This August i went to Russia for the third time. Flying to Moscow. And visiting Yekaterinburg and St.Petersburg (finally!). Some random impressions:
- it was not the best time to visit Moscow :-P there was a lot of smog like you might have heard in the news. Luckily there was almost no smog in the first two days, just visible when looking far. My friends there told me that it was the least smog and least temperature in two weeks. Lucky me. Sunshine and all. But heavy smog was back on my third and last day in Moscow. So i was walking around with a mask. And left to other, less-smoggy areas of Russia on that day, fortunately.
wearing the smog mask- as expected, i had a great time meeting old and new friends all over Russia. If you haven't experienced Russian hospitality yet, go for it.
- on my 3rd time in Russia&Moscow, i finally managed to see Lenin. Well, what they present as his preserved corpse. I paid an "idiot's tax" to see it - it should be free, but i came to Red Square relatively late. Too late to get into the queue and see it for free as it's supposed to be for everyone. But they sold access to it for 300 ruble. And since i was only passing through Moscow, i thought what the heck I'll do it to "have it off my list". Anyways. It was as expected. Little creepy, interesting to see, nothing oh-so special. No cameras etc. inside the mausoleum, and no talking allowed. AC'd room, so nice and cool on a hot summer day. The corpse behind glass, the crowd silently passing by. And he looks like he'd just died five minutes ago. Quite hard to believe that the body hasn't deteriorated at all in more than 85 years (cf. this). Looks a bit like something on display at Madame Tussauds - and my Russian friends told me that they'd rather pay for that ("because it has more than one wax puppet").
I'm the guy with the yellow t-shirt, about to enter the mausoleum.
- some sushi restaurants in Moscow advertise that they sell sushi and antisushi. Meaning 'food that's not at all like sushi', like traditional Russian dishes. Because they also want to attract customers who don't like sushi at all.
- we tried to find a restaurant with traditional Russian cuisine. Turns out it wasn't possible, so in the end went again to Mu-Mu's. Yummy again. Try one of those when you're in Moscow.
- me in Tsaritsyno Park:
- posing in front of the former KGB building, now FSB.
- Moscow Metro - always an experience. The communists wanted to build "temple for the people" or something like that. Anyways, each station is different, almost all with some kind of marble. Guess they had lots of marble in some region of the Soviet Union.
- Horses fountain near Kremlin, with water because it's not -15 degC like on my first visit there :)
So that's that. I hope i get to blog about the rest of my Russian summer trip, including something about going with the Trans-Siberian (planned to blog about that since my first trip in February 2009...) and the city of St.Petersburg.
