Moscow: Jumping-off Point for the Trans-Siberian!

We left St. Petersburg for Moscow in the afternoon of our third day in Russia. Traditionally, this has been an overnight journey (in fact, for most Russians, it still is). For us, however, the 400 mile trip took about 4.5 hours. That's because we took Russia's brand new "Sapsan" high speed train. Russians we met seemed pretty excited about this train, and on board there were all sorts of "Sapsan" branded souveniers for sale. We weren't interested in any of the goods for sale, although Emily snatched up a few "Sapsan" barf bags. You can never have too many of those in your purse.

I (Brad) had been looking forward to Moscow for a long time. I remembered looking at my world map as a kid and wondering at the immensity of the big red section labeled "USSR." (I was just as nerdy back then as I am now - I had maps all over the walls of my bedroom as a little kid). To me, entering Moscow still seemed like penetrating the heart of the country that Reagan once referred to as the "Evil Empire."
We stayed in a small hotel about 15 minutes' walk from Red Square, and unlike St. Petersburg, we really made use of the Moscow Metro (subway) system. It was a bit confusing initially, as all of the signage is in Russian (and some stops aren't even labeled!). We found that the easiest way around this obstacle was learning the Cyrillic alphabet. I am proud to announce that I can now read Russian... although for the most part, the words that I sound out just sound like gibberish to me.
The Metro in Moscow is beautiful, with each station uniquely decorated. The stations doubled as bomb shelters in WWII and the years following, so the escalators are surprisingly deep.

I especially liked the stations with over-the-top communist decor. Here are a few great proletariat warriors we found sculpted in bronze along the wall of one station:
Russia in general is not easily navigable for the independent tourist. As mentioned earlier, signage is almost exclusively in Russian, and very few people speak English. In St. Petersburg, our hostess at our B&B helped us navigate the city. In Moscow, we had something even better: our own private Russian-speaking tour guide (who worked for free!). Brian Felix, the husband of Emily's old college roommate, was working at a camp and conference center in Moscow for the summer. He majored in Russian in college, and was a godsend to us as we navigated the city. We had only met Brian once before, and we really enjoyed getting to know him a little better during our time in Moscow. (here's their blog if you want to learn more about Brian & Wendy)

Here's Brian enjoying a bottle of "Kvas" (the fizzy non-alcoholic fermented bread drink that seems to be everywhere in Russia):
Brian not only helped us out with linguistic difficulties, but he also showed us some parts of the city we'd otherwise never have seen. Like this place:


It's called the "All Russian Exhibition Center." It's a park on the outskirts of Moscow built in Soviet times to celebrate the many facets of Russian society. There are something like 80 pavilions, each dedicated to a different element of Soviet life. There's a pavilion for the space industry, another for meat packers, one for energy, and pavilions for each of the former Soviet Republics. Here's a video of Brian explaining the place:


I especially loved the art and architecture. There were dozens of statues, all in that wonderful communist-propaganda art style (you know what I mean - lots of pictures of burly, stoic looking peasants, gazing confidently into the workers' paradise of the not-too-distant-future):
We wandered around the park for several hours, ate some street food, and generally enjoyed people-watching.

At one point, an impromptu water fight broke out:




As we were about to leave, Brian directed our attention to what he had found to be Moscow's latest and trendiest pastime... Rollerblading:


The next day, Emily and I saw the more touristy areas of Moscow.

We visited the Kremlin and stood in line to see Lenin's dead body (he looks a bit waxy, but not bad overall considering that he died about 90 years ago).

Look at the size of that bell inside the Kremlin!

Emily's commentary on the Kremlin Gardens:


We visited a very sobering museum (which doesn't show up in many tourist guidebooks): the Gulag Museum. It was quite sad to see the conditions in which so many people perished (over 20 million died, yet neither of us remembered learning about it in our High School history class). We've all seen so many movies and read so many books about the holocaust, yet roughly 3 times as many people had died in Russian gulags and neither of us had heard much about it.

Our 4-night trans-siberian train was scheduled to leave at midnight at the end of our third day in Moscow. We decided to spend our last afternoon stocking up on souvenirs at a market that we had read about in Lonely Planet. It was pretty far from the city center which meant that with fewer tourists stopping by, prices had not been driven up as high as elsewhere in Moscow.
Here's Emily in front of her favorite store (give you one guess what they were selling):
As many of you know, Emily LOVES pottery. She's not much of a shopper (she's the money saver in our family), but when she sees pottery, she goes bonkers. When she began to buy worrying quantities of heavy (and fragile) pottery, I reminded her of how far we still had to travel (and how heavy all that stuff would be). She assured me that she would carry every piece of pottery home by herself. She made good on that promise, and not one piece broke on the way home!

Overall, we both enjoyed Moscow, although we were exhausted from walking by the end of 3 days in the city. We were both shocked by the prices in Moscow (Starbucks charged over $8US for a latte), and we wound up eating in cafeteria-style restaurants (thanks for the tip, Brian!) and McDonald's a lot. For our last night's meal in Moscow, we splurged and visited a Georgian restaurant. We ordered "Wareniky" (Brad's favorite dish since childhood), and decided that Mom Christensen still makes it better than the restaurateurs of Moscow.

That night, we went to the train station to board our train to Irkutsk. We'll write all about that in the next post, but I thought we'd include a photo of the departures board at the station that announced our train. It was train number 2, bound for Vladivostok:
See how easy the Cyrillic alphabet is to read?