Wednesday
We first went to the magnificent church by the river, The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. As with all the churches the inside walls are filled with wonderful frescos of saints, biblical scenes and images of tsars. Christ the Saviour is as good as it can get and the size of the cupolas are hard to comprehend. In the basement, there are collections of embroidery that are jewel encrusted depicting saints,etc.
From there we went to the Tretyakov State Gallery. This gallery has collections dating back to the 10th century up to the 0th century. If you were into Russian art you could spend hours here.
After lunch, we caught the metro and stopped at several stations to see the artwork, some of these stations could pass for art galleries. Most of the metro stations would be at least 60m underground, very long escalators take you up and down, and takes about 2 minutes to reach the bottom.
We found our way out to the Expo park (All Russian Exhibition Centre) and all you can think is the Soviets never did things in half measures.
Nearby was the Cosmonaut Museum and this was really
interesting even though there was little information in English.
From there we navigated the Metro back to our hotel on the otherside of town.
For dinner, we wandered around and there was little English spoken at the local restaurants, so after the third attempt we decided to stay. We didn't know what type of food or the price, but somehow we managed to order beers and some lamb and beef dishes...and it was one of our better meals lately!
Thursday
We were left to our own today. We catch the overnight train to St. Petersburg (leaves at midnight).
So, first we travelled on the Metro across town to the Vodka Museum. It was ok. It was situated in a theme town called ,Kremlin, there were lots of schoolkids there. A bit like Wobby World!
We then crossed town again to go the Victory Park, a war memorial park for WWII. The size and scope of the memorials are hard to comprehend, they make the cenotaph in Rosebud look very insignificant!
After a few hours at the Victory Park, we got back to the centre of Moscow and went on an hour boat cruise on the Moscow River. In one direction it goes pass the Peter the Great statue and down to Gorky Park and in the other direction we went pass The Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the Kremlin, the Red Square, St. Basil's and a bit further.
After the cruise we walked over the Patnarshiy (?) Bridge and walked several kms to the Lenin statue near Gorky Park and finally returned to the hotel for a break and freshen up before the train trip.
Cheers,
A & K
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