Moscow, Russia

Tuesday to Friday, 26 - 29 September 2006

After a sleeply 8 hour train journey from St. Petersburg, we are met at Moscow's Leningradsky station by Svetlana, a family friend of the Cummins', who has kindly offered to put us up for the few days we are staying in Moscow. It's great to see a familiar face! Svetlana tells us that all official taxi drivers in Moscow are "robbers" but as nearly every car in Russia is a taxi, she quickly flags down a driver in front of the train station and negotiates a good rate to get us to her apartment. Svetlana gives us a great tour and history lesson en route and we feel we know more about Russia from this than the guidebooks we have been lugging about! The apartment is centrally located, with a view of the Russian White House and within walking distance/a few metro stops of Red Square and the Kremlin. We walk the nearby Arbat area and Svetlana takes us for dinner at a Georgian restaurant.

Over the next few days we visit Red Square, the Kremlin and see St. Basil's Cathedral (the one that is in every postcard from Moscow and looks like the experimental-icecream-cone wing of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory). We also see some spectacular goose-stepping by soldiers at the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Apparently, these soldiers used to guard Lenin's tomb (where he is eerily well-preserved) but were shifted to the tomb of WWII soldier after communism fell out of fashion in the early '90s. On Wednesay, we put on our least scruffy clothes to go to see a ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre. We have nose-bleed seats but, once you get over the sight of men in spandex tip-toeing at high speed across the stage, the ballet is entertaining. The evening probably marks the cultural high point of the trip and we round it off with a meal at a gem of a local restaurant, McDonalds. On Thursday, we visit Sergiev Posad, the centre of the Russian orthodox church which is just outside Moscow - worth visiting alone to see the holy men with their monumental beards.

For more photos click here.