You see, travelling to Moscow was actually a familiar but forgotten experience to me, as my parents used to drag their 6 children through an extremely long journey once every couple of years so that they could visit their relatives back in Bangladesh and the cheapest airline for then, back in the day was Aeroflot.
The journey consisted of five stops, one being Moscow. The stopover could, as I recall, mean waiting around the airport for hours on end or even staying a full day until the next transfer flight.
One of my clear memories as a child was going through security; looking up at huge security guards and having to hold the gaze of a person at passport control, who would stare so intensely, checking to see if the photo on your passport matched the person looking at them through the glass barrier, that I, as a child, was unable to hold that gaze for more than a second or two before embarrassment took over and I had to look away!
No way! And so I did. Fear of Moscow and Russia. And how wrong was I to have doubt about one of the most important, influential and culturally diverse nations in the world. So the following 24 hours of my journey really did start to raise questions about many of the misconceptions that influence perceptions about the Russian people and three years down the line, I have tried to piece together why this appears to be the case if we are to believe most mainstream global media.
Back to my first 24 hours. After a night at a hotel near Izmaylovskaya, I had my first experience of taking the metro.
