Travel Week Part I

I think that it would be best for me to break travel week up into several smaller sections. I’ve already broken my photo albums up as such, and I will attempt to keep the same breaks in my posts.


Travel Week Part I

Wednesday ended up being a very long day for me. After lessons we held Smolny’s malsinitsa celebration. True, it was about 3 weeks late, but it was still good fun. Various groups sang Russian songs, read poetry, preformed dances – the crowning jewel was a children’s troupe who preformed national folk-songs and dance routines. They were so adorable! I wish I hadn’t forgotten that the part was happening and thus brought my camera to school with me that day.

As soon as the part wrapped up and every one was stuffed with blini and pastries I raced back to my home-stay to unpack school supplies and pack for my trip to Moscow and then to Kyiv. Happily that didn’t take extremely long.

The long part was waiting around to leave, and then going to Moscovsky Vokzal to catch our night train to Petersburg. The good news is that trains here leave more or less on time. That meant that many of the people who traveled on Russian trains before were freaking out that our train left the station 5 minutes after scheduled time. This is not normal for Russia. If one could combine the ease of booking a train in the U.S. with the cleanliness of Russian rail-stations, and timeliness of Russian trains – one might very well have the best train system in the world. The only down sides to Russian train travel are a) booking tickets if you do not speak Russian, and b) the toilets onboard the train, which can get pretty gross.

We arrived in Moscow early Thursday morning and promptly took a bus tour around the city as it was still too early to check into our hotel. As usual, Russian Language program students were sent with a Russian-speaking guide and Area Studies with English speaking. It was rather amusing to us Russian Language students as our guide normally gave tours in English and would occasionally forget and give us a place name in English instead of Russian or ask us “how do you say X in Russian?” He was a great guide however, his Russian very understandable and with a great sense of humor.

Probably the funniest part of our guided excursions occurred on the second day of our time in Moscow. We were taking our tour of the Kremlin and a one of the Babushki in Cathedral Square scolded him for speaking in Russian – “they are Americans - speak English!” She didn’t really buy his explanation that we understood Russian perfectly well and was threatening to report him to one of the guide organizations for leading an unauthorized Russian language tour. :-P

Moscow is a very intimidating city and a bit difficult to find one’s way around in. The metro system is HUGE. (Though it actually feels less chaotic than the Petersburg metro once you start figuring out where you are. People are more laid back in the metro in Moscow.)

(Moscow Metro system map)

As such I didn’t see nearly as much of the city as I perhaps would have liked. Still, I am not overly fond of Moscow, my only real regret in lack of exploration was not seeing the Tretnikovskaya Galley.

I did however manage a visit to the State History Museum, which was actually quite interesting containing a collection of artifacts ranging from ancient tribes to the 19th century. (To see more recent artifacts one must going to the Contemporary History Museum.)

(State History Museum viewed across Red Square)


After the visit to the Museum the group I was with was accosted by an Russian woman who wanted to tell us about the Clones. Why she chose our group I’m not sure as we had been speaking in English at the time and her entire rant was in Russian. We understood it – for better or ill, we just couldn’t figure out why she came to us to warn us that Putin, Medvedev’, The Minister of Finance, and even President Bush are pieces in a plot to take over the human race by clones from Transylvania. Thankfully she was harmless, and once we politely thanked her for her warning she raced of through the crowd to find more people to warn of Man’s impending doom.

Finally Friday afternoon my travel group of 6 departed for Kievsky Vokzal and our train to Kiev.


EDIT:

It will be some time before I have pictures uploaded. I tried today to get my Moscow album on my gallery and for some reason it is not exporting. Until I figure out why it won't export more than the first 4 images, those are all you will be stuck with.