeks I have spent 3 of them in this Vortex of a cit, and i'm pleased to say not only have i lived to lived to tell the tail but grew and discovered a new way of life.

Only in Moscow do you get phone calls from friends at 2:30 am requesting your presence at any number of clubs 'Propaganda' in this instance. Then leaving your apartment in zero degree weather jumping into the first car that stops and shout at the driver "PASHALUSTA KLUB PROPAGANDA!" then "SKOLKAH?" and after a rough frantic minute of head shaking finger pointing smiling and laughing do you eventually pay over the odds to get to your destination.

The city is hard as nails, their are few benches, smiles and frivoluties on the streets, on the stunning Metro you can expect to be charged down by the type of middle aged business man that in London you would never have dreamt would act so bullishly.

You can get lost in syrillic alphabets, pronunciations, womens eyes and in apartment court yards. If you are foriegn some may say Muscovites are suspicious of you and watch you like a hawk. I'd rather say they are interested, why the change in perception? Simple, almost everybody in Moscow I met was bloody , almost embarressingly kind, friendly and helpful.

From the young lad who stopped, organised and arranged my first solo gypsy cab adventure, to the Georgian gypsy cab driver who just wanted to talk about Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal.

This is not to say Moscow is full of angles. Like all big cities and some small ones naturally it is not. I saw the ugly underbelly of Moscow when I went to the Luzniki Stadium with my friend Ibrahim and we were made to feel quite uncomfortable and in the end decided to leave without seeing the match. This was no surprise the enterance to the San Siro is littered with ultra graffiti and English grounds would still be a meeting ground for certain types if we did not have the forsight and resources to change our games image.

It would also be unfair to tarnish all the fans with the same brush, i spoke to one Spartak Moscow fan who was going on a 16 hour away trip the next day who, although in a slightly UN PC manor, explained how he just prefered his team playing Russians or Moscovites over foriegn players, purely because the related to them more. This isn't a completely alien concept to any football fan.

I was almost beaten up in a resteraunt queue for speaking English to my friend Ibs by a drunkard only to be saved by a beautiful Belarussian girl called Kristina (she could proabably tell you more accurately what the mans obvious grievance with me was).

But that is Moscow and it's brooding, bolshy, crass but essentially well meaning nature make it such a wild place and somewhere so many people want to visit the place but so few people would.

When I was out there first time a friend called it the 'wild west', I know what he means but the term is too loose and dare i say it, American. Moscow isn't Russia and it certainly isn't American, I fear one day it might become so. My Russian friends accept and greet the Wests offerings and Starbucks , Mcdonalds, Subways and Pret A Manger can all be found easily. This is not a bad thing, i'm not one to hark on about globalisation, but i would say the rough and chaotic side of Moscow would certainly be reduced by an increased presence of Western corperation. Is it the 'wild east' no, that's just too rubbish. It's just wild wild Moscow I guess.

My Moscow factfile.

Visa's allow two weeks to organsie and get them. Doing it in person is the cheapest and quickest way, but also the most hassle. Forms , queues etc.

Best Club: Propaganda

Where to eat: Try My My , it's a Russian fast food resteraunt. I have fond memories of the place.

What to eat : Chicken Noodle soup

Where to stay. Obviously the closer to Red Square the more expensive and probably better. But anywhere within the Purple circle metro line is adaquate.

What not to do: Go to the football