Moscow in 5 days: the Kremlin and the metro palaces

This is a personal account of a trip taken before recent events. Travel advice for Russia has changed substantially - check your own government's current guidance, and your insurance, before planning anything.

The first thing about Moscow is the scale. Red Square is 330 metres long and reads as small in photographs because there is nothing in it to give it size. The main streets are ten lanes wide. The metro runs 70 metres underground in places. It takes about two days to recalibrate your sense of distance, and until you do, everything is further than you think.

The route

• Day 1: Red Square and Kitay-gorod
• Day 2: the Kremlin
• Day 3: the metro and Tretyakov
• Day 4: Novodevichy and Gorky Park
• Day 5: Izmailovo and out

Day 1: Red Square

I went straight there and then went back at night, which is when it is worth seeing. St Basil's is smaller and much stranger in person than in pictures - not one church but nine, each a separate chapel, painted in colours that were added centuries after it was built.

GUM on the eastern side is a nineteenth-century glass-roofed arcade, now full of expensive shops, and free to walk through. Behind it, Kitay-gorod is the oldest quarter and the only part of the centre that feels like a neighbourhood rather than a stage.

Day 2: the Kremlin

The Kremlin is not one building but a walled city: five palaces, four cathedrals, and the government. Tickets are separate for the grounds and for the Armoury, and the Armoury - the treasury, with the Fabergé eggs, the carriages and the coronation regalia - is the one to book ahead for a timed slot.

Inside the walls, Cathedral Square has four churches within fifty metres of each other. Outside them stands the Tsar Bell, the largest bell ever cast, which cracked in a fire before it was ever hung and has sat on the ground ever since. There is a Tsar Cannon nearby that was never fired. Both are somehow very Russian.

Day 3: the metro, as a destination

This was my favourite day and it cost the price of a metro ticket. The stations on the circle line were built as, in the official phrase, palaces for the people: marble, chandeliers, bronze statues, mosaic ceilings.

Do this as a route: Komsomolskaya for the baroque ceiling, Novoslobodskaya for the stained glass, Mayakovskaya for the steel arches and the mosaics you have to look up to see, Ploshchad Revolyutsii for the 76 bronze figures - the dog's nose is polished gold because everyone touches it for luck.

Trains run every ninety seconds. Station names are announced in a male voice going into the centre and a female voice going out, so you can tell which direction you are travelling with your eyes shut.

In the afternoon, the Tretyakov Gallery for Russian painting, which is the collection that explains the country better than any museum of history.

Day 4: Novodevichy and the river

Novodevichy Convent, a walled sixteenth-century monastery with a lake beside it, and the adjacent cemetery where Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov and Shostakovich are buried. Quiet, and the antidote to the scale of the centre.

Then Gorky Park, which was a fairground and is now a large, well-run public park, and a walk along the river to the Muzeon sculpture garden - where Soviet statues removed from their plinths in the 1990s were collected rather than destroyed.

Day 5: Izmailovo

The Izmailovo market on the eastern edge: a mock-wooden kremlin with a flea market attached, best at the weekend, and the place for matryoshka dolls, Soviet badges and old cameras. Haggling is expected and good-natured.

Practical notes from the trip

• Learn the Cyrillic alphabet. Two hours on a plane is enough to sound out station names, and it changes the city from opaque to navigable.
• The metro is the transport. Traffic above ground is severe; below ground you cross the city in twenty minutes.
• Distances deceive. Two metro stops on the map can be two kilometres.
• Cafés and canteens - the self-service stolovaya - are cheap, good and where people actually eat lunch.
• Winter is a real decision. I went in September. December is beautiful and it is minus fifteen.