russia: moscow and borodino

In a prior post I'm pretty sure I've mentioned some of the 'Instagram' museums we visited. We had one more visit left on our ticket, so we chose to go on Friday night. One of the options was for throwing plates, which sounded like a great stress reliever.

The ticket to this museum allows you to throw three plates at a wall and watch them break. There is a marker available, if you want to label your plates with a particular stress, but we skipped that. Throwing plates just feels good!

If it had been allowed, we each could've thrown stacks and stacks of plates. It was fun and just felt good.

Afterward we had dinner at the diner down the road.

The next morning all three of us had to be up pretty early to catch an elektrichka at 0715. Catching a train that early means getting there around 0650 to buy tickets and find the train. Doing that means leaving my flat around 0630, which means waking up at 0600, on a Saturday. Sigh. Fortunately I almost always think a day trip is worth waking up early.

The train was a bit over 2 hours, arriving at 0930. The train station in Borodino was quite small, with a low ceiling. 

The outside of the station looked far better than the inside, as it memorialized what happened in Borodino in 1812.

The battle of Borodino was fought on 7 September 1812, between Russia and France during the Napoleonic Wars. Wikipedia tells me 250,000 troops were involved, with 70,000 casualties. It was the deadliest day of the Napoleonic Wars, indicating just how bad it was.

The French won this particular battle, but it didn't mean much in the end, as they were unable to hold Moscow for very long.

Visiting this area is best done with your own car/transport, but we didn't have that option. Instead we walked. A LOT. We walked and walked and walked.

Visiting this area means looking at a lot of war memorials. Nearly all of them are very specific, dedicated to specific companies and battalions and such. The specific groups didn't mean much to me, but honouring those who fought did.

Some of the memorials are quite close to the road, others sit back further into the fields. Some have paths leading directly to them, others involve walking through the grass.

The very first memorial was just outside the front of the train station. It wasn't very interesting aesthetically, so none of us took a photo of that one. Some of the memorials were more interesting aesthetically, others not so much.

The biggest memorial was to Prince Peter Ivanovich Bagration. He was of Georgian origin, and died on the battlefield of Borodino, as a general.

We also visited a convent in the area, called Spaso Borodinsky monastery/convent. It was founded in 1839, by the Maria Tuchkova, the widow of one of the men who had died during the battle of Borodino. 

She raised funds, getting some financial help from the widow of Emperor Paul.

Work on the first church began in 1818, after she bought the land. The Saviour Miraculous Image church was finished in 1820. Other life circumstances for Mrs. Tuchkova brought her to living in a cottage on the field, and founding a religious community, being joined by other war widows.

In 1838 she became a nun, in 1839 she founded the convent, later becoming Mother Superior. The state closed the convent during Soviet times, but it was returned to the church in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

There are several churches in the complex, though I couldn't tell you the names of any of them. We only went inside one of them, it was nice. They were careful to make sure we covered our heads and added wraparound skirts over our pants.

A couple of the buildings on the property are now museums, but we didn't visit them. It was enough to step inside the church and honour the reasons it was built for a few minutes.

Not long after leaving the convent we realized we needed to walk pretty fast in order to get back to the train station in time to catch the train we wanted. There is nothing like speedwalking that far, whoops! Thankfully we did catch the train, each of us went to her own flat when we got back to Moscow.

Sunday morning all three of us met up again, a bit later this time :)

Our original plan was to visit the state history museum, on Red Square. When we got there we found really long queues, so we figured it must be free museum weekend again. 

We would've loved to see the museum for free, but had zero desire to share the space with that many people. Sigh. This was the 3^rd or 4^th time we'd tried to see the museum, foiled again!

Instead we walked through GUM, the state department store on another side of Red Square. We opted to do something else very traditional, that is to get ice cream in this mall. Not amazing, not awful.

From there we walked all the way to another mall, this one much more modern. It was a two hour walk, but the weather was quite nice, so we didn't mind.

Afimall is in the area known as Moscow City, the main business district of Moscow. When we got there we met up with our friend Rayne, who wanted to visit a coffee festival.

I'm not sure why we decided to go to the fest, since none of us (except Rayne,) drink coffee, but it was fun to meet up with her. I love the smell and atmosphere of coffee, just not the taste. Somehow there were competitions at the festival, I'm not sure what there is to compete for in coffee, but it happens.

Since we didn't consume anything at the coffee festival we walked to another metro station, then went to our third mall of the day. The top floor of this mall had a food court, one of the restaurants had Asian food. Yum.

And that is the story of our weekend :)