Day 12 Moscow

No tours. After breakfast, we walked to the nearest metro station (Rechnoy Vokzal) and went downtown. The walk to the metro took about 15 minutes, through two parks with families, kids, dogs enjoying their weekend activities. The metro was not crowded. We got off at Mayakovskaya and started our walk tracing the places from one of Bo’s favorite novels “Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, which is set in Moscow in the 1930s. Bo printed a map of all the places and their addresses, but we still had to ask directions a few times, and once we had to use Google maps. The best part was that almost all the places were in a very beautiful part of old Moscow, in Arbat, with lovely little streets lined with amazing buildings, neighborhood parks, small cafes, posh shops, etc. People were out, cafes were full… We got to fully appreciate the life of the city and its atmosphere. We stopped at a local branch of the Moscow Museum of Modern art and visited exhibitions of two contemporary Russian artists – a photographer Sergei Borisov and a video artist Alexandra Mitlyaanskaya. After that we walked on Tverskaya, a wide and impressive boulevard with one designer shop after another, towards the Red Square. We stopped for lunch in a little café and then continued onto Manage Square with a huge exhibition hall in the former tsar’s stables. There was a strange event going on there – an art fair – that we walked through, then walk through Alexander’s Gardens along the Kremlin wall and then back to the metro and the ship. By the time we got back about 6:30 pm, we must have walked at least 7 hours.

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