Chapter the Eighth: Moscow! Moscow!

Moscow adventures, part two!

The second day, Brenda got me up bright and early, so there would be hot water available for the showers we so desperately needed. It may have been the best shower of my life - I was a hot mess by the time we got back to the hostel the night before (after realizing we had no idea when the curfew was, and practically running across town to get back as quickly as possible in the event that the curfew was something like 11:00 or 11:30 - turns out there isn't one, but we didn't know that). Sweaty and tired, with the beginnings of a sunburn on my face and blisters on my feet.

After grabbing some breakfast at McDonald's, because it was close by and cheap, we hit the metro and decided to explore the circle line. The day previous, Josh had recommended riding that line and getting off to look at the stations - several of them are very pretty, but most of the pretty ones are on that line, and given the limited timeframe we had to explore, that was our best bet to see the good ones. I linked to a couple of my favorites in the previous post. My knee, for some reason, was bothering me for most of the day Saturday, and as I mentioned before I didn't like standing on the metro anyway, so we eventually figured out that the last car or two on most trains usually had a few seats open. If we had had a bit more time and I had been in less pain, we would have also checked out the transfers - all of the stations on the circle line have transfers to other lines, which are I'm sure just as lavishly decorated, making the Moscow metro system considerably more efficient than Petersburg's, particularly if you're coming from the suburbs. But we didn't, and I wasn't, so we couldn't.

We were meeting someone for a tour of the Kremlin, as well as Novodevichy monastery and cemetery, that morning at 11:15; Brenda and I decided, figuring this tour would probably take up most of the day, to find a cafe or something outside the metro station where we would be meeting the guide and grab a coffee and a snack to tide us over until next we would be able to eat. We went to a place called Schokoladnitsa and got cappucinos and fruit cups. Let me tell you, few things feel fancier than eating a fruit salad (with mint garnish!) out of a martini glass with an iced tea spoon. It was a really good fruit salad, too - slices of strawberry, banana, pineapple, orange and grapefruit, which surprised me. I guess I was expecting something like what passes for fruit salad at Stetson, which is basically "cantaloupe and honeydew with the occasional strawberry and couple of grapes, maybe a blueberry or pineapple chunk if we have it, raspberries if we have some left over from a catering event." But, then, that's all I've had in terms of fruit cups for the past three years, so yeah.

We met our tour guide and were joined at the last minute by this guy Rich, who had been at the seminar the previous evening. The tour guide was a nice older gentleman named Mikhail. Rich started learning Russian to do translation work for the Air Force; he also speaks Farsi (Persian, the language they speak in Iran). He's currently aiming for medical school now. It's kind of intimidating, being surrounded by people so much older than me who seem to have a better handle on things than I do. They probably don't, nobody does, but it's still hard not to feel like I'm just spinning my wheels because my goals aren't nearly as clearly-defined as those of the people around me. Being younger than everyone by probably at least five years doesn't help, either; I can't even begin to compete with that. But anyway.

Mikhail took us to the Kremlin and we toured the Armory, which is much more than just arms and armor. There was a room containing spears and swords and firearms as well as the armor worn by Russian soldiers (first chainmail, later plate armor) as well as saddles and other horse accoutrements. There was also an exhibit of clothing, consisting mostly of clergy robes and a few things belonging to old czars and their wives. And a few things of Catherine the Great's. There were also some thrones, and crowns, and a room full of silver and gold dinnerware of various forms and functions, all given as ambassador gifts. And, of course, Faberge eggs. Lots of shinies! :3 The Kremlin was quite busy that day; there were many tourists in town, because summer is approaching and it's basically a holiday weekend, so our little group had to dodge much larger groups of Russian schoolchildren and foreign tourists all day, especially when we moved to Cathedral Square.

This is a place in the Kremlin surrounded on all sides by churches. In the Czarist era, this was where coronations took place; this is also where all of the czars are buried, specifically in the Cathedral of the Archangel. (Russian emperors are buried in St. Petersburg, because there wasn't an empire to be emperor of before Peter the Great.) That cathedral is a single large room, a necropolis full of graves of czars including Ivan the Terrible, who considered himself so important that he is actually buried behind the icon stand, figuring that would put him at the head of the line to get into Paradise. The walls are also covered in icons, paintings of canonized patriarchs and saints, some of whom are buried there. Among those buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel is the Czarevich Dmitry Ivanovich, "illegitimate" son of Ivan the Terrible (Dmitry was a product of Ivan's fifth or seventh marriage--records are fuzzy--and canon law only recognizes the validity of the first three marriages). The czarevich died of a stab wound under mysterious circumstances after Boris Godunov, rightful heir to the Russian throne after the death of Ivan IV, assumed power. The official story is that he was playing with a knife and had an epileptic seizure, managing to stab himself in the neck by accident. Uh-huh, that sounds plausible. But anyway, Dmitry is buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel, and was canonized after several "false Dmitrys" appeared years later to challenge Boris Godunov's claim to the throne.

We left Cathedral Square and saw the Czar Bell and the Czar Cannon, just behind the Kremlin proper. The Czar Bell weighs more than 200 tons, and was never rung. The wooden derrick that was supposed to lift the bell out of the casting pit caught fire when molten metal started leaking, and in the mad dash to put out the fire with cold water, the sudden temperature change shocked the bronze and a chunk weighing 11 tons broke off. The chunk is as tall as I am and just as wide, and the bell is about 16 inches thick. The bell and chunk are on display, as well as the massive clapper, laid under the stone platform that the bell now sits on. There are portraits on the bell that were never finished; you can see faces but the rest of the detail is obscured. The Czar Cannon is an equally impractically-huge work of bronze, a cannon almost 15 feet long and nearly two feet wide. It was never actually used in combat (though there is evidence that it was fired at least once), but it did intimidate the hell out of the Mongols when they saw it.

After that, we decided to break for lunch, to everyone's relief. I was glad I wasn't the only one tired and hungry already; my knee was still bothering me, though, so I would have been happy just to sit down for a while, food or no food. We went to Sbarro, because that was quicker than going to a proper restaurant. I got a tasty stuffed veggie pizza, some kind of salad and some green beans, and it was delicious. Over lunch we somehow started talking about serial killers and psychology. I swear, the most interesting conversations happen when Rich is around.

After that, we headed to the metro and went out to Novodevichy monastery and cemetery. This is the oldest still-functioning convent in the world, and it has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. It's got several pretty church buildings and a lovely bell tower, and we happened to be there when they started ringing the bells, which was cool to hear. Several ladies from the Russian royal families who could not or did not bear children were housed at the Novodevichy convent, including Sofia Alekseyevna and Eudoxia Lopukhina, sister and wife (respectively) of Peter the Great, and Irina Godunova, wife of Feodor I and sister of the earlier-mentioned Boris Godunov. During the Soviet era, the convent was turned into a museum and apartments, then became a theological institute, and then it was restored to a working convent in 1994, and it continues to be so.

The monastery also has a cemetery on the grounds, where many important figures of Russian art, politics, literature and theatre are buried, including Yeltsin, Khrushchev, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Mayakovsky, and hundreds of others. Apparently Mikhail's father is also buried there, I think, but we didn't see his gravesite and I don't remember exactly why he was buried there. I think he was a political figure of minor importance; I was tired and in pain and not listening much at that point in the tour. It was really cool seeing the Soviet-era graves; obviously they're not marked with crosses, so there was a bit more room for creativity. There are a lot of busts, and some of the graves of more important people--Yeltsin in particular comes to mind--are particularly unorthodox (pun totally intended). Yeltsin's grave is a massive granite sculpture that looks like a Russian flag, all red and blue and white. There was a big group of Chinese tourists checking out Khrushchev's grave the first time we came to it, so we came back later. By that time I just really wanted to go to the hostel and sleep for a while, which is what I did once we got back to the metro.

I took the key from Brenda and headed home by myself, and when I got there I found the door unlocked (!) and a frazzled-looking girl pacing about through the door on her phone. I was...less than courteous to her, because I was also not in the greatest of moods, being sunburnt and blistered and tired with a sore knee for no discernible reason, which had me quite concerned. We reconciled later; she felt better after a shower, and I after a nap, and we got along famously for the day or so we had left to share that space. Her name was Monique. She's from Holland, and has been teaching English in Thailand for five years. She came to Moscow via the Trans-Siberian Railway (and had thus spent 3 days on a train - no decent sleep, no shower), was on her way to Petersburg next (in fact, I believe she's staying in a hostel not too far from me, so maybe I'll run into her this week), and then she's going home for the first time in about three years.

We all kind of did our own thing that night; Brenda wandered around the city and specifically Red Square when it was all lit up for the night. While Monique was taking a shower, after I decided I had napped enough, I picked up Brenda's city guide to see what it recommended for restaurants. One place, called Pancho Villa, caught my eye. I decided to see how Muscovites did Mexican food. (The answer is "with a lot of onions and no discernible spice.") I ended up spending about 800p all told for the experience (150p cover because they had a live band + 650p for my enchiladas and frozen margarita), and it was worth it. I mean, I figured this would probably be the last time I would find myself in Moscow, so why not? A comparable establishment in the US would probably have come out to about the same (~$25). Anyone expecting a high-larious story about Emily and tequila is about to be disappointed; the most exciting thing I did after consuming my adult beverage was to stare down a lady on the metro on the way back, who gave me a look as I step/tripped over her bags to get to a seat. That's still pretty major, though - I don't normally stare at people on the metro, even though that's basically normal here. Staring isn't as rude in Russia as it is in America.

Anyway, I made it back to the hostel safe and sound after my dinnerventure. I drank some water and went to bed; Brenda and I had decided to continue doing our own thing on Sunday. All we had planned that day was a tour of a Cold War bunker, which was actually pretty cool, but I'll write about all of that in my next post.