It's pronounced "stop"!!
I ended up loving Moscow, after being so nervous of the place on the first day. We went to the Cathedral of the Assumption and attendant bridge...
...back to Red Square, and to visit Lenin's mausoleum. He's very "waxy", you might say. It's worth seeing him so you can form your own opinion. Jason and I got in trouble for talking as we were going in, and we'd already been warned about smiling.
Russia is crazy. There are security officers and police absolutely everywhere. And those are just the ones you see, we're pretty convinced there would be plainclothes all over the show as well. It's particularly noticeable on the metro, but you see them all through the streets as well.
The metro is so fantastic. I'd heard about it before I arrived and been really keen to see it. It's absolutely stunningly beautiful. There are 180 stops and I'm pretty convinced they're all different. There's marble everywhere, and statues or frescoes or paintings or anything else you can conceive of decorating each stop. You're not allowed photos of train drivers, officials, or the escalators, which is a shame. We did a tour through the metro, which I loved....
The same guide, Helen, had taken us that morning for a tour of the Kremlin. I'd pictured it being an enclosed palace, but it's actually a mini city inside a fortress wall. There are heaps of churches, a big bell, and my favourite building was the one that they used as a residence.
Katherine by the bit that broke off the biggest bell in the world.
"Imagine the bong that that would make". I wish I could remember who it was that said that.
On the second night we were there, I went to the ballet with Kat and Adrian, the one single guy on our tour. We had a great time trying to communicate with the Russian lady in the ticket booth, but we got tickets to something by Tchaikovsky, which we kind of ended up assuming was Swan Lake. It wasn't. It got to the interval and we all looked at each other, and Kat said "shouldn't she be a swan by now?" In the second act there were a lot of toys dancing around, and she and I started to recognise the music. The one piece we could name was Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, which helped us come to the realisation that it must've been The Nutcracker.
Don't look at me like that. Everything's in Cyrrilic.
This is Adrian. He's very tall. Standing next to him is Steve, of Steve and Amanda fame. It's entirely possible that they don't know I took this photo.
After the ballet, the three of us had crapdogs for dinner. Crapdogs became a bit of a running joke amongst the entire tour group, which may or may not have been started by me. Check this out:
Adrian and I waited for Katherine to eat hers before we bought ours.
Then we went and met Steve and Amanda for a drink. This is Amanda:
I love this photo. She had just been to the toilet. However, the puddle of water is from her washing her hands with water from her drink bottle.
The following night the five of us went out for dinner, to the Pushkin Cafe, which is meant to be one of the best restaurants in Moscow. It was rather expensive, and they told us there was a dress code - no jeans for the boys and no bare shoulders for the girls. We were all worried that we wouldn't get in, because it's not like the boys brought suits with them, and what we do have that's nice is not necessarily going to cover our shoulders completely. However, we managed. The boys wore dark jeans and nice shirts. Everybody scrubbed up pretty well! And the meal and the service were really excellent. It was a very fun night. We'd invited Tony as well, the tour leader, but he didn't come in the end.
Me, Amanda, Steve, Adrian and Kat at Pushkin Cafe; my meal; Kat and me still at Pushkin.
Previous three photos by Amanda and Steve Tilley
The last day we had in Moscow was a free day. I went out by myself, to the Gulag Museum (which was fantastic, I was there for hours), then to a street exhibition of photographs by Pattie Boyd which I stumbled across (she was married to George Harrison and then Eric Clapton), and then to a sculpture garden, which was originally a dumping ground for old Soviet sculpture but has since had bits added and has turned into quite a lot of sculpture in quite a big area. I had a great day.
We had to get the metro from our hotel to the train station, and then we had an overnight train to St Petersburg. After having beautiful weather for the entire time we'd been in Moscow, it absolutely bloody POURED as soon as we decided to leave the hotel. By the time we got to the train, the water was running out of my hair and right down my shoulders and into my clothes. The train was better than expected, but the beds were still too short for me and Adrian, so by the time we got to St Petersburg at 630am and to the hotel at 730am we were pretty damn tired. And this time we couldn't get into our rooms!!
Watch this space for St Petersburg info and photos...
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