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MOSCOW 2006 |
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One thing I love about
traveling is the contrast in cultures and environments your senses are suddenly
assaulted with. After ten days in Kyrgyzstan, I took an early morning flight
from Bishkek to Moscow for the second part of my adventure into the Russian
domain. Crowded, charismatic and chaotic Moscow seemed a far cry from the
jailoos of Song-Kul where I had awoke the morning before arriving in Moscow.
‘Confusing’ is perhaps the best word to describe the independent
travelers first tastes of Moscow. For the capital and largest city of the
world’s biggest country, Moscow is one of the least easy places for
independent travelers to arrive in.
In order to obtain a Russian visa
(as of 2006), one had to show a ‘letter of invitation’ from a Russian
travel agency as well as a proof of pre-booked accommodation for your entire
stay in Russia. Both of these however were very easily obtained via
online-agencies for a small fee without needing to book neither a hotel nor
tour with that agency itself. The problem is Moscow is not an easy place to
‘just go to’ without any pre-booked accommodation as there is
virtually no English speaking tourist office in the city anywhere. There’s
also a dearth of English speaking staff at the airport so trying to find out
how to get to the metro station and surpass the pesky taxi drivers was a
challenge in itself. Budget hotels are not easy to find either and without
being able to read the Cyrillic alphabet doesn’t help. Add to this the
fact that my Lonely Planet Guide was a good decade out of date (the city has
gone through many changes since them) and I found myself wondering around the
city aimlessly in the rain for several hours looking for
‘gastinistas’ that were mentioned in my guidebook but nowhere to be
found. Thankfully, a friendly, English speaking woman at the Leningrad train
station was able to point me in the right direction to an affordable, centrally
located hotel just a couple of minutes walk from the Kremlin called Hotel
Tsentralnaya.
Once you get over the initial culture-shock, Moscow turns
out to be a fascinating city to explore. Red Square, which is actually more
like a rectangle is surrounded by the Kremlin and GUM Department Store on
opposite longer sides and St. Basil’s Cathedral and the State Historical
Museum facing each other on the shorter ends. Red Square is a place that you
come back to time after time when visiting Moscow and each visit seems to be a
different experience, it’s where locals and visitors alike congregate, and
photos look different of the place depending on the time of day as well as the
weather. The fairytale structures of the Kremlin and St. Basils Cathedral are
simply stunning. It’s amazing to think that this candyland-like place was
where some of the worst atrocities against humanity were plotted by the likes
of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible throughout the centuries. Despite the crowds
and lines, visits to St. Basils, the State Historical Museum and the Kremlin
are absolute musts. Lenin's tomb is also located at Red Square; however, I
couldn’t find George Harrison’s anywhere. |
Above: in front of St. Basil's
Cathadral in Red Square |
| Moscow and St. Petersburg are contrasting
cities is many ways. St. Petersburg is all glitzy and glittery while Moscow is
both grim and glamorous at the same time. St. Petersburg is a city that thrives
on catering to tourists with English widely spoken and tourists and times
outnumbering locals in many places. Moscow meanwhile takes a little more time
to get comfortable in but this was one of the traits that made me actually
prefer Moscow to St. Petersburg in some ways. Rather than act as an open-air
museum for tourists, Moscow is definitely more authentically Russian. Moscow
was beautiful and bittersweet at the same time with plenty to see and do. I was
sure to check out a local cultural show as well as attend a football match at
Locomotive Moscow. The Moscow Metro which makes getting around the city easy
and affordable is an adventure in itself. Many stations are majestically
decorated and when taking the escalator down one, it can sometimes feel as if
you’re going down all the way to the center of the earth! At the height of
the cold war, under Stalin’s guidance many of Moscow’s metro stations
were double-designed as bomb-shelters in case of a nuclear attack from the
United States. In fact, Moscow’s Park Pobedy Station is located some 84
meters below the surface and is serviced by the longest escalators in
Europe! |
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