St Basil's Cathedral and the Gum Department Store
Red Square, Moscow
Saturday, 13 August 2011
I am so glad I did this.
Funny enough, I was on the same plane from Hong Kong to Moscow as I'd been on from Auckland to Hong Kong. Like, literally the same. It had this horrible clunk that woke everybody up when one of the wheel bays opened, and a very strange noise when one of the wheel brakes engaged. I figured that it was loud enough that the pilots must have known it was happening, and that they must have checked the brakes over and been convinced that they were operating effectively. But I was still VERY nervous when we landed.
However. We made it to the terminal safely. And in immigration they barely even looked at me or my passport, all they did was scan the photo page and my visa, print out whatever bit of paper I need, give me back my passport, and look over my shoulder for the next person. I was expecting far more drama than that, given how difficult they make it to get a visa in the first place.
I flew into Moscow Domodedovo Airport, and I was expecting something pretty huge and fancy. It looks like a local airport that extended the runway a couple of times and put in an immigration booth. It was really difficult to figure out which line was for visitors and which for citizens. The baggage was very slow to get from the plane to the carousel, but to be fair they did land five or six planes in about twenty minutes. We were half an hour or so early, and I'd arranged for the tour company to pick me up from the airport, so I wandered out into the arrivals hall and tried (unsuccessfully) to find somewhere to sit. When the driver arrived, I saw him straight away and went over to him, only to find he was Russian and didn't speak a word of English. He did however have the name of the tour company, my name, and the names of two other people from my tour that he was picking up from the same flight. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Three more flights landed. We waited. 45 minutes later, a couple who both had white hair walked over to us and introduced themselves as Sue and Hugh (memorably). I was surprised because I was expecting it to be like my tour in the Middle East, which was with the same company - everybody was my age.
Sue and Hugh are AWESOME. We were chatting as we walked out to the van, and they're from Khandallah in Wellington, which is only like two suburbs away from where I was living in Thorndon.
We got on really well right away. It was about an hour drive to the hotel, right through the suburbs of Moscow, and we were all just open-mouthed and staring out the window the whole way into the city. The suburbs consist of miles and miles and miles and miles of huge apartment blocks, which all look the same, and are all fairly run down on the outside. What really amazed us was that even after we drove for half an hour past apartment blocks as far as the eye could see, they were building tower after tower of new apartments. I was so absorbed in looking out the window that I didn't even take any photos.
So we arrived at the hotel at 9am and eventually managed to get one of the eight staff at the reception desk to pay some attention to us, and they actually let us check in and go to our rooms right away, which was great because I'd slept for a grand total of about two and a half hours on the plane, and we'd lost four or five hours, so I was feeling pretty grotty and awful. I was expecting that I was really early and that my roommate would arrive after me, but when I got to the room she was there already - Katherine from Canberra. She was feeling a bit homesick, and I was pretty nervous about going out into Moscow on my own, so we joined forces and went out together.
We managed to figure out the metro together and get ourselves to town. We were heading for Red Square but the metro came out somewhere slightly more random and we weren't sure which direction we needed to go. So we wandered for a bit, and we eventually did get there. The buildings around Red Square are all amazing anyway.
The roads are of course crazy, as you would expect in a city this size, so we spend lots of time using predestrian subways, which are actually really awesome. They usually have lots of tiny shops in them. There was one I found on my last day in Moscow which had art stalls from one end to the other. This is what they're normally like:
We evenually made it to the side of St Basil's, which is just as weird in the flesh as in photos.
We wandered round Red Square for a while, went and had some lunch, decided to head for home, Katherine led us off in the wrong direction, I sorted us out, we got the metro back to the hotel, and we both totally crashed out by 2pm. We got up at about 4pm, because we figured we'd be meeting about 5pm with the tour leader and the rest of our group. We'd been instructed to look for a notice in the lobby, but we couldn't find anything all day. We got down there and met up with Hugh and Sue, and there were three other older people standing around who we eventually started talking to... who were also on our tour. Colin and his wife Jane (Aussies), and Jane's friend Pat (Kiwi). Katherine and I were starting to look at each other and at the rest of the group and back at each other. We were both the same, we'd expected it to be all 20- or 30-somethings.
We eventually got it sorted and everybody met at 6pm. As well as Tony our Tour Leader, who's Canadian and in his mid-thirties and been tour leading for ages, there was only one single guy, Adrian (Aussie), who I would've said was mid-thirties. There were Denise and Jason, our resident Canadians. There was another Aussie couple, Peter and Janette, who are on a six month trip around the world. There were Ian and Julie, a British couple, who are only with us as far as Poland and who are incredibly well-travelled. And the last to arrive were Amanda and Steve, more Aussies and the youngest couple on the tour, who are also one a six month trip. We did the "say your name, where you're from, and one thing we don't know about you". I said "I'm Laura, I'm from NZ, and I quit my job to travel". Katherine said "I'm Katherine, I'm from Canberra, and I'm a band geek... I play euphonium". You must be kidding me. We'd already worked out that we are really alike in sense of humour.
We (whenever I say "we" just assume it's me and Katherine. Even by the time we had the first meeting at the end of the first day, everybody thought we'd been friends for years) went for dinner with Hugh and Sue, who even by then we'd pretty much adopted, and the Canadians, Jason and Denise. We sat outside and it was light until about 10pm. As soon as we'd finished dinner we all had to go home and have a biiiiiiiig sleep, ready for day two.....
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