My visit to Moscow was nearly, but not quite, the bookend to the trip that started in Beijing. Our small group boarded a train in Beijing early on the morning of 5 June, 2013. Twelve days later we arrived in Moscow on a quite different train. Of course, we had many stops and adventures along the way and as some of you have likely read I’ve recounted the entire trip in these posts. (This is the same link I posted in Beijing and Me.) For this series, however, I’ll keep my focus on Moscow.
Introducing Erin
The Trans-Mongolian Express travel group was a small one. It consisted of seven travelers – two from Australia, two from New Zealand, two from Brazil, me, and our guide. Those of you who have read my tales of that trip – whether contemporaneously or having followed one of the links to it provided in this series – need no introduction to Erin the Australian teen who became my closest traveling companion and some of you met her when she visited me in the States a few months later.
You need to know Erin because she figures prominently in my Moscow tales.
Our arrival
It was mid morning when our train pulled into Kazansky Station and a waiting van transferred us to our hotel before 10:00 so, of course, we could only check our bags and find a way to pass the time until our rooms were ready. Our hotel complex, which has the charming name Ismailovo Gamma Delta
was the athlete’s Olympic Village for the 1980 games and this would be my most direct connection to any Olympics. We started our day with a brief tour of Moscow’s Metro stations (If this sounds like a bit of an odd tourist attraction, I’ll direct you to this site – one of many that offers private Metro tours.) and a stop for lunch at a café called My-My on Arbat Street probably the largest and best known pedestrian only street in Moscow. After lunch we sought places of our own interest.
Seeing dead people
Once again, those of you who have followed my travels through reading this blog have a little advantage to those who have not because the former group knows of my penchant for visiting famous cemeteries should a locale have one. In this instance the burial ground in question was Novodevichy Cemetery. It was my good fortune to have Erin choose to accompany me.
We needed to take the Metro to Luzhniki and from there a short walk to the cemetery which is actually part of the Novodevichy Convent. (The Luzhniki Metro station is also only a short walk from the stadium of the same name that hosted the athletics events as well as the Opening Closing Ceremonies of the 1980 Games. However, the stadium was closed for renovation and it seemed useless to make that detour.) When we exited the Metro a sign pointed us in the direction of the convent which we found with relative ease. Erin then made the mistake of allowing me to choose whether the cemetery entrance was to our right or our left. I chose left and we had to completely circle the convent before we found the cemetery entrance. (It did lead to a fun game of Duck, duck, goose, though.)
Once inside, Erin relied on me to read and translate the Cyrillic names and I placed my full faith and trust in her navigational talents – a step that proved its wisdom as she flawlessly led me to every site I asked. Among them were Anton Chekhov, Boris Yeltsin, Nikita Khryuschev, and Dimitri Shastakovich.
Kremlin-Schmemlin. Let’s do Tolstoy
The morning after our visit to Novodevichy our schedule began with a group tour of the Kremlin and a walk around Red Square that we finished with lunch in ГУМ (pronounced “goom” and usually transliterated GUM) once considered the world’s largest department store but refashioned into an upscale, trendy mall. Our afternoon was free so Erin and I set off to see the Leo Tolstoy Estate and Museum. Getting there should be a snap. Hop on the number one (Red) line at Okhotnyy ryad station and hop off at Park Kultury with a short 800 meter walk to the museum that Erin’s internal GPS navigated easily.
On our way there, we passed this
and I should have taken it as an omen of the direction the day would take.
The Tolstoy Museum is the house and garden where Count Leo Tolstoy frequently spent his winters in the 1880s and 1890s. After we paid the admission we had cover our shoes with blue booties to wear at all times inside the house. For a house that needed to accommodate Tolstoy, his wife Sofya, as many as ten children, and the servants, it is, in keeping with Tolstoy’s moralistic and ascetic views, relatively small. And, as it did at the time, still eschews the use of electricity.
Unlike the Kremlin, it was uncrowded and we walked walk through at a leisurely pace lingering wherever we chose – the desk where Sofya hand copied his manuscripts, the grand piano where Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov played, or the room where his seven year old son Ivan died of scarlet fever an event that would deeply impact the great writer’s life. We spent nearly three hours in the house and garden.
From Tolstoy to Fellini (actually Gorky Park)
Head west from the Tolstoy house turn slightly north to cross the Moskva River on the Krymsky Bridge and you will find yourself at an entrance to Gorky Park. Along the way, try as you might, you probably won’t be able to avert your eyes from this
what is, I think, certainly the ugliest statue in Moscow and perhaps in all of Russia. At the time I wrote, ‘I think Erin’s naturally wavy hair went straight at the sight and my bald spot grew measurably larger.’
(The statue is 98 meters tall (that’s over 300 feet, folks) and was erected in 1997. It seemed a bit odd to me that Peter the Great would have a statue honoring him in Moscow to begin with since he was responsible for relocating the capital to Saint Petersburg. In fact, in 2010, Moscow offered to give the statue to Saint Petersburg. They politely[?] refused it.)
We entered through a side gate near the bridge and only had time to visit a small section of the 120 hectare (300 acre) park. The first thing we saw was a sand pit that seemed to be serving as a beach because when you live in Moscow, and you can’t get to the beach, the obvious solution is to bring the beach to you. But before I could take a picture of that, I glanced to my left and took a picture of this scene.
Among the other oddities we saw were a life size model of NASA’s Space Shuttle that rented bicycles, beach volleyball courts where simply too many men inappropriately wore Speedos, and array of ping pong tables the sound of whose gnip-gnop reverberated though much of that section of the park and the place where Erin took this photo of me
and you can see the rest of my Gorky Park photos here.
Now that you have some idea what I’d look like if I had a cabbage growing out of my head, I can proceed with my next post about the Games of the XXII Olympiad.