Moscow - Day 2

Novodevichy Cemetery


Ross and I with the Kremlin, St. Basil's and the GUM in the background

The GUM

Stalin - Park Iskusstv


After a relaxing night in our comfy hotel beds, and a big breakfast thanks to the free buffet included in our stay, we were fueled up and ready for day two in the Russian Capital. Because Lenin's Mausoleum had been closed I really wanted to go see one of Moscow's graveyards where numerous famous Russian politicians, writers, musicians, etc. are buried. So Ross, Laura and Jessi came along with me to the Novodevichy Cemetery on a scavenger hunt for the graves of some famous Russians. Once there, we checked out a board which listed over a hundred of the most well known names and then indicated on a rough map of the cemetery where each one's grave was located. We chose to find: Nikita Khrushchev - he is my favorite Soviet leader after Lenin, Eisenstein - the famous Russian film director who created montogue, Vladimir Mayakovsky - a famous Russian poet/playwrite considered the father of Russian Futurism, Dmitri Shostakovich - a composer who wrote numerous pieces including a famous opera called "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenk District" and his famous 7th Symphony called "Leningrad" which he wrote during the seige of Leningrad, Mikhail Bulgakov - my favorite Russian writer who wrote "The Master and Margarita," Anton Chekhov - a famous author of shortstories and plays, Nikolai Gogol - aslo a writer, the father of "Russian realism," and Boris Yeltsin - the first President of the Russian Federation who passed away in April 2007. Numerous other important or well known people are also buried there, including Lenin's wife and one of Stalin's wives as well.
Following the cemetery, we decied to visit Park Iskusstv's Statue Park (or Park of the Fallen Heroes) which began as a collection of Soviet statues which had been torn down post-1991. A few years ago this park was even one of the location visited on the show The Amazing Race (contestants had to run around the park to count how many statues there were of Lenin and of Stalin). We perused the park for a while, snapping photos of the statues we recognized, but the warm weather combined with the snow and ice made for a wet and sloppy walk so after a while we decided to continue on to the next sight on our list.
From the statue park we made our way on foot back toward the Kremlin and Red Square, we wandered along the Moscow River, and across an island until we came out across from the Kremlin and Red Sqare. On the bridge (Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Most) which crossed the river, we took some great photos of us with the Kremlin, St. Basil's and Red Square behind us, and then made our way to the GUM to grab some lunch before finally going to the State History Museum. (We had popped into the GUM the day before and Jessi and I had both fallen in love with the store Monsoon, so on this day we went back in and both made purchases! Now I can say I bought something in the GUM)
The State History Musuem's collections date back to the Stone Age period in Russia and end with the last few tsars of the Romanov family. Laura in particular was interested to see their exhbits on the Romanov family but I think was disappointed in their lack of information on Nicholas II and his family. It seemed to me, like the musuem just stopped with Nicholas's father Alexander III and forgot to include anything on the last Russian Tsar. We could have spent hours and hours in the museum, had we been interested more in some of the things we were seeing, but instead we simply skimmed through the rooms, stopping to look at the things that interested us. By this point we were all exhausted and had sore feet yet again so we made our way back to the hotel.
I think the cemetery was by far the most interesting site we saw that day, it was like a puzzle wandering through the various rows of headstones in search of the right ones. And walking from the Statue Park to the Kremlin, instead of taking the metro turned out awesome too because we came across such a great view of the Kremlin and Red Square which we would have missed otherwise.

- Leah

Still to come - Day 3 in Moscow and then . . . . our trip to Finland!