Adventures through Moscow

Hey readers, sorry for the horrendously long delay between posts! I will definitely try not to do that again. Between semester break and just getting back into the swing of things for the last half of the semester, sometimes it is hard to find the time to just sit and write about your experiences more than a quick jot in the notebook. So this post will also be ridiculously long. I wish you the best of luck if you decide to read through all of it :)

MOSCOW TRIP

Moscow quotes:

“Are you a foreigner?” (pertaining to a duck)
“Moscow is too sunny!”
“I’m making a beeline towards the impressionist goats.”

Oct. 9 – Saturday

So we arrived in Moscow, promptly at 8:00AM after an all night train from Saint Petersburg. I will have to say that as far as methods of transportation go, I am definitely a fan of overnight/sleeping car trains. Granted, it was a pretty cozy little cabin for four girls, but we all like each other which made the experience much more enjoyable. The only thing that I have to say I was not impressed with during our trip was the food on the train. Yes, airplane food can be so much worse. It was the blandest excuse for a meal I have ever had the option of eating. So just think next time you think the plane food is lousy… you could be eating train food.

So as I mentioned before, we arrived in the morning promptly at 8:00AM sharp. I love the absolute promptness of the Russian train system. We left at exactly 11:59PM as listed on our tickets and arrived at 8:00AM sharp. Impressive if I do say so myself.  It was a pleasantly crisp morning when we went out to the platform and met with our guide, Paul. He was probably the best tour guide that we have had yet on this trip. He spoke English well enough that we didn’t need to strain to hear his every word, and he started off our meeting by showing us his marker. You know how tour guides always have an umbrella or stick of sorts that you’re supposed to follow so that you don’t get lost, right? Well he was carrying what looked to be like a ski pole with a mitten tied to the top, which he told us was the “guiding mitten”. Starting any day being told to follow the guiding mitten is a good start to a day in my book! We were then taken to a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant for breakfast. It reminded me a bit of a small diner, but full of Russians. Obviously. The best part was the breakfast which we were served… hot dogs and rotini! The Russians have such oddball breakfasts, but I love it. I don’t think that I could have thought of a more random combination for breakfast of my own accord. Also had a lovely cup of Ceylon tea (my new favorite) to go along with breakfast. (I’m pretty sure that I am slowly becoming a tea junkie during my travels… I’m drinking a cup as I’m typing this for you!)

After our breakfast, we were taken to the center of town for our first look at Red Square. I’m not really sure what I was expecting for Red Square, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. GUM was a monstrous department store on one side of the square, it is basically the equivalent of Harrold’s in London or KaDeWe in Berlin. Opposite that was Lenin’s mausoleum, which was less ostentatious than I was expecting, but that is ok with me. St. Basil’s Cathedral was really pretty, especially because of the position of the sun behind the church during the morning, and I got a few pretty nifty pictures thank to the lighting. It was mildly disappointing because I am used to seeing the Church Built on Spilled Blood in downtown Saint Petersburg, so St. Basil’s was a not quite so overpowering, but it was still really pretty nonetheless because although they have similar architectures, they are colored and built differently. St. Basil’s is actually nine churches within itself, which is impressive considering it’s not exactly a huge building. Maybe I will have to come back sometime and actually go inside.

Then we went to see the Church of Our Savior, which was a pretty huge church with an interesting history. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the thing, but I do know that during its lifetime, it was torn down by the Communists, turned into a swimming pool, and then rebuilt into an exact copy within 6 years (not all of that happened in 6 years, just the rebuilding process). Then from the bridge, Paul pointed out, what I like to call, the Pater Columbus monument. It is a huge (and I mean huge) monument celebrating the creation of the Russian navy with Peter the Great on a huge ship. Then you realize he is dressed in 15^th century (I believe) Spanish sailing garb… Apparently this monument was originally designed and built for the US as a monument for Christopher Columbus. However, after the completion of the monument, the US didn’t want it. So the designer of the monument happened to be close friends with the mayor of Moscow who decided to take the monument. So he just switched out the head of Christopher Columbus with that of Peter the Great, and tada! Russian naval monument. However, the current mayor of Moscow (the previous was sacked a few weeks ago) is not particularly fond of the guy who designed the monument… so I’m pretty sure that they are going to take the monument down in the near future and put it in Saint Petersburg instead. Which makes more sense to me personally, but whatever. So this is probably the only chance I would have ever had to see it in Moscow in the first place. Oh, the Russians are silly sometimes. 

Our next stop was a cemetery on our way to the Sparrow Hills. While we were there, we got to see the resting places of the founder of the Moscow circus, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, and Nikita Khrushchev. Pretty cool stuff, although that was one crowded cemetery! We eventually made it to the overlook of the city from Sparrow Hills. It was a pretty cool view of the whole city. I was personally impressed that there was an overlook since there are basically no hills in the city. Russia is way too flat for me, it makes me miss all the mountains back home! Then we finally made it to our hotel after a long day of being tourists and not having any opportunity to shower after our train trip. We got to shower and relax before our last outing of the day (yeah, still talking about the first day!). What a wonderful two hours of relaxation.

After our recuperation and naps, we got to go to the circus! I don’t think I have been to a circus since I was like 3, so it was extra exciting to be going to the Moscow circus. Their circus even has a permanent building, no tents. It was definitely a fun evening and highly entertaining. Although I do retain mixed feelings about the animals in the show… Oh, and just to top off the evening, we had what are considered to be the best doughnuts in Russia. And they were definitely tasty! Great way to top off my evening. Thus concludes day one of my Moscow adventures!

Oct. 10 – Sunday

Day two started off with a tasty breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Man, I’m going to miss European breakfast when I come home. I don’t know how people want to eat piles of fried food when they wake up in the morning. I’m so much more partial to bread, cheese, fruit and yogurt in the mornings. But anyway. We then all got our first taste of the Moscow metro… that made me miss Saint Petersburg. Although I’m not particularly partial to the metro in the first place, the Saint Petersburg metro is far more favorable. The Moscow metro is about 18 times more complex and crowded. But we made it to our destination, which was Red Square again so that we could go to Lenin’s tomb. I pretty much expected the line to be something absurd and that we would be spending the better part of the morning just standing there to go inside, but we really only waited maybe 30 minutes because we got into line before the tomb was even opened to the public in the morning. When I finally had all my bags checked and I had been metal detected and patted down, etc. I made my way into, what I think to be a very poor designed entrance to the mausoleum. We come into an entrance way from the bright sun into a hall with stairs made completely of black granite. It’s a little less than easy to see where you are going and you have the constant fear that you will fall down a flight of stairs at any moment. There are also Russian guards posted at every corner that seem to float in and out of the shadows, which is extremely disorienting when you’re watching the floor and trying not to fall down the stairs and you look up to see a guard directly in front of you. What is even more frightening, is turning the corner and having a guard pop out of a shadow and grab your arm! Just a future note for anyone going to see Lenin… don’t have your hands in your pockets. NOT ALLOWED. Finally found Lenin, and it was a creepy experience. Its hard to believe that that was actually Lenin laying there. He looked more like a wax figurine than a real person. Honestly, it was kind of gross. But that’s just me. And that is my Lenin experience, haha.

The next segment of our day was spent on a tour of the Kremlin complex. Again, I wasn’t really sure what to be expecting, but it was pretty cool. Most people think of the Kremlin and imagine one building, but it is really a huge complex of lots of buildings, churches, walls etc. But I think my favorite part of that tour was getting to see the Tsar Bell and the Tsar Cannon. The largest bell and cannon in the world. And I’m pretty sure that neither of them have been used. A huge chunk of the Tsar Bell fell off of it, and just the chunk that fell off, is taller than I am. Then again, being taller than me isn’t a difficult task, but that’s another story. I also think that I heard somewhere that the Bell is so big that they have held Mass inside of it before. The Tsar Cannon has also never been fired, at least I think so. There is a legend pertaining to the Time of Troubles in Russian history that deals with the time of the False Dmitri’s (kind of along the lines of all the people claiming to be Anastasia). According to the legend, there was a guy from Poland who came to Russian claiming to be the lost Dmitri (known as False Dmitri II) and took power. However the Russian’s didn’t like his extremely un-Russian behavior and sentiments… so he was killed, displayed on Red Square for a while, then his body was burned, and then they stuffed his ashes into the Cannon and shot them back at Poland. This is probably one of my favorite stories from Russian history, whether it is completely true or not, haha!

After the completion of our Kremlin tour, we were given the rest of the day for our own explorations. Myself and a few friends decided to seek out the Tretyakov Gallery which was very strongly recommended to me by my Russian professor. We eventually found it and spent a few hours wandering its halls. I would say it compares to the Hermitage in that it is the equivalent in Russian art as the Hermitage is in Western art. I really enjoyed it, I think possibly more than the Hermitage or the State Russian Museum in terms of the art exhibitions. After that, we decided to just wander the city with the intention of finding a park full of old communist monuments that had been taken down and placed in this park for display and Gorky Park. It took a good chunk of the rest of the day, but we eventually found them, but we were so exhausted that we just took a quick look then tried to find a metro station to get back to the hotel. We returned to the hotel and took a good 30 min to an hour recovery then decided to go out and celebrate our last evening in Moscow. We bumped into more people from our group outside the hotel and we all made our way to the café across the street from the hotel, where we all just chatted, had some soup, a beer and good conversation. It was a good way to send off from our adventures in Moscow as most of us were leaving the next day for countries all over Europe for our semester breaks. I, myself, was bound for Germany!

And I think this should about cover it for my time in Moscow. The next installment of my adventures abroad will continue in my next post. Thanks for reading and I hope to get my next post up about Germany up very shortly as well as pictures which will probably be its own post :)