RUSSIA / UKRAINE MARATHON TRIP JULY 2017 - PART 2

Moscow: 7/10 - 7/13, 2017
First day in Moscow!

Monday morning after the marathon, we got on the train to take us to Moscow.

On the train from St. Petersburg to Moscow - Only a 2 hour ride!

Our hotel in Moscow

Once we got settled in to our room, the first thing we did was head to Red Square!

In front of the entrance to Red Square, people would stand here and throw a penny or some kind of change over their shoulder. The only annoying thing was that some vagrant was immediately picking up the change people were tossing over their shoulder.

Entrance to Red Square

Looking South towards St. Basil's cathedral.  On the left is a mall.....yes, that old historical looking building is in fact a mall.

Looking South in Red Square Left to Right - St. Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's tomb and The Kremlin

Saint Basil's Cathedral

Inside St. Basil's Cathedral

State Historical Museum - We didn't tour this

After touring the cathedral, we...dare I say it...went to the 'mall' to eat and use the bathroom.  Finding public restrooms in Moscow is practically impossible.  AND you always have to pay to use them.

Inside the mall

After eating, we left Red Square and started walking down the river.

Outside of the Kremilin, walking along the Moskva River

Signs of the USSR still can be seen around Moscow

98 meter tall monument to Peter the Great

Entrance to Gorky Park

Fountain at Gorky Park

Lounge chairs at Gorky Park

Statue of Vladimir Lenin - when the USSR fell, instead of destroying all Soviet Era monuments, they took all of them from around the city and placed them together in an area of Gorky Park

Joseph Stalin - If you look closely, you can see that his nose is broken off of this statue. Everyone still hates him.

Not sure what this carriage was used for, but it was outside of a building in the park

'Sculptures Cemetery' in Gorky Park

As we were walking through Gorky Park, a sudden downpour hit.  Everyone rushed under the highway to sit and wait out the rain.

Stain glass window art in metro station

Moscow Metro station

This says Starbucks Coffee in Russian.  It is the Cyrillic Russian Letters 

First day in Moscow, we only walked 10 miles. haha

Tuesday, July 11th 2017 - 2nd day in Moscow

Our hotel breakfast.  The pink juice had this odd kool-aid / milky texture.  It was good but I cannot figure out what it was.

One of the things we definitely wanted to do was tour Lenin's tomb.  Luckily, we checked the internet and found out that it's not open very often.  It's really weird, but it is only open to the public a couple days a week and only for a few hours.  On this day, Lenin's Mausoleum was only open 10am to 1pm.  Because we had already witnessed insane lines during our trip, Gary suggested that we get in line at 9am to make sure that we made it inside. When we got there, there was already a line formed!  It wasn't too long, so we figured that we would get inside for sure before the time cutoff.  As 10am approached, guards started putting up metal detectors to walk through and they started getting everyone organized into a single file line.  Again, not to sound racist or anything...I'm sure this is just a cultural thing...but there were a large number of Asians that were in line and they all cut in line, push and pretend not to understand how a line works.  It's really frustrating and annoying.  And it honestly is only the Asians that do it.  I was starting to get pissed because I did not want to miss the time cut off! As a side note - I later found out that the mainland Asians (Chinese) tend to behave this way...it's just part of their culture because of the shear numbers of people that are in their country. 

Anyway, we make it through the bag check and through the metal detectors.  They strongly emphasize no photography inside the tomb.  I was scared to even take my phone out because there were so many guards around and they are all ready to pounce at any minute.  I actually wanted to see what would happen if any Asian would dare take out their camera....they also would not follow instructions and were very disrespectful...more then once I saw them get yelled at by police officers...but, I digress and more about that later.

Anyway, we enter the tomb.  In the center of a dark room is Lenin's body laying in a casket and he's illuminated by lights.  His casket is surrounded by glass panels.  We enter the room and walk around him in a counter clockwise direction.  There were guards in every corner of the room watching us.  We actually were quite far away from him.  We were also pushed along through the room...there was no time to stand and stare at him.  The entire 'tour' was over in just a minute or so.  He looked very small and plastic.  From what I read on the internet, they 'wash' his skin in some chemical to keep it looking like his normal skin color.  They also change his clothes every so often.  I just don't understand how they could have possibly preserved a his body properly when he died in 1924.  It's just very bizarre to me, but we saw it and we can check this off our bucket list!

Entering Lenin's tomb  It says Lenin in Cyrillic Russian letters above the entrance. This was the last picture I could take before entering.

This is just a picture I pulled from Google so you could see what he looked like.  

Behind Lenin's tomb, several dignitaries are buried.  The grave closest on the left is Stalin.

Line of people waiting to see Lenin's body - this was AFTER we had toured and came back outside.

After Lenin's tomb, we decided to go into the Kremlin.  Outside of the Kremlin is their 'tomb of the unknown soldier'.  There's an eternal flame and guards standing there all day.  As we were standing there, an Asian guy apparently wanted to get a better and closer picture of the memorial.  He actually crawled on top of the stone sign (below picture) and started taking pictures.  The guards guarding the eternal flame didn't move from their post.  However, as this guy is totally disrespecting the memorial, a police officer comes running out of nowhere and starts shouting and blowing his whistle.  I cannot tell you how many times we saw thing kind of thing over and over again.

Tomb of the unknown soldier

Soldiers standing next to the eternal flame of the tomb of the unknown soldier

Image on the outside wall of the Kremlin

The one frustrating thing about Russia is that 1) the lines to everything are hours long 2) you need a ticket for EVERYTHING.
We wanted to get in to the Kremlin.  There was this 1-2 hour line just to get tickets in to the Kremlin.  As we stood there trying to figure out if there was a different or faster way inside, this girl was walking up and down the line asking if anyone had questions.  She explained to us that everything needed a different ticket.  There was a ticket to get in to the Kremlin.  There was a different ticket for each building / church / museum inside the Kremlin.  Gary and I were like, "We just want to go inside and that's it".  So, she directed us to a different line.  Thank goodness the line to just go in to the Kremlin was super short.  We got our tickets and proceeded to one of the gates to get inside.  Of course, we could not find the one and only gate that could get us into the Kremlin.  We practically walked the entire perimeter of the Kremlin before we finally found the correct entrance.  It was exhausting and frustrating!

Outside of the Kremlin

Finally, the entrance inside!!

Outside of Ivan the Great bell tower

Cathedral of the Archangel inside the Kremlin - Ivan the Terrible is buried here

Ivan the Terrible's tomb

Ivan the Terrible's tomb - Died 1534!

Information for the picture below

I only took a picture of this painting because it was from the 15th century! That's the 1400s!!

Pretty sure I was going to murder a tourist at this point.  I was so tired of all the pushing and shoving.

Russian guy painting on the street

Garden at the back of the Kremlin

Garden at the back of the Kremlin

Not sure who these people are but they looked important! 

Upper left hand corner - guy sitting on the ground - We saw all sorts of tourists doing this....not Americans, but other tourists.  Posing for pictures seemed to be the thing to do and people would get really into it!  Sometimes people would lay down or girls would pose like they were super models.  It was kind of funny.

McDonald's in Russian Cyrillic letters. It was just as packed there as they are here!

Horse fountain outside of the Kremlin, next to the Alexandrovsky Garden

The traffic is unbelievable in Moscow.  You cannot just cross the street.  They have underground tunnels to get from one side of the street to the other.  It's so easy to get turned around under there too.  There were many times that we would pop up and not be on the side of the street that we wanted to be on!  We had a heck of a time trying to get around the traffic outside of the Kremlin.

Monument to Prince Vladimir outside of the Kremlin

After dealing with the traffic and people and business of the Kremlin, we decided to head out to this amusement park thing a few miles outside of the city.  This place turned out to be a gold mine!

This Cultural Center was basically an abandoned amusement park that only had souvenir booths.

From the outside, it looks like the most Russian thing you will ever experience.

It looks like it's in operation, but then we went inside...thankfully, we didn't have to buy a ticket!  Half of this place was abandoned, but half of it was in operation.  It was very odd. 

They had the BEST t-shirt slogans!

Putin obviously hated Obama, but LOVED Trump!

Abandoned attractions

Abandoned sites of the cultural center

More abandoned attractions

Church of St. Nicholas in Izmailovo - Apparently this is a functioning church

Souvenir booths - We bought all of our Moscow trinkets here!  It was awesome and cheap!

Local band playing outside of the metro station

We stopped by Red Square at night - Don't forget, that's the mall!

St. Basil's cathedral at dusk

We did 13.2 miles for the day!

Wednesday, July 12 - Final day in Moscow

At this point, we had been travelling for a week and we really needed to do laundry before we headed out to Kiev.  The hotel would have done our laundry, but it was super expensive.  We have traveled enough to know that all you have to do is get outside of the tourist areas and you can do everything (shopping, dinner, laundry etc) for much, much cheaper.  After some internet searching, we found a small laundry mat a few miles outside of the city.  Once we got there, we realized that it was not a self serve laundry.  You had to drop off your clothes and they did your laundry for you.  We were kind of nervous thinking that this was going to cost us a bunch of money.  In the end, we got 2 or 3 loads of laundry done, clothes all folded and places neatly into bags for us to carry back all for about $4.00.  We looked at each other in disbelief....I actually thought we weren't understanding the price correctly, but it really was only $4.00.
She told us that we could pick up our laundry in a couple of hours.  So, since we had time to kill we decided to just walk around the neighborhood and see if we could find anything interesting.

Launderette Chistoff

As we walked around we came across this "outdoor athletic complex". just down the street from the laundry mat  They had exercise equipment, a track and a building with an indoor pool.  These guys were outside boxing like it was an everyday occurrence. Also, we were lucky enough to get into the building to use the bathroom without paying for it!  Win!

Monument to the heroes of Patriotic War of 1812 on Soldatskaya Ulitsa

Fountain inside the monument park

Vvedenskoye Cemetery - I know, I know...another cemetery.  But they are so interesting!

VVedenskoye Cemetery - How they set up their cemeteries are so different and creepy from us.

Image on a headstone

You know how the stereotypical Russian always wears Addidas?  Well, I can confirm that it's not a stereotype.  It's fact. 

People playing and singing in the metro station

After getting our laundry and dumping it back at our hotel, it was almost the end of the day and pouring outside.  We decided to just try and see a couple more things before we left for Kiev. There was this interesting convent that we thought we could tour.  After walking in the rain and taking a couple of metro trains we got there only to find out it was closed!  Grr.  So all we could do was walk around the outside.  Kind of bummed because this was a UNESCO site too!

Ensemble of the Novodevichy Convent

Sorry we're closed. Moose out front should have told you.

 Luckily (?) the convent cemetery was behind the convent and that was open to walk through.

Sometimes when we are walking around places like this, we will sort of walk alongside English speaking tours to hear some information about the place where we are at.  Pretty sure this was one of those times.  She was just telling the group about all the important people who were buried here.

Last stop in Moscow - The American Embassy!  Home!  Of course, when we got there it was closed.  Double grr!

The American Embassy. The security around this place was unbelievable.

Our flag!  The guards there were nice enough to talk to us and explain that it was closed but would be open for tours the next day.  They started speaking to us in Russian, but the second we let them know we don't speak Russian, you could visibly see the switch flip in their heads as they went from thinking to speak in Russian to thinking to speak in English for us.  It was kind of funny to actually see the look on their faces.  In the end, we at least tried some Russian by saying good bye to them (of course, I can't remember the word now).  They smiled, probably trying to contain their laughter at how poorly we spoke...or maybe they just appreciated that we tried even though we suck! haha

Cement barriers made to look like nice flower beds, cameras everywhere, and a 15f(?)t tall brick wall!

Even with the pouring rain, we still managed to walk farther then I thought!

Next stop...Kiev, Ukraine!