Moscow

Capital City #20

Travelling on the trains can be nice, but when you've been on the road (or is that on the rails?) for a few days, one feels like having a shower. Thankfully the place we were staying at had one of those – it was a really nice apartment, with more than enough of everything we needed.

After cleaning ourselves up a bit we went into town. Red Square.

Red square isn't actually red, and isn't actually a square. It does have all these nice features though:

Lenin's Mausoleum

St Basil's

There was this fairground type thing.

There was also this well type of place where people were throwing coins in, which we didn't photograph.

Russian money is strange, especially the coins. The coins go from 10 roubles at the upper end to 10 kopeks at the lower end of things. 10 kopeks are worth one tenth of a rouble, which is worth around 2.5 NZ cents. At first I would spot the 10 kopek coins and pick them up; there are quite a few of them just lying around on the footpaths, left there because they're not worth the time and energy to pick up. Once I realised this I started to just leave them there too. Anyway, back to the story.

Anna and I aren't the type of people to go literally throwing money away down some fountain or well, like it's some karmic vending machine dishing our health/wealth/love. Here we made an exception. On the steps around the well there were various coins that people had thrown and missed with (it's hard to throw with a bulky jacket and gloves on) so we picked up a couple of missed coins, and tried getting them in the well in the middle. They're worth so little that I do wonder why they actually still have the kopeks.

We went to church too; great to sing some songs that we knew, even if they are Christmas carols in the non-December part of the year.

The next day we went to the Kremlin. Not the Kazan one, the Moscow one.

The Czar cannon.

The Czar bell. The Czar seems to like large things.

It started snowing while we were there.

Gilt onion domes scattered all over the place.

Then we went to another church. Probably my favourite one so far.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

No pictures allowed inside, since it's still a working church. It wasn't garish or overly sumptuous inside; even though it was ornate and there were icons all over the place it was cohesive.

The next morning we went to try and find a market that was recommended as having good tourist shopping. We went to the place where I thought it was on the map and found this:

Some sort of winter wonderland.

It's like a theme park with a Russian flavour and as far as I could see, no rides. Plenty of interesting looking buildings though:

After wandering around this place for a while (and belatedly seeing a no-photos sign) we finally found the market. It was mostly deserted, and the few people still there were all bundled up warmly. Not exactly the Mecca of tourist shopping, but sufficient. I bought a fur hat.

After this we went to VDNK – Всероссийский выставочный центр – which translates to Exhibition of Achievements of the People's Economy in English (thanks Wikipedia!). Basically a bunch of monuments and stuff. We saw this thing though:

Noble space engineers and scientists strive for a socialist future.

Me, with the space obelisk, sporting my new hat.

It's a little incongruous inside. There's a theme park type place that blares western pop music, and a long wide avenue leading up to triumphalist architectural monstrosities; there's an ice skating track type area, a replica Vostok rocket, and one of the Soviet space shuttles that never went past the testing stage. Possibly the most incongruous part was walking past all these Communist structures, and then hearing a song come on that sounded like it was by Casting Crowns. Turns out it was, called “The Well”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKioQPEW4do

Triumphal

Soviet

Architecture.

Vostok!

The Buran Shuttle!

Moscow is an interesting place, it's really rather large, and the metro is ridiculously confusing, perhaps more so than Berlin. While I enjoyed our time there, I was happy to leave – and happier when we got two breakfasts on the train to St Petersburg.

Anna interjects: I really liked Moscow! It was so pretty, and I felt like we got a proper, if short, Russian winter experience with the below zero degree temperatures. It was great to be there in the build-up to Christmas, with all the sparkly decorations and festive atmosphere. I also loved the Tretyakov Gallery, which we visited on our last day there. Russian art is beautiful.