russia: moscow wanderings

We started the weekend with a day trip, then on Sunday decided to stick around the city and knock a few things off the list. We'd been traveling most weekends during the year, but there is always something going on in Moscow.

First up was an ice cream festival in Sokolniki Park. I'd seen it mentioned on a couple Moscow related Instagram accounts I follow, who am I to ignore ice cream?

It was easy to meet up with the girls at the metro stop right outside the park, then figure out what was happening. Our expectations were not met, to say the least. I was hoping for lots of places to buy scoops of ice cream, but that's not what we found. Instead it was nearly all vendors with freezers selling ice cream bars.

There were two or three vendors with scoops available, all of them quite expensive. Sigh. We each had an ice cream bar, as well as a couple scoops, but it wasn't as fantastic an experience as we wanted. Darnit.

After ice cream we went out to Izmailovo, as Angela had a few more souvenirs to pick up before leaving the country. Claire and I didn't need anything, but it is a photogenic place to go, so we went. It was a long-ish metro trip between the two places, fortunately we like the metro :)

During that week I used my Wednesday afternoon to go out to a university campus. Russian State Social University was mentioned on one of the Moscow Instagram accounts, I'd never heard of it before. (I reckon the city of Moscow must have a ridiculous number of universities I've never heard about.)

This university was mentioned because of something they had on their campus: large scale models of the so-called Seven Sisters buildings around the city.

I had to walk through part of a botanical park to get to the university campus, but it wasn't hard. All the building models were right in front of the main building of the university, I didn't have to go exploring.

The models were super cool. Bigger than I'd expected, and just nifty.

I love seeing random stuff around Moscow.