Intro to Moscow

We arrived in Moscow on Sunday morning, after a smooth two flights from SFO (minus the "is there a doctor on board?" scare from SFO to JFK). Luckily, I was able to sleep a bunch on both flights, in addition to watching two movies, "The Impossible," (4 stars) and "The Great and Powerful Oz" (eh).

Mindy (who has been teaching music at an international school here for almost two years) met us at the airport and escorted us to her lovely apartment in central Moscow. We had an awesome first day!!

Riding the Metro is an adventure in and of itself. I have never been intimidated by a metro before, but this one worries me a bit!

Most signs are like this one (no English, all Cyrillic characters!)

Moscow's metro is knows for its beautiful designs-- marble, mosaics, even chandeliers! And, I must say, it was very impressive that we never had to wait more than 1.5 minutes for a train!!

It is also DEEP underground with looong escalators!

Our first attraction visited was the Novodevichy Monastery/Cemetary, which was built by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate the capture of Smolensk from Lithuanians in 1514 and where, at one point in the 1500s, Peter the Great imprisoned his sister, Sofia.

The grounds were quite lovely.

Adjacent to the monastery is the cemetary, where lots of Russian notables are buried.

Grave of Boris Yeltsin

(it took us quite a while to find the actual headstones, were were not numbered, and which we had to decipher in Cyrillic)!

Mindy and I fortuitously found the grave of Sergey Prokovief, a Russian composer!!!

We rode the metro more around the city to riverside Gorky Park, which was complete with fountains, rentable ping-pong tables, and where you can skate in the winter.

Hear, near Red Square and the Kremlin is the historic and gorgeous Bolshoi Theater, which opened in 1824 and featured the premier of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in 1877 and The Nutcracker in 1919. It is home to many world-class performances of Opera, Ballet, etc. Tickets there were a bit out of our price range in the few-hundred-dollar range, but it was cool to see it!

Red Square was unfortunately closed due to preparations for Victory Day (May 9th, when the Russians defeated Germany in WWII), but we wandered around the outside...

... and watched the burning of the Eternal Flame.

On Mindy's suggestion, we went up to the roof of the nearby Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where we had a really nice view of the square...

... and enjoyed some very pricey drinks ($10 sodas, $20 cups of tea, etc!!). I know I look exhausted in this photo, but I was actually not too jet-lagged at this point!  

[This photo is one of the few we got of the four of us on our first day, and represents a reunion of sorts! In 2009 (before K and I were "official"), this very group hiked around the Lares valley to Machu Picchu in Peru. Where shall we go in 2017?!]

Chamreun, however, fell asleep for some time while we were wandering around, and may have stayed longer had we not aroused him!!

We stopped in on the five-star historic Hotel Ukraine (now the Radisson), one of Stalin's majestic "Seven Sisters" buildings, which now has within it a gorgeous city diorama (nice, since we couldn't really get close to Red Square/St. Basil's Cathedral) which has narration about these city sights.

Here are some confusing nearby signs:

We didn't even need Cyrillic to be confused by this sign, "No playing soccer with taxis"? 

 Here, in contrast, I guess soccer-playing is permitted:

 

We took a lovely dinner River Cruise departing from the hotel's nearby pier and snaking down the Moskva River, from where we saw more of the city sites (from a different perspective).

 

Here are the boats

Here is us, dining (food was delicious!)

Here is the "Russian White House"

  

This statue, created by Georgian-born sculptor Zurab Tsereteli, was a statue of Christopher Columbus which was attempted to be sold to the U.S., but which was rejected and so now (at 315 feet high, and the 8th tallest statue in the world), sits in the Moscow river and now is claimed to be of Peter the Great (and one of the ugliest statues in the world).

 

Christ our Savior Cathedral, which is the tallest Orthodox church in the world, was finished around 1860; it was then razed around 1930 during the anti-religious campaign, and rebuilt in 1990.

The Hotel Ukraine was lovely by night!

We are loving Moscow (and a much-needed, much-anticipated vacation)!!