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The Kremlin. Red Square. Architecture. Museums. History. Putin. Moscow is famous for many things, and we were very excited to be visiting it. We had to get there first, though. If you remember how we got to Terskol, it was pretty much the same thing in reverse. A 3-hour drive through mountain roads, followed by a ~4 hour plane ride to Moscow. I felt that the trip went much more smoothly this time around. For one, I sat in front on the drive so no motion sickness! We were driving through the mountains during the day this time, so we got to take in the spectacular scenery making for a much more interesting journey. And the flight itself wasn’t bad. The A/C worked, and there were far fewer crying kids!
Getting into Moscow, we had a 1.5 hour van ride to our hotel thanks to traffic. I think we progressed about 3 blocks in the last 20 minutes. So yes, I’d say Moscow has horrible traffic. It’s funny how humans manage to bunch up so easily. This is the largest country in the world by a factor of two(compared to Canada, the next largest), with a population 1/2 that of the US, and yet – horrible traffic.
Mike didn’t give us much time to settle in – 10 minutes in fact, before we had to go down for lunch. Aaron somehow managed to fit a shower in there(unpack, shower, change), a superhuman feat I’m still trying to comprehend. I was hoping for pizza, but settled for the available pasta, which was in fact quite good. I’m thankful for the Russian woman in Terskol who cooked for us, but there’s nothing like good restaurant food! We also had a surprise waiting for us downstairs – Milana, our tour guide from St Petersburg was here to join us as a fellow tourist in Moscow.
We still had a long day of touring ahead of us. Unfortunately most of us were tired after the ride + flight + ride, so we weren’t a very enthusiastic audience. I think our tour guide got a little frustrated by that, as she didn’t join us for dinner afterward. We visited Red Square(but didn’t go inside the Kremlin, that’s tomorrow), Moscow State University, and the Novodevichy Convent(which inspired Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake). I’ll let the photos walk you through the tour – be sure to check out the captions below each photo in the album! Getting back, we had dinner and hung out in the bar before crashing, extremely tired.
Planetary Muffin Expeditions 