russia: moscow: fun with friends and being sick

This post will cover a full week or so in Moscow.

I had a birthday coming up, and I'd read about several 'high tea' options in Moscow, so this seemed like a good way to celebrate. Saturday at noon I met up with four of my friends at the Ritz-Carlton, definitely one of the nicer hotels in the city.

We ordered two sets of high tea, each of which is supposed to serve two people. Between the tea and snacks, there was definitely enough for all five of us. We felt fancy, and I loved hanging out with friends.

After tea we all went in different directions. Claire and I walked over to Zaryadne Park, one of the newer parks in Moscow. We got lucky with weather and timing, and got to see a beautiful sunset. (Standing with everyone else in the city, all of whom were trying to take the perfect photo for social media.)

Not that I was at all hungry, but Claire and I went out to dinner after the park.

I convinced Claire and Angela to meet me pretty early Sunday morning, to take some photos in a couple metro stations, when there wouldn't be too many people up and about. We had fun, even though we were all rather sleepy.

After metro photos the three of us rode to Sokolniki park, to take more photos. Fall is a gorgeous time in most of Russia, though it is usually too short. The leaves change colour, and everything looks amazing for a couple weeks.

I was looking for a specific photo in particular, one with tram tracks in the middle, with yellow and orange trees on the side. After following the tracks for a while we finally found what I wanted to see. We also found a couple small lakes/ponds with beautiful reflections in the water.

Sunday was basically a day of photos, as each place we went was because I wanted to take photos. After Sokolniki Park we went out to Izmailovo Park, I wanted yet another fall reflection photo. Unfortunately, that one didn't work out. When we got there I realized the trees there had lost their leaves at least a few days ago. Argh, oh well.

Starting sometime on Saturday and getting worse through the weekend I lost my voice. Monday morning I couldn't talk. I felt fine, but I couldn't talk. I ended up calling in sick to work four out of the five days of the week, because you can't teach little kids without talking.

Since I didn't actually feel bad, I still left my flat for a little bit each day. On Monday I walked to a park about 20 minutes away. I'd found it on a map, and wanted to see what it was like. My walk was totally worth it, as I found a viewpoint with a beautiful reflection of a bridge and fall trees.

Tuesday was Claire's normal day off, so I met up with her to go check out a well known cemetery. (There are several cemeteries worth visiting in Moscow.) Novodevichy convent is currently being renovated (I have no idea how long it'll be before all the scaffolding is finally gone,) but the attached cemetery still looks normal.

I've been told that sometimes there is an entrance fee for foreigners to see this cemetery, but we didn't see a ticket office, nor did anyone ask. Maybe this was because we were there in the middle of a workday?

There are several well known people buried in this cemetery, and many of the graves are big/unique/full of themselves. One of the better known people (that is, known outside of Russia,) is film director Sergei Eisenstein. Another is Sergei Prokofiev, a composer. The person most famously buried in this cemetery, whose name still brings a reaction among many Russians, is Mikhail Gorbachev.

Another day of staying home convinced me to go out again. I found street grafitti, which I always love. I got close to hotel Kosmos, which is brutalist architecture. Boring, but photogenic in that way, if that makes sense.

I also visited the cosmonautics museum. Russians love to remind people that Russia (technically the USSR at the time,) won the space race. When you think about it, what the first cosmonaut (in English we say astronaut,) did was absolutely incredible. Yuri Gagarin blasted into the unknown (scientists had done the math, but no one really knew for sure what would happen to a human in space,) on 12 April, 1961. 

Not surprisinly, Gagarin was praised and rewarded when he came back to Earth, and sadly, didn't do much else of note for the rest of his career, as he was too much of a national treasure at that point. 

The museum had space suits, and space food, and model rockets, and model everything. It was nice to wander around for an hour or so. 

This museum deals with the human part of space, there is another space museum that deals more with the science aspect of space.

It was a good week of being out and about in Moscow, though I wish I'd been able to talk :)