Day 61 - Moscow on foot

Our day started a little earlier than usual, when our Russian railway breakfast was delivered at 6:30am. The porridge that was part of my breakfast was OK, but Laura wasn’t too keen on the “Shepherd’s Pies” that came with hers. Our train pulled in on time at 7:15am when we were still sorting out the directions for reaching our hostel, “Godzillas”. As a result we were the last ones to leave our carriage, and I think our “cabin steward” was getting a little impatient for us to be gone.

With our experience of the St Petersburg Metro behind us we figured it would be a pretty simple matter getting to Godzillas, but we hadn’t reckoned on one significant difference – the Metro signs in Moscow do not repeat station names in Roman script as well as Cyrillic. This caused a bit of uncertainty as we had to look at signs long and carefully to work out which way we should be going. Still we managed to find our way without getting lost and at least this time the hostel hadn’t overbooked or lost our booking. We could check-in, but couldn’t move into our room until 2:00pm, so we deposited our luggage in storage and Laura made some plans for the day while I tried unsuccessfully to get my Notebook to work on the hostel’s WiFi network. After ten countries in two months this is only the third time I have encountered this problem, but at least the other two occasions were in places I was only staying for one night. It will be a real bumma if I can’t get some WiFi access somewhere for the remainder of the trip. One thing we would like to have checked online immediately was whether we needed to register our visas as part of our stay in Russia. We were told by hostel staff in St Petersburg that new regulations now applied, and as we were staying in Russia less than seven working days, visa registration wasn’t required. However, the receptionist here advised us it was still necessary for any stay longer than 24 hours. As it cost 600 roubles each and involved a lot of paperwork we didn’t want to go through the process unless it was definitely required.

St Basil's in Red Square

It was about a 20 minute walk to Red Square so we opted to walk there in the brisk morning air. Given the gazillion people who were travelling on the Metro this morning it seemed strangely underpopulated. I guess the early morning commuters were all ensconced in nice warm offices somewhere. The fact that St Basil’s Cathedral didn’t open until 11:00am and Lenin’s Mausoleum didn’t open at all today (as we realised a little later) meant that there probably wasn’t a lot of reason for the bus and half of tourists who were there to be about either.

We went in search of the Tourist Office that was listed as being nearby but could find no trace of it and so we adjourned to a coffee shop in the GUM shopping centre to read some of the guide notes and make plans for the day. Some of you may remember the image of GUM department stores (Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin = State Department Store) in Soviet times as being grim shops with not much on offer and long queues for anything that was. The GUM of today is like a bigger and more expensive version of Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, with over 2,000 individual stores selling all kinds of high fashion and luxury goods.

Since the Lenin Mausoleum was shut today and it made logistical sense to tour the Kremlin the same day we saw the Mausoleum, we decided to skip the Kremlin area altogether for today. Instead we decided to do a self-guided 10km walking tour described in the Lonely Planet guide, because although it was a bit cool it was at least dry and the forecast for the next few days was less promising. The listed walk started from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour which was only a kilometre or so away, and it didn’t take us all that long to get there along the river. We even started to see some little patches of blue sky along the way.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

By the time we reached the cathedral with its five gold domes (of the Orthodox onion shaped variety) the building was bathed in sunlight and the weather was starting to look seriously better. Crossing the adjacent footbridge onto Bolotny Island in the middle of the Moscow River also provided a nice panorama of the Kremlin which was by now also light up by sunlight. On Bolotny Island we made our way to a little park which features a sculpture called “Children are Victims of Adult Vices”. This sculpture consists of 13 statues which depict the ways in which the actions of adults impact the safety and welfare of children around the world. I will list at the bottom of this blog entry the thirteen vices in case you want to see how many you can guess.

Peter the Great

Continuing along the river we arrived opposite the imposing but controversial sculpture of Peter the Great. At 94.5m high it is twice the size of the Statue of Liberty and has been dubbed “Peter the Ugly” by locals, who don’t know why they should be celebrating a Tsar who moved the Russian capital to St Petersburg.

We were now at the Art Muzeon Sculpture Park, and despite Laura’s suspicion that the “tourist entry fee” was about three times that for locals we decided to enter anyway in the hope that it would at least be better than the last open air sculpture park we saw (see Day 50). Well, we were not disappointed this time. As well as the promised selection of discarded Soviet era statues of Lenin and Stalin, and monuments to workers, etc, there was a very good selection of more contemporary items, which we quite liked. Moving on, a pedestrian underpass brought us to Gorky Park, famous (to us at least) for the William Hurt/Lee Marvin movie of the same name. Since it was now past the 30 September deadline that seems to be the cutover date for Summer to Winter schedules, the park was largely deserted despite that fact that it was by now a glorious sunny day. Almost all the food stalls were closed and the amusement park attractions all mothballed for the season. Even the still blooming flowers were being ripped out of the flower beds by the park’s gardeners. Nevertheless the park was quite pretty and we could see why it would be a big summer attraction.

Fortunately at the other end of the park we found a Subway stall that was open, because it was by now well past lunch time and our tummies were letting us know it. We let a local family go ahead of us while we sorted out what we were going to have. We couldn’t understand why they then just stood around in the shade right next to the stall to eat instead of moving to sit on a bench in the sun next to the river as we did. Far more pleasant, on every level.

Feeding ducks in Neskuchny Sad

The next stage of the walk along the river took us into the Neskuchny Sad, which apparently translates as “Not so boring garden”. It was actually a very lovely wooded area, and certainly not so boring at one stage in particular. We came across an area amidst the trees where two marquees with wooden floors had been set up, one with a big pile of what looked like dirt in the middle, and with the area cordoned off by something like police tape. It was being “guarded” by at least half a dozen snappily dressed young men all wearing fawn trench coats, trilby hats and ear pieces. Two ping-pong tables stood within the cordoned off area and a couple of games were being played by guys dressed as labourers. We weren’t sure if we had stumbled across some film noir set or some nefarious Russian Mafia function, so curious as we were we opted not to linger to find out.

After the “not so boring garden” came a recently created ecological reserve, but as we were starting to feel a bit leg weary by now we opted to continue along the river front rather than detour up through the nature walks. We were hoping that when we reached the chair lift up to the panoramic views offered from Universitetskaya Place we would find that it bucked the trend of things which shutdown for the season on 30^th September. Alas it was not to be, and we had to get up to the lookout area the old fashioned way.

Panorama of Moscow

I would have to say that the hard slog was worth it though because the view was really good. For starters it was a perfectly cloudless day, the sun was getting low in the sky behind us, and many of the trees before us were clad in autumn colours. The main stadium from the 1980 Moscow Olympics was just across the river and we could see just how far we had walked from the Kremlin in the distance. No wonder we felt tired.

Once we had taken in the view we made our way back down the hill to the Metro station we had passed a little earlier and caught the train back to our hostel. Once again the absence of names in Roman script at the station where we had to change lines confused us for a little while but we sorted it out in the end. Too tired to go out again we bought some supplies from the little supermarket near the hostel and had a very nice chicken salad for dinner. Afterwards we had a long chat with a young Irish chap about non-rugby topics; mostly about his experience of having been in Moscow for a week, also struggling with the metro, but mostly looking at Orthodox Christian iconography as part of a post-graduate Arts scholarship.

The 13 Vices: Drug addiction, Prostitution, Theft, Alcoholism, Ignorance, Irresponsible science, Indifference, Propaganda of violence, Sadism, For those without memory, Child labour, Poverty, War.