Moscow - a new city to conquer

A recap of the last two days that we have spent in Moscow.

First of all, Moscow is a big city.  More than 11m people live here.  They have a great metro system, used by 7m people a day.

Well, we were able to conquer the Metro.  Basically, it is very simple.  Buy a ticket (or better, one that lasts for 5 trips) and then pick your line (ie, line 2 or line 5) and then pick a direction.  This last step can be a little difficult, as the places the metro stops are written in Cyrillic, which is all Russian to us...

The metros are often very deep underground.

There are also some metro stations that have been decorated like museums, often at the expense of artworks and marble stolen from churches. The 1930's.

The streets and the maps, well, not so easy. Both maps we used have been created with an unusual scale and not all streets and their names are included.  Even if the street is on the map, the name in the English alphabet does NOT, repeat, NOT resemble the name in Russian.  BIG problem.  At one stage we were trying to cross the city, just four blocks or so, but we ended up going in the wrong direction and finished up about 10 blocks from where we wanted to be.  We only know where we ended up by coming across a Metro station that we could look up on the map.  

Red Square is big, surrounded by St Basil's, the Kremlin, the GUM shopping centre, Stalin's mausoleum, other churches and various museums.  

The GUM shopping centre is full of expensive brand name shops and some coffee shops and restaurants.  Very upmarket.  We managed to find an affordable cafe on the 3rd floor that served simple, delicious food.

St Basil's' was a little disappointing, as instead of a very large interior, the inside was very poky and broken into nine smaller chapels, each beneath one of the domes.

The roads can be very big, especially the ring road.  I counted at least 6 lanes in each direction, some areas having 8 lanes.  This makes it impossible to cross and it is so busy that the authorities have made many underground passageways to improve traffic flow.

We found some affordable restaurants to eat in (ie, not the $50 breakfasts in our hotel) and every now and then treat ourselves to a coffee and cake in the afternoon.  Once, at the Vogue Cafe, one of the cakes costs almost as much as our entire lunch !

All in all, we are filling our days up, leaving our room at around 11 am and often not returning until 10pm after having dinner at the restaurant across the road from the hotel.

This final selfie was taken in front of the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre.