After
our day trip on Saturday all three of us wanted to have a lay in on
Sunday. Angela lives on the edge of town so she chose to stay out
there instead of meeting up again in the city with me and Claire.
Claire
and I met up at 1600, and did part of a metro tour. One of my goals
is to see all the metro stations, and Claire is usually up to join me
for it. On this day we decided to look at all the stations on the
northern half of the orange line. Half a line at a time is a reasonable pace to see the stations, otherwise it gets overwhelming.
Wikipedia
tells me this line is the third busiest in the city, with a million
people riding it each day. That seems like a really big number to me,
but I have no idea how they count it all.
After
finishing our 'metro tour' we went back to the same food court as
we'd visited recently, but had thai soups this time. It was slightly
easier to find seats than the last time we'd been there, but it was
still the most difficult part of the meal.
The
next day I hopped on the metro after classes were finished and made
my way to a station called Fili, on the light blue metro line.
I'd seen a church on social media,
called the Church of the Intercession at Fili, and the architecture
seemed different from what I'm used to seeing.
It was
golden hour when I got to the church, so the lighting was really good
for photos. As far as I could tell, the lower level of the church was
open, but the interior was pretty boring. The upper level was closed,
I'm hoping it is just being renovated. I don't know if the church
holds services regularly or not, but it looked rather abandoned.
The
field across from the church gave me a beautiful view of Moscow City,
the business district of the city.
The
next morning my kids had a field trip to a place called Neskuchny
Park. Nice walking paths through a whole lot of trees.
I used
my Wednesday afternoon to walk from school to Vagankovskoye Cemetery.
The walk was a bit over 4 kilometers, and since the weather was nice
I was happy to be outside. (In Russia it's a good idea to take
advantage of good fall or winter weather, because it doesn't stick
around as long as anyone would like.)
Vagankovskoye
Cemetery is older than the United States!
It was established in 1771,
after the Moscow plague riot in that year. It was established in an
effort to keep the contagion from spreading, I have no idea how well
it worked. At the time it was outside city limits; the city limits
have since moved.
The
cemetery is huge. Wikipedia tells me half a million people have been
buried there since it opened, and there are currently 100,000 people
buried there. Graves from the Battle of Borodino, the Battle of
Moscow, and the Khodynka Tragedy are there. It is now a popular place
for people from the elite sports and art communities of the city.
Many
of the graves are extravagant, to say the least. If I was Russian I'm
sure I would recognize some of the names of people buried there, but
I'm not, so I don't.
I
walked through different parts of the cemetery, mostly amazed by the
burial plots. Many areas are slowly being reclaimed by nature, at
least it looks that way to me. It makes sense to me, as keeping up a
grave is time consuming, and a never ending chore. I'm sure there are
rules on how often a plot is reused.
On
Friday I walked to Red Square after school, for a couple reasons. One
was to see the way the moon looked really big behind St. Basil's
Cathedral, and the other was to see the seasonal decorations in GUM
department store.
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