Day 11 Moscow

Impressions of Moscow from day 11 and 12. Amazing city. The wealth here is very noticeable. More billionaires here than anywhere else. Lots of big beautiful cars – Cadillac, Mercedes, Bentley, Maybach. Big very wide streets, and lots of beautiful, renovated historical buildings from different periods. Even the Stalin-era buildings look amazing with a fresh coat of nicely-colored paint. The cleanliness is unreal – automated washing of the streets and sidewalks. The metro is beautiful and efficient – train every 40 seconds. We took a city tour which included the metro, the Red Square and the part of Moscow called Sparrow Hills, which is the highest point in Moscow and has the best view of the city. That’s also where Moscow State University is located and where many prominent people, including Medvedev, live. Our tour guide, Victoria, was amazing at herding 29 mostly geriatric folks through three metro stations and two trains with multiple stops for explanations and pictures without losing anybody and without any accidents. The three metro stations we saw were Dynamo – with lots of white marble, Mayakovskaya – with beautiful artwork and sculptures and Teatralnaya near the Red Square. After the tour, we went to a concert of Russian folk music.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Preamble

This is our 61st trip together. We fly to St. Petersburg Russia for 4 days then a “river” cruise stopping at 5 unheard of cities (Mandrogy, Kizhi, Kuzino , Yaroslavl , Uglich and ending in Moscow for 4 days. We go through two lakes: lake Ladoga and lake Onega. When I said I never heard of them, Bo was aghast. “How could you have not heard of them. They are the 2 largest lakes in Europe”.
Read more

Day 7 Monday 6/5

Image
Early in the morning, we stopped a Kizhi island on Lake Onega. This is our northern most stop – in the province of Karelia, which was once a part of Finland and is only 300 km from the Arctic Circle. The reason for this stop is the open air museum of traditional wooden architecture, which includes several old wooden churches. The biggest and most elaborate was built in 1714 and is entirely made of wood. There are also some peasant houses, a windmill, a chapel and a bunch of souvenir shops, of course. Again, we were not alone here. There were two Russian ships in this small harbor as well. The setting of this reserve is beautiful and the tour was really interesting and very pleasant. This time the weather cooperated and it was almost sunny, and relatively warm – in the 40s, but no wind. They told us that on the previous cruise in early May they had to cross the lakes following an ice breaker and they couldn’t stop at Kizhi at all because everything was frozen. The rest of the day was ...
Read more

Day 10 Thursday

Image
Uglich. We arrived early and opted to not take any tours. The city is small and we decided to walk it ourselves. We went to innumerable churches and two monasteries - one for men and one for women. There are many picturesque churches with many onion domes, some blue, some green, some gold. Each color has its significance. The number of domes also has its meaning. The oldest part of Uglich, the Kremlin, which actually means a complex of churches and fortifications, includes a lovely church of St. Dmitry on the Blood, which was built in the 1690 on the spot where 9 year old tsarevich Dmitry was killed. Uglich is a very picturesque and quaint little town of about 35,000. It has no industry apart from a watch manufacturing plant Chayka, cheese production and tourism. It’s a mixture of traditional wooden Russian houses, a few post-communist structures, new dachas some newly constructed hotels and apartment buildings. We were to meet Andrey, a choir director from Moscow with whom Bo wo...
Read more