OH MY, I am in Moscow! (Day One)

So the midnight train worked out fairly well, I got about 6 hours of solid sleep.  I have certainly had a worse night’s sleep in a hotel before but In the future I think a bed not running on rails might be better.  However they did have good tea available for breakfast (like everywhere else in Russia!!) and of course the coolest part, you wake up ready for a full day in a historic and extremely important city without many of the hassles of air travel.

The train came to a stop at the station at exactly 8:00 am, and I still find it amazing how they do that, we had about 5 minutes to grab our luggage and assemble on the train platform. We all made it off in good order and where meet by our guide and the bus to take us out for our first day’s tour. But first we stopped at a café for a very Russian breakfast, which consisted of what amounts to pasta and hot dogs. It was not the best thinning the world in terms of taste, nutrition or what we all wanted to eat at the time but we all needed the protein and ate it willingly.

Our first tour stop of the day was the exterior of the Moscow Kremlin (old fortified city center and current home to most of the Russian government), St. Basil’s Cathedral and the world famous Red Square.  We got off the bus and at once our guide pointed out the Russian State Duma (their house of representatives) and the world famous Bolshoi Theater.  Both where very impressive buildings in their own right, but they where dwarfed in significance by the sights ahead.

Bolshoi Theatre

Russian State Duma

We walked down past some fairly modern buildings, went past a state museum and through an archway and there we where, RED SQUARE!  For those that don’t know red square is the place where the soviets and now Russians have their massive military parades and it is one of the most important places in the city.  On it is Lenin’s Mausoleum, GUM (now one of the world’s most expensive malls), the graves of Soviet party secretaries and heroes of the revolution and the iconic St. Basil’s Cathedral.  Unfortunately the rising sun made it quite hard to take many good photographs but just being there, in one of the most significant areas to Soviet Russia was such an odd and thrilling experience. No tanks or ICBMs on parade though.

Red Square

Lenin's Mausoleum

St Basil's

GUM

Next we moved down the Moscow River slightly to Christ the Savior Cathedral, the most significant church in Moscow and one with quite a story.  Stalin had it destroyed in the 1930s with a plan to replace with a huge new communist party headquarters building.  However the plane proved impractical and more pressing concerns arose so the project was abandoned.  The foundation became a swimming pool until a rebuilding project started in 1995 and it was completed in 5 years.  They restored the church to as nearly close to the original as is practical.  It was quite an impressive building its hard to imagine tearing down the original but I am very glad its glory and majesty was restored.

  

Next we went a fortress/ monastery (yes walled monasteries formed the outer defenses of the city of Moscow for much of its history) called New Maiden Monastery.  It was an interesting walled complex of buildings but most interestingly, it contains the most famous graveyard in Russia.  Boris Yeltsin, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Eisenstein and Mikhail Bulgakov among many other famous Russians are buried there.

After that we drove up to the Sparrow Heights overlooking the city.  Moscow is situated in a very flat region so the hills of the Sparrow Heights allow for amazing views of the city and also where the location of many of the events of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.  The very imposing building of Moscow State University is also located there (this is the school I would have studied at had I chosen to study abroad through UCI).

Moscow

Moscow State University

Olympic Stadium

After this whirlwind tour of the Russian capital, on a day with cold but very sunny skies we were able to return to check into our hotel for a few hours of needed rest and to prepare to go out again to the Moscow Circus. But more on that in my next post!