russia: moscow but not the way we planned

When we planned our year of traveling, we left a few weekends for exploring Moscow. This weekend we planned to see a couple major sights in the city, but it didn't turn out the way we expected.

Claire, Angela, and I met up at a metro station then made our way up to ground level. 

Our first planned sight was St Basil's Cathedral. This might be the most recognized sight in the entire city, and of the city around the world. Legend says the man who designed it was later blinded so he could never create anything so amazing again. This probably isn't true, since he is credited with other architectural work around the country.

We got to the edge of Red Square to discover it was completely blocked off, and empty. We weren't the only people surprised by the closing, argh. We had no way of figuring out why it was closed, or when it might open again.

Hoping that St Basil's might be open by another entry, we made our way through GUM, the former state department store. Unfortunately, as we walked out the other side, we found Red Square blocked off on that side as well. The other side of St Basil's was also fenced off. None of us know enough Russian to ask why it was all closed, or when it might open again.

Even though we wanted to be on the square and in the church, we took advantage of the empty square to take a couple photos, since it is quite rare that it is totally empty.

To get back to where we wanted to go, we went through the mall again, and decided to take part in an old Russian tradition: eating ice cream. We're pretty sure the cones had been scooped out while a while ago, but the taste wasn't too bad. It was another example of the Russian disregard for queues, we saw people coming to the window of the ice cream stall from several different directions.

After our ice cream we tried to get to our next destination, but were foiled again. The entrance to the state history museum is just inside the gates to Red Square, and they were closed. Argh.

After some discussion, we decided to walk to Lubyanka Square. The name Lubyanka struck fear into the hearts of Soviets for decades, because the building was the home of the NKVD/KBG, and now the FSB. All were secret police organizations, with no public transparency. There was a lot of fear that if your loved one disappeared, they had been taken to the basement of Lubyanka, which meant you weren't going to see them again.

In the middle of a small park on one side of the square is a large stone. This stone came from the Solevetsky Islands, it is a memorial to those who died in the Gulag system; the first such camp was in the Solevetsky Islands. It's a small memorial, put there in the 90s. (Side note, there is another such memorial in St Petersburg, which is a lot closer to the islands.)

While we were taking our photos Claire was google-ing and wikipedia-ing, and found out that one of the world's worst serial killers used to live in a building on this square. When you start clicking on links you never know what you'll find!

Darya Saltykova was responsible for the death of more than 70 people! This is definitely not widely known Russian history, for obvious reasons.

Since our original plans for the day had already completely changed, we came up with something new to do for the next few hours: seeing more of the city's metro system. I convinced the girls to ride the southern half of the dark green line, getting off at each stop just to see what the station looked like.

The most interesting station turned out to be the very last station, Alma Atinskaya. The station is pretty new, it was opened in 2012. 

The original name of the station was Brateyevo, the neighborhood in which it is located. The name was changed for reasons of international relations: Kazakstan had renamed one of it's stations in the old capital of Almaty, to Moskva, to honour relations between the two countries. Russia decided to do the same.

I liked the decoration of the station, just because it was different from other stations. The sculptures spaced along the station made me think of giant ice scrapers, like those used to scrape off the windscreen of a car.

From there, we made our way back into the city center and found a new (to us,) restaurant to try, a place with Korean BBQ. Yum.

Another successful day with friends, yahoo!!