Moscow Part 1: Red Square

So last weekend I was in Moscow. Because I thankfully managed to avoid dying in a tragic train derailment on my way back, I can now share more photos with you than you will be interested in seeing!

St. George, patron saint of Moscow, slaying the dragon...on top of a gigantic stained glass globe, on top of a gigantic mall!

I got to go on this trip at last minute, thanks to someone from the American study abroad program dropping out. Also, it was free! Totally great.

We left on Thursday night on the train. Mostly everybody takes the train from Petersburg to Moscow. It leaves at like 11 or so and gets in at 6:30. If you are a student, this is the perfect interval to get really superdrunk and completely avoid sleeping, even though you get to sleep in a bed on a train, like you’re in some kind of old fashioned movie! Because I am not a student anymore, but am now an adult, beds are more of a novelty to me than alcohol is, so I didn’t party all night.

Which was a good thing! The trainladies wake you up at 5:45 or so to get ready to arrive. That is one early hour. We took the Famous Moscow Metro to our hostel, dropped our bags off, and to the great surprise to all the still-intoxicated students, went  straight to breakfast and a walking tour because on no planet can you check into a hotel at 7am.

Number one surprise of the walking tour: Moscow has hills. How long has it been since I’ve walked up a hill?  Nearly three months. Got none of those in Petersburg, got plenty of them in Moscow. Luckily, I still knew how!

Moscow is actually a really nice city for walking in. It grew, like most European cities, in concentric circles defined by the city walls. Now those walls are gone and have been replaced by boulevards with parks in the middle. There are dozens of churches hiding everywhere in the city center and in general they look quite different from Petersburg churches, which might as well be Catholic by the looks of them. We went into one of these churches to discover that they were actually having, you know, church in there, which was a sort of amazing thing to see. Thus ends my two-year quest to see an Orthodox service (sure it could have ended earlier–its not like I’ve ever lived anywhere far from an Orthodox church). Also: it was the first time I’ve ever seen an actual religious service.

Anyway, here are some pictures from the  Red Square and surrounding areas:

Marx Monument. Every red square's gotta have one.

The back of the Historical Museum (or some military building?) and a statue of a WW! (?) General, Zhukov (I think?)

Oh, hey, what's through that little archway?

Lenin's Mausoleum: Inside you can see Lenin's embalmed corpse, although it was a subject of debate whether any actual flesh remained. Apparently he looks very waxy.

I didn’t go into the Mausoleum. The hours are very limited, though I can’t figure out why. Don’t they want people to see him? Behind the Mausoleum there are many Soviet leaders interred in the Kremlin Wall, including Stalin, for whom that was a serious post-mortem ego-blow.

St. Basil's. Also didn't get to go in here due to weird hours.

They were building a gigantic New Year's Tree and ice skating rink that morning.

They’ve done this all over St. Petersburg too, in addition to putting up fancy lights on every streetlight and across all the major streets. According to Hardie, there’s a law that says the city must have finished New Year’s decorations by December 1st. It’s sort of surprising to me that they’d get on it so early, being as New Year’s isn’t for over a month still, but who am I to complain about the holiday spirit?

GUM - Gosudarstvennyi/Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin

The mini-GUM-like red roof below is part of the skating rink. GUM (pronounced G OOO M, not like gum) was the main department store in Moscow until the revoltuion, when it was nationalized and became known as the GUM which stood for State Department Store. As the GUM, all of its stores, in Soviet style, could only sell one thing pretty much, so there was like, a sheet music store and a science book store, but none of the glamorama of today (this according to Bryan). It was one of the few places you could actually buy things in the ’50s and beyond and had extremely long lines. Also, it briefly served as an office building and after Stalin’s wife Nadezhda committed suicide, it was used to display her body (ref Wikipedia).

Stuck in the GUM

It is the epitome of turn of the century opulence in architecture. After the fall of the USSR it was privatized again, as the Main Department Store, so conveniently it could still be called GUM!

Nearby there is another old department store called the TsUM, probably for Central (Tsentralnyi) Department Store (imaginative!). Bryan said he worked on their website years and years ago when they were just going online. Apparently, they mis-transliterated their own name and bought the domain http://www.cum.ru, perhaps thinking it would be more friendly for Western audience.

One more for good measure. New Years Tree completed! I also love that right across from Lenin's tomb there's a gigantic department store that's bigger than everything else on the square.

Also, I autocorrected all these pictures and iPhoto made it seem like the weather wasn’t as completely miserable as it was. It seems in these pictures like it was 3x sunnier than it actually was. It was fucking freezing! Of course in Petersburg that weekend there was a warm spell…

More on Moscow to come!