Day 3 Moscow - some big statues and the museum of Cosmonautics

14 October
Day 3 Moscow

I had another fairly late start today.  I didn't sleep in ... I just felt like sitting around the hostel for a while so I booked some accommodation and did some forward planning for the rest of the year.

I've had a slight change of plans.  I'm going to meet up with Julian and his friend John in Denmark in a town called Aarhus then go explore Denmark for a little while til they are done with their commitments there.  This means that after Russia I've got about 10 days to get to Copenhagen.  And because I'm trying not to fly very often (thought I have done a couple of flights so far) Latvia is just a little bit inconvenient for getting to Copenhagen.

So I'm switching it up a bit:
Old plan: Estonia (Tallinn) -> Latvia (Riga) -> Denmark (Copenhagen) -> Germany -> Norway -> Sweden -> Svalbard -> Iceland -> USA

New plan: Estonia -> Finland -> Sweden -> Denmark (Aarhus then Copenhagen) -> Norway (incl Svalbard) -> Iceland -> USA

I'm also considering tacking somewhere onto the back of the USA for a few days before I get back to Australia but I'm not sure.  It'll be right on the New Year period which could be kind of shit to find accommodation and such.  I need to come up with a plan for that soon.

OK - so that done and I head out for the day.  It's raining for the third day in a row in Moscow and it doesn't look like it's going to let up anytime soon.

I start by heading towards the Peter the Great statue on the river in central Moscow.  It ended up taking me about an hour to get there because the angle I approached it from put me behind the statue so I had to cross the river and walk around to see it from the front.  This thing is absolutely enormous and really spectacular.  I don't know who conceived it or why they decided to put it where they did but it's pretty awesome.

Near the statue I stumbled across a park which has a shitload of what look like old and discarded statues from Russia's past.  I knew this place was around somewhere but I hadn't marked it on my map so it was a nice surprise stumbling across it.  They had all sorts of stuff there.  Old heroes of the state, random artworks, memorials and many Lenin statues.  I particularly liked the wall with hundreds of severed heads in it.

It's a pretty cool way to use all the various sculptures and whatnot a country like Russia generates.  There's nothing saying a statue has to be there forever but it's a shame to destroy a nice piece of art so this is a nice compromise.

After the statue park I had lunch nearby then headed out to the Russian Cosmonautics Museum.  Given Russia was the USA's big competitor in the space race I thought it would be interesting to see what they did with the museum.

The first thing you see when you exit the metro station is this amazing sculpture that sits on top of the museum.  It's a rocket flying towards space and it must be 70 or 80 metres high.  It's really something.

The museum itself sits at the end of a row of other artworks memorialising the space race and the people involved in Russia's part of it.  A nice park and lots of Ingress portals!

The museum itself was pretty cool and a lot bigger than it looked from the outside.  From the front it looks kind of small and shit but they go down under the park instead of up which is pretty cool and ironic given the content of the museum.  The museum has tons of stuff in it.  There are models of all sorts of ships, lunar modules and satellites (obviously not the originals ... they are still up there or crashed!), exhibits about food and clothing in space, a to-scale model of a part of the Mir space station and even a section showing where you can find all the space related memorials and artworks around Moscow.  They also had a theatre showing a documentary of some kind but it was in Russian so I didn't bother sitting down.

It's not a terribly interactive museum but I found it really cool and interesting And something a bit different to the usual art and history museums.  On the way out I bought some space food from a vending machine in the museum!  I'm not sure how authentic it is and I'll need to get someone to help me read the instructions but I'm looking forward to trying it.

Nearby there is a giant statue called "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman" which symbolises socialist Russia.  The man is carrying a hammer and the woman a sickle to form the hammer and sickle symbol when viewed from the side.  It was originally made to sit atop the Russian pavilion at the world's fair in Paris in 1937 where it won some award then it was moved to Russia and placed on top of a building at some sort of exhibition area.  There's some sort of Russian revolution museum in the building the statue is on but I just couldn't be bothered traipsing through it.  My feet were sore.

So instead I went and drank beer!

I visited a pretty cool little craft beer bar called Craft RePUBlic and had a few beers.  The guy I sat next to at the bar spoke some English so we had a chat and even shared a beer he'd had his eye on but didn't want to drink on his own.  Chatted a bit to one of the bartenders as well who had more limited English but enough to have some light talk.  I got him and the other bartender to recommend me some craft beer joints to check out in St Petersburg and they gave me a pretty huge list which was cool.  I also had an excellent Russian Imperial Stout by a Russian brewery called Jaws.  Kat - keep an eye out for this.

I'd had just enough beers to feel a bit tipsy and sleepy so I headed back to the hostel and went to sleep.

I've decided that Russia's strength is making really big shit.  Everything here is huge.  Huge statues.  Huge buildings.  Huge cities.  It's like they have a big inferiority complex that only giant things can alleviate.