Boy were we ready to get off that Siberian train! We pull into Moscow on a Friday evening rush hour - great timing on our part again. At least it's not a national holiday (that we know of). But wow! Moscow is gorgeous at night! What a change from the rustic rural Russian scenery we've been used to this past week.
First thing after a week on the train - take a crazy long hot shower! Then right after that, do a bunch of laundry. We're definitely getting good at doing laundry in the hotel sinks using their cheap shampoo. The clothes get a rinse, a squeeze and a blast with the hair dryer and they're ready for another leg of the trip. I'm not sure stuff is really getting clean, but at least it smells like shampoo now. Our new saying is that if it smells clean then it is clean (enough). We get an added luxury this stop - this hotel has a heated towel rack which doubles as a very effective drying rack. Nice!
I had a hard time finding the perfect Goldilocks hotel in Moscow near the Red Square - especially in our price range. We mainly picked our hotel because of the supposedly fabulous buffet breakfast. It did not disappoint! After eating junk food for a week on the Siberian train my stomach was so excited to have some real food to work with.
We're not quite as giddy over Russian cuisine as we were over Chinese stuff so these posts probably won't be quite so food focused. But this little breakfast Syrniki (cottage cheese dumpling) was very tasty. It's like the love child between a pancake and a soft scone and it's served with jam and a type of Russian sour cream.
The Russians have some great dairy products - quite a change from China where there was very little. You gotta try new stuff when you travel so when I saw this "fermented milk" on the buffet, I poured myself a glass. It's a delicious (says me, Brian didn't agree) drink somewhere between buttermilk and yogurt (called kefir?). Brian rolled his eyes every morning I came back to the table with yet another glass of my tasty probiotics. Anyone know where I can get it in the US?
Brrrrr.... it's cold here - low 30's with clouds, sleet and a bracing wind. We did expect Moscow to be our coldest stop on the journey but we didn't have room to pack enough cold weather gear to handle *this* much winterness. We scamper from metro stations to historical sites trying to avoid frostbite on our faces. There is little to no English anywhere so we struggle a bit deciphering the Russian letters and symbols on the maps and street signs.
We navigate the metro to the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. Very cool! Too bad the US has all but given up on our space program. The Russians are justifiably proud of theirs - both the past accomplishments and their plans for the future. It was very interesting to see the space race from the competitor's side.
Get ready for blog posts full of cool building pictures. The old architecture in these classic cities sure has American strip mall construction beat on aesthetics. I don't imagine that a hundred years from now tourists will be tromping through Target parking lots taking pictures of our old buildings.
Here's what a shopping mall looks like in Moscow. Not too shabby and a hugh departure from our previous image of what Russia is supposed to look like. It's kind of unusual that with all these high-end stores there's a 50 cent charge to use the public toliets. Gotta find ways to part us tourists from our rubles.
Moscow feels very stately and oozes with money - at least the area we stayed in (cause we're so swanky like that). The people are polite and friendly. And hooray... cars yield to the pedestrians again and we've left those crazy scooters back in China. Moscow has a very European vibe with everything you'd expect in a modern city: trendy restaurants, expensive cars and a very luxurious fashion scene. Check out the ladies rocking the furs and boots. The cold weather makes it tempting to buy a little furry hat myself but I'm saved from a big credit card bill again by the smallness of my backpack. At least the fashion lessons were free. I'm looking forward to more tips as we continue through the other European capitals.
This puts us about half-way through the trip - 37 days done and 40 days to go. We've traveled through what we thought would be the most unsettling parts of the journey - China and Russia - without incident. The friendliness of the local people has made our initial nervousness entirely unfounded. It's a travel cliche but even if our politics are different, people around the world are very similar. They hope for success for their children, work to earn enough money to secure life's necessities, enjoy a laugh with their friends over good food and cold beer, and root, root, root for their home team. Oh, and evidently everyone eats Lays potato chips and Snickers.
The next leg of our journey will be three weeks of working our way through eastern Europe to eventually catch our trans-Atlantic cruise out of Rome. First city up is Warsaw, Poland.
"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries." - Aldous Huxley
A Few More Food Pics
We stopped by a few traditional Russian restaurants that were on our pre-scouting list but they were all of the fancy, sit-down, order-6-courses type of place. We were feeling casual so we ducked into a pub-like spot. Real tasty (Belgium!) beer again. Hooray! Since we were in Russia, we paired our beers with a huge plate of meat, fried potatoes and cabbage. That cabbage-cream-bacon dish was dang tasty but a little research leads us to believe it's more of an Irish thing and not so typical Russian.
Here's just one of the many dessert cases at the fancy-pants grocery store in the fancy-pants mall. Kind of reminded us of the cruise... except everything looked delicious... and they weren't free for the taking.
Here's just one of many the caviar cases at the fancy-pants grocery store. The store was fully stocked with a huge variety of caviar and champagne. Unfortunately they weren't passing out free samples on the day we visited (or ever). Our stack of Rubles wasn't quite big enough to venture into caviar tastings.
We were trying to spend the remainder of our Rubles before we exited Russia so I picked up this little danish at the train station - filled with a kind of vanilla'ish custard. Meh.
We're really digging the Russian borscht! (but come on Brian, clean that rim before you shoot the picture) This cold weather definitely calls for soup and borsht fits the bill perfectly for us. It's a regional speciality, healthy, delicious and available everywhere. I'm even starting to form strong opinions about different preparations (easy on the dill, matchstick those veggies so they fit on a spoon and yogurt on the side please). If you visit us in Colorado this winter on a ski trip, you should probably expect to be served some borscht. So you've got that to look forward to...
