Moscow madness

01.11.06

Have just arrived in St Petersburg on the overnight train from Moscow. Our hotel room isn't ready and it's fairly cold and snowy (slushy footpaths!) outside so the only thing to do is retreat into the warmth of the cheapest internet cafe we've found for quite some time!

Moscow was quite hectic! Our hotel was absolutely huge - a monolith of 4 buildings, each with about 25 floors and probably the capacity to accomodate 10,000 people - it was originally built for athletes in the Moscow Olympics. Plus it was a bit of a way out of town so sightseeing involved a trip on the metro (which was not a problem, the stations are beautiful and trains come every two, yes TWO minutes).

We spent a day checking out Red Square and the Kremlin - quite astounding, I didn't realise there was so much older architecture, with a lot of churches dating from the 1500-1600s. They have a weird system for tickets to the 'crown jewels' (the armoury), whereby you can only buy tix 45 minutes before the 'session' starts so we stooged around from about 1.5 hours before the session to make sure we could get one of only 75 tix available... and experienced the magic of Russian queueing. Even though everyone in the small ticket office was just slouching around the walls, when the window opened, a Russian lady was adamant that we were there first and waved us straight to the salesperson - nice one!

The Armoury was excellent, absolutely decadent stuff - jewellery, decorated bibles, crowns, goblets, tableware, incense burners fashioned into scale-model castles as tall as an 8-year-old child. Plus a cool display of armour, old-fashioned weapons, royal carriages and, perhaps my fave, coronation robes of princes and princesses (looks like Catherine the Great was quite short and stout, heh).

The next day we visted the Tretyakov gallery, which has mostly Russian art, lots of portraits - again excellent for seeing clothing/what people looked like in bygone days - love it!