city cross-section

Traveling back from Domodedovo airport on the aeroexpress train offers a good cross-sectional cut through Moscow (so good to do this journey in daylight if you can.) Coming towards Moscow, there is first a few small satellite towns and villages, each with their banal ring of Khrushchev era high-rise apartments; these are interspersed with pine plantations and scatterings of birch, together with older dachas, small traditional villas for people escaping the city at weekends and in the summer.

As you get nearer, more recent dachas pop up - many more of them, much more tightly packed and in wide variations from almost sheds to huge, overbuilt and over-styled mansions. Then, the next band of dull high-rises, this time on the outer ring of Moscow itself and now overlapping randomly with industrial buildings, miscellaneous yards and rows and rows of garages and 'car-cans'. Finally the city proper - still showing its comfortably worn out pre-revolutionary buildings knotted together with housing, offices and factories from every period.

And then into Paveletskaya, not a pretty station....