Lynda turns into an entirely different person when we travel. She is absolutely giddy with excitement. Even a 7 hour flight from Detroit to Paris followed by a 3 hour flight to Moscow does nothing to diminish her fervour. Tim, on the other hand, barely tolerates flying. It’s not that he is afraid of flying. It’s that everything involved with getting from point A to point B is excruciatingly annoying. Once he arrives at our destination, Tim joins in with Lynda’s excitement. We left Detroit at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, stepping aboard the Viking Ingvar at 3:45 p.m. in Moscow on Wednesday. The rest of the day was spent unpacking, reconnoitering the boat and meeting up with our good friends, Lyn and Don Johnson. We have traveled with them before and it has always been an enjoyable experience.
Thursday was an arduous day of touring. Yes, we know. It’s a tough life we live. On Thursday the cruise offered two different tours of Moscow: the Panoramic tour and the Up Close tour. The difference was the Panoramic tour was mostly by bus while the Up Close tour was a walking tour. We don’t do bus tours well. Don’t like “on your right is the Kremlin, and then on your left is St. Basil’s Church”. Naturally we opted for the walking tour. The tour started with a 15 minute walk to a Metro stop, the Metro being the Moscow subway.
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| Moscow Subway Station |
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| Revolution Square Below Ground |
Once we were at street level, we walked through a second square called Revolution Square. Our guide admitted to having no acceptable explanation to having two squares with the same name. Two highlights of the street level Revolution Square was seeing the Metropole Hotel, that Lynda claims is very famous, and the Bolshoi Theatre, home to the world famous Bolshoi Ballet Company.
Having walked through Revolution Square, a block later we stood before the imposing entrance to Red Square. After a few instructions from our guide we were given an hour and a half of free time to explore the square. There were three major attractions on Red Square; the Kremlin, St. Basil’s Church, and the GUM Department store. We were told that there was an ATM machine at GUM’s so that was our first stop. We were under the assumption that GUM was a department store similar to Harrod’s in London or the old Hudson’s in Detroit. To our surprise it was just another indoor mall albeit with only exclusive high end shops, names which you would readily recognize. Later, when talking to our guide about this, she told us that during the era of the Soviet Union it was, in fact, a department store, but when the Soviet Union broke up GUM became the mall that we visited. Needless to say we were disappointed. Harrod’s is always on our itinerary when we are in London and we were looking forward to a similar experience in Moscow.
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| GUM Dept Store |
The next stop was St. Basil’s Church. Dear Readers, we are sure you have all at one time or another seen a picture of St. Basil’s without knowing that’s what you were seeing. Like many large Russian Orthodox churches, it has several of the iconic “onion domes”. St. Basil’s stands out because these onion domes are very colorful. Tim, in particular, was looking forward to seeing this church and he was not disappointed. At least not on the outside. On the inside the four of us wandered up and down stairs and through a maze of halls looking for the main worship area that we assumed would be as striking as the outside of this edifice. We never found it. It turns out the inside is a bunch of rooms, each called a church, each church having a different name. The décor throughout the building was very ornate but not necessarily in a breathtaking way.
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| St. Basil's Church |
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| The Kremlin |
Having re-assembled our group our guide took us through the Alexander Gardens, named after Czar Alexander. While the few flowers still in bloom were not at their best we could tell that in the summer the garden would be stunning. This garden also was home to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Much like our Tomb in Arlington Cemetery, the Russian version had guards who rotated every hour. There was no mention of a changing of the guard ceremony like we have.
Our last stop of the walking portion of the days tour was the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Unlike St. Basil’s, Christ the Savior did have a central worship sanctuary. Evidently in Russia it is traditional for the worshipers to stand throughout the entire service as there were no pews. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior is among the largest Cathedrals in Europe, able to hold 10,000 people at one time. The inside of the Cathedral was stunning both for its size and beauty. While Lynda found a bench to sit on to rest her weary legs, Tim wandered about looking at the various icons hanging on the walls. These icons were nothing more then paintings of different Saints. Because many of visitors were stopping in front of these pictures to pray and then kiss the glass protecting the picture, we assumed this raised the pictures to the level of icons. As Tim approached one of these icons our guide happened to be standing there and pointed to this particular icon as being significant. He pointed to the center of the icon telling Tim this was a picture of the last three Romanofs, the family that had been in power before the communist take over. Surrounding this central part of the painting were smaller paintings depicting the Romanofs being murdered and their bodies being removed. In Tim’s mind this seemed a strange painting to be hanging in a magnificent Cathedral. On our way to a bus that would take us to the next stop of our tour we walked across a pedestrian bridge that had a wonderful view of the back of the Kremlin bathed in lights as dusk was falling.
The walking part of the tour as we have described sounds a bit idyllic and would have been if we had not spent the whole time walking in the rain with temperatures in the low 40’s. Despite the miserable weather it was an exhilarating day.
With great relief we boarded a bus that took us on a 30 minute trip through Moscow’s city center to a small concert hall where we attended a wonderful concert of classical and traditional Russian folk music. The orchestra consisted of 15 musicians playing traditional folk instruments; dora’s, a smaller version and precursor of the balalaika, three different sizes of balalaika, a harp like instrument that is beyond our ability to describe in words, an accordion like instrument, a flute, and a percussionist playing a variety of traditional and non traditional percussion instruments. The dora’s and balalaika are guitar like instruments. The playing was quite remarkable and the concert was very entertaining. It was a wonderful way to end an exciting beginning to our cruise.
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