Hello, Moscow!

I turned up at my new hotel on Tuesday morning with most of my possessions (thanks to not being awake, I sadly managed to leave a few toiletries lighter than I had intended, but nothing irreplaceable!).

The hotel is 28 storeys high and, well, bloody huge. It's one of 4 built out by Izmailovsky Park for the 1980 Moscow Olympics: outside, a large concrete block; inside, a rather strange shade of aquamarine with excessive amounts of marble. After registering my passport (Russia requires that you register your visa within 3 working days of arrival into the country - otherwise, you may have any number of issues with leaving!) - not made more comfortable by the fact that the hotel staff mislaid my documentation for a while - I made my way back into town to go around the city centre.

Red Square is amazing - it's a staggeringly large space, entirely pedestrianised with only marching routes for parades marked out on the ground. It's bordered by the State History Museum on one side, the Kremlin on a second, GUM (originally the state department store) on the third, and St Basil's Cathedral with the Moscow River behind it on the fourth. Yesterday was spent looking around the city centre and taking a tour of the Metro (absolutely amazing - fantastic architecture in a number of stations!). I met up with the other members of my travel party last night, and we had dinner (well, we tried to - it didn't go terribly well!) and a few drinks.

This morning, breakfast (the hotel provides a breakfast buffet with offerings such as cucumber, pickled radish, omelette cubes (!) and porridge - but, most importantly, lots of coffee) was followed by a walking tour around Moscow. Later, I went to the sculpture park (after the Soviet era, many sculptures were pulled down - some of which are now preserved for posterity/tourist gawking just outside the city), Gorky Park, and then spent some very rewarding hours in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. With an absolutely staggering collection, the Pushkin's only real drawbacks are that it has too large a collection and, with such a large and eclectic collection, its curatorial selections are sometimes a little stilted or unusual.

I'm about to hop in a much needed shower and rest my tired feet, then it's off to try and find a nice restaurant to celebrate my last night in Moscow!

Tomorrow night at 21:25, I leave Yaroslavsky on train # 2 (the Rossiya, bound for Vladivostok), where I'll be for four days - next departure, Irkutsk!

 До свидания!