For an earlier country, too early—
We all stand in the black line
Along the Kremlin’s black square.”
We got into Moscow around 9 or 10 in the morning and immediately were met by our tour guide and driver. It was cold and cloudy, but smelled less polluted than Petesrburg, maybe because of the fresh rain. We all felt pretty tired and grubby, but we couldn’t check into our hotel yet so we went around the city for a quick tour of some of the main sites. I was immediately impressed with the enormity of Moscow and how different it was from Petersburg. It was big, imposing, intimidating and had a really strange mixture of architectural styles, Soviet, Stalinist, but with a NY/Chicago feel, Gothic. Moscow has really been booming since the collapse, in comparison to Petersburg at least. It feels more like a big American city than anything else. Busy, loud, lots of cars (much nicer ones than in Petersburg), skyscrapers, lots of people, billboards, ads, and everything is about twice as expensive as it ought to be. It’s this weird mix of capitalist America and Stalinist Russia. Truly bizarre. The city is on an inhuman scale (much more so than Petersburg) with these stony, towering buildings doing violence upon the skyline. If Petersburg was once built for bureaucracy then Moscow is being built for business. In comparison, Petersbug felt like a warm and human city compared to this gray and monstrous metropolis.
Almost immediately we went over to the Kremlin, a place we’d return to in more detail later. It was cold and damp out so we didn’t stay outside too long. We walked around St Basils and only the perimeter of the Kremlin since it was closed off during the visiting hours of Lenin’s mausoleum. I had really wanted to see his body, but we didn’t have the time and Golstein said he just looks like a marble sculpture anyway. Alas. The Red Square was again big and intimidating, with its 2km of wall, and makes one feel uncomfortably exposed. Of course this place was once the stronghold of the city and was also a market place, a place to get news, to hold executions, and later to hold big Soviet parades.
St Basil's:
Lenin's Mausoleum:
After that we walked around in this beautiful and expensive mall called гум which was a nice little break from the frigid weather, even if we did get ice cream on the way out (professor Golstein’s favorite). The bathrooms were also really nice. Overall the bathrooms in Moscow were better than in Petersburg and things were more clean in general.
Mall:
After that we made a quick stop at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was rebuilt not too long ago. But I’ll mention more about it later seeing as we go back there.
Pic for now:
We made a brief stop by мгу (Moscow’s big University), which was also very frightening looking. I can’t imagine walking into that building to take exams, I’d probably turn right around and jump off the little hilly ledge across from it. There was this random ski jump thing left over from some kind of sporting event (weren’t the Summer games not the Winter ones in Moscow?), which was rather amusing to see just hanging out there on the hillside covered in trees. We walked around the little souvenir market there for a while, where I found some earrings and haggled over a t-shirt for Patrick.
I didn’t get my own picture of the university, so I stole this one off the internet so you can get an idea of it. It’s way more scary looking in person, believe me.
We then went to lunch, which was pretty bad. I mostly drank tea to try to warm up. Sonya also gave me her sweater, which helped some. Instead of going to the hotel first, we decided to go to the Tretyakov Gallery, which was absolutely amazing. They have such an amazing collection, and I hate to say it, but I may have even preferred it to the Hermitage and the Russian Museum just for their collection of icons and especially their late 19th early 20th century Russian art collection, which was mind blowing. The enormous gallery of Vrubel was so incredible. They had a lot of the big hits of Russian art, which was really fun to see after having only seen slides prior.
Their collection of icons was large and quite complete. We saw Rublyov’s Trinity and some of his other works. There was this very old icon board painted by an anonymous artist (as most of them were) that was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen. The lines of the faces somehow blended in with the skin and color of the wood, and the faces just seemed to appear of their own accord rather than by the hand of an artist, seeing as everything but the three faces of Christ, Mary, and John had washed away. The delicacy with which the artist rendered the eyes and around the mouths was breathtaking. I was particularly taken with Mary’s pained and compassionate face. We spent some hours there before finally going to the hotel to settle in and warm up before going out to dinner at a Ukrainian place.
Really bad picture of the outside of the Gallery (the only thing I was allowed to take a picture of)
Our hotel was also pretty scary looking, and very Soviet.
But it was lovely inside and the rooms were really nice, even if they still had the 50’s married couple look. The bathroom was a dream, and the tv was a nice amenity, even if there was way more free porn on it than Tania (my roomie) and I would’ve liked. Yikes.
We met up downstairs and went out with Svetlana and Vladimir and an old friend of theirs (Sasha) from Moscow who’s a real estate agent. He actually got his PhD at Brown in German philosophy or something, but realized he’d make more money in Moscow dealing with real estate. He was a really nice guy and I was really excited when I saw that he was wearing an LL Bean jacket. The braces kind of threw me for a loop, unless that’s become a status symbol in Russia or something because they all generally have such atrocious teeth.
Dinner was really nice and I tried a lot of new things, some of which I think I could’ve passed on. I got a cold borsch and then these ravioli type things filled with various fruits, which were delicious. Svetlana convinced me to try this pretty nasty Ukrainian dish that is some sort of pickled grass rolled up in uncooked lard. So the idea is you take a big gulp of vodka first and then pop the lardy treat in your mouth and chew away. I never thought this would be true, but the vodka almost made it taste better. It was mostly the texture that was revolting and the idea that I was eating pure animal fat. Ukrainians eat a lot of lard I guess. What was the best part about it all was that Svetlana even got Alisa to try it, who’s normally a vegan (although that has slacked some since it’s so hard to eat vegetarian in Russian let alone vegan). The rest of the evening consisted of a long hot shower and sleeping in a bed bug free bed. Yay! We had a nice view from our hotel of the Moscow skyline. The window was pretty freaky though, about 4 feet wide and 5 feet tall with no screen or bars or anything and you could open it up all the way like a door. With as scary a building the place already was I would’ve thought suicide would be a concern already without these all too welcoming windows.
Our hotel at night:
Day two will be covered in another post.
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