Moscow, Russia

The capitol of Russia! After an overnight bus trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow we arrived around 10 in the morning after a breakfast stop at the Zelonograd McDonalds...which is apparently one of the biggest ones in the world. I opted for the convenience store next door. My best advice is do not get the pastry that looks like it has chocolate filling in it, they are actually poppy seeds and its a bit rich for that early in the morning! Anyways the photo above is me in front of St. Basil's Cathedral. It in the Red Square and has recently been repainted which is why it is still so brilliantly colored. The Kremlin shown with all the magnificent onion domes is enclosed in a triangular wall. Inside are the main government offices of Mr. Putin. On the first day we took a bus tour of the city (bad planning after having spent the previous night on the bus its really the last thing you want to be doing....but oh well) and on the second we had a guided tour of the Kremlin. Moscow was interesting but I found that most of the 'touristy' spots basically center around the Red Square. The rest of the city does not seem near as interesting or beautiful as St. Petersburg. Nonethess after an evening spent at the Opera in the Kremlin Theater (tickets were only 140 Rubles each which is approximately 5 dollars) watching an Opera I unfortunatly don't know the name of given that the title was also in Russian and the lady at the ticket office could not help with a translation, we went to the Red Square.

After wandering around for a bit we decided to go back to the hotel (pictured above). The trick with this one was that even though we looked up the metro route we got off at the wrong stop (didn't succeed at matching the cyrillic alphabet letters well enough!). It was ok though because we located our hotel and started walking in that direction...turned out it wasn't far at all. However, as we got closer nothing appeared familiar and the area felt a little less central. The building we were walking to wasn't our hotel after all, fair mistake considering this hotel Ukrainia is one of six identical structures in the city of Moscow. Why? Stalin liked the design of the building so much that he had it replicated six times, one of which is the hotel another a business and yet another Moscow State University. We gave up on trying to work the metro once again and just stuck our hand out by the road. It took only a few seconds for two cars to show up, a little bargaining to be done about the price before we were in the cars and back at the hotel. All in all it was a great experience to have been to Russia and back! The photo below was taken by a friend of mine on the ferry ride from Finland back to Sweden, wish I would have seen this one live but I was catching up on much needed sleep in the cabin :)