MOCKBA 20 years later

Red Square
see all photos »

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the lapse...much to see & do, little time to blog!

Took the overnight train from St Petersburg to Moscow - very different experience from what Boris remembers 20 years ago. Swank, in fact - flat-screen TV, caviar for breakfast, little overnight pack with slippers and eye covers. Lots of fun.

Upon arrival, we (Boris, that is) haggled aggressively with cabbies who wanted to charge us something like $50 for a short ride to the apartment we rented...Boris is nothing if not persistent, and we ended up paying 1/3 of that. Probably still got ripped off. The apartment we rented was, well, very centrally located and had running water. Enough said.

St Basil's cathedral. The story is that Ivan the Terrible was so pleased with this, that he had the architect blinded so he could never create anything more beautiful!
see all photos »

We were lucky enough to meet up with a friend of Boris' from school and his cousins who live in Moscow. Boris and Garik had fun getting reacquainted, and his cousins Jane and Julia spoke beautiful English, which was lucky for me! They showed us around town, so we got to see all the hot spots we would never have found without them - a day trip to Kuskovo (a former residence of some aristocracy or other), the best place for coffee and smoothies in Moscow (Coffee Mania, in case anyone's going -- $$$), a fun Uzbek restaurant in Gorki Park, a great spot for views of the city at nighttime, a private club with good old Russian food (more herring for Boris).

Friends at a cafe
see all photos »

WIth Garik, we explored the Kremlin...well, spent more time waiting in lines and trying to figure out how to finagle tickets through a very visitor-unfriendly system to get into the State Armory, diamond fund, cathedrals. Went to Pushkin Museum, which has a huge collection of impressionist paintings, and also happened to have an exhibit of American art, which was somewhat embarrassing, but did contain a few paintings from the New Britain Museum of American Art -- hard hittin' New Britain makes it to Moscow!

Boris, Garik, and Lenin in the Graveyard of Fallen Heroes - the place where monuments torn down at the end of the USSR have come to rest
see all photos »

Really the best thing about Moscow was having insiders to show us around -- in addition to all the tourist stuff, we got a real flavor for the city.