Day 1 Moscow
I'm in Moscow! The capital of the Russian Federation! One of the great cities of the world. Like any big city there's heaps and heaps to do but while I enjoy living in cities I tend to get a bit bored visiting them after a few days.
Anyway - here I go.
The metro here is awesome! It reminds me a bit of the Beijing metro but a lot older. It's cheap (about $1.20 AUD per ride) and you get unlimited transfers within the metro system on a single ticket and there are ticket vending machines with English so getting a ticket is super simple.
There is almost no English signage once you get past the ticket machine but it's not actually hard to get around. Google maps is really good for metro lines and transfers which is great. And while I can't read the cyrillic alphabet most of the station names are close enough to their English name that you can tell what they are. Like a 2 word station name in name is generally a 2 word station name in Cyrillic with about the same number of letters.
You wouldn't want to have vertigo getting the metro around here though! The escalators down to the stations are probably 5 stories high at some stations! It feels almost like you're going down to the centre of the earth at times.
My hostel was suspiciously easy to find which is very not-Russian. It even had a giant sign on the side of the building so I knew exactly where I was heading from the opposite side of the river.
I dumped my bag at the hostel for the day then headed off to do some touristing!
My first stop was to try to find some breakfast. There's a pretty good coffee shop about a 10 minute walk from the hostel according to google maps so I head there. The coffee was good but their breakfast options were limited. I ended up with a couple of pretty expensive little pancakes which were a bit shit but filling enough.
Breakfast sorted and I'm off to Red Square! Surely you have to start here don't you? St Bail's, the Kremlin, Lenin's tomb etc...
So I headed in the direction via a sculpture in a park nearby. The sculpture is called "Children - victims of adult vices". It's a couple of children playing surrounded by a dozen or so adults representing various bad behaviours. It's an interesting artwork and surprising they allowed it in a public park next to a children's playground.
The first thing I notice are the Kremlin's walls. Big red brick wall running along the river with giant towers dispersed along its length. Very impressive. Then I look to the right and see St Bail's Cathedral sitting in view over the river. At first I'm not actually sure it is St Basil's as the domes aren't the right colour. All the pictures you see show the blue and white ice cream cone but that's the view from the middle of the square. Approaching from the other side you can't see the blue & white cone but instead a red & white and some brownie coloured ones. So while I was pretty sure that was it I thought maybe there was another church there that looked the same.
Red Square really is a spectacular sight. Surrounded on all sides by all these magnificent and iconic buildings. And since it's not high tourist season there weren't that many people here fighting for selfie spots.
St Basil's doesn't open til 11am and apparently the Kremlin is closed on Thursdays so I decided to start with Lenin's tomb and it didn't look too busy. It's a rather small and unassuming building in the square by the wall of the Kremlin. The entrance is quite a long way from the building so I head down and join the queue. Took about 20 minutes to get through the queue and I had to pass through the ever present security checkpoint.
It's amazing really that so many people seem so surprised by what's required of them going through one of these checkpoints. You're in the line for 20 minutes and you can see what everyone ahead of you has to do which tells you exactly what you need to do. But dickheads still get to the front of the line and seem surprised that they have to put their bag here, and empty there pockets, and walk through there but not until you're called through. Tourists are so stupid.
It's very similar to the one in Vietnam. You go in the building, down some stairs and past a series of guards, then you go into the mausoleum where there's what looks like a wax figure sitting in a glass case. You walk quietly around the case without stopping and without taking any pictures then walk back up the stairs on the other side and it's over. You get about 30 seconds in the room with Lenin (or is it just a wax figure? We'll never know!) but it's an interesting cultural experience. They do still worship the guy.
Outside there are a bunch of busts of various famous soviet heroes (I assume - can't read any of the descriptions) as you walk along the Kremlin wall to exit. The exit actually provides a good vantage point for a couple of St Basil's selfies ;]
After Lenin I go check out St Basil's. It really is a beautiful facility from the outside. Inside you can really tell its age. Most of the paintings are quite faded and the icons and whatnot all have the sheen of age about them. There are some beautiful pieces and exhibits inside the cathedral. What I didn't realise is that it's not actually 1 cathedral. It's a collection of half a dozen small cathedrals that are stuck together. Despite not many tourists outside it's pretty busy inside. At one section there's a small group of singers performing some very beautiful gospel music. It really adds to the atmosphere and reinforces that this used to be a working cathedral.
Across the road is a giant department store called GUM. I looked up the meaning of the acronym but I've forgotten now. It's a massive building that was historically a big department store in the late 1800s / early 1900s, then was closed to become some government department or something and was re-opened a few decades ago as a high end department store. It's now got all the high end brands you'd expect from any fancy shopping district.
There's a few little things in there that are "attractions" like a fountain and a "historic toilet" but ultimately it's just a bit shopping centre with a lot of expensive stores and a very nice ceiling. There's also one of those soviet canteen style eateries on the top floor which is a bit of a draw card. Since I was getting hungry I went up and had some lunch up there. A much bigger choice and much fancier than the one in Kazan, the food was tasty and not expensive but not worth making a special trip to unless you haven't done the canteen thing before and even then if you're making a trip to a decent Russian restaurant you'll be able to try most of the dishes there.
At this point the local ingressers tell me about a few portals that are setup as a farm not far from a metro station out in the suburbs. I'm running pretty low on gear so I decided to go on a little adventure and head out there. It's a fair way out and it's right in the suburbs. The portals are in a playground in the middle of some big soviet era apartment blocks. I had to walk through a local market to get there which was the same as any other market then linger around a playground staring at my phone for about 30 minutes. Nothing like Ingress to make you feel like a creeper.
I wasn't entirely sure how safe it was going to be there but people were playing with their kids and old ladies were walking around so it must be fine. I'm just glad I didn't have to try to explain to anyone what I was doing there.
Went back to check into my hostel which turned out to be pretty nice and then I was informed the Ingressers had organised a farm for me that night. Sigh. I didn't want to say no so after a little nap I went out and used up a bunch of my gear then headed out into the arse end of Moscow to meet up with a bunch of random from the Internet.
Amazing the trust that Ingress convinces you to put in people based on chatting to them online. That said - I've been to a bunch of Ingress farms in various countries and haven't ever been molested or murdered. Traipsed around a graveyard at 1am sure but never molested or murdered.
So the farm was about a 20 minute metro ride then a 20-25 minute walk past a bunch more soviet era apartment complexes. There are so many huge buildings here with identical construction in groups of 6 or 8. Must be thousands of people living in each one.
The farm turned out to be on the side of a road next to a wall off graffiti and across the road from a multi story car park. Not the nicest location in the world but Ingress payers started turning up and a couple of them even spoke some English which was nice. So we hung around for a while and played and chatted then everyone started to get cold and drifted off. A couple of them were nice enough to give me a ride back to the metro station so I took off back to the hostel full of gear again and crashed for the night.
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