Full day in Moscow
We woke up around 9 and not wanting to spend $20 on the hotel breakfast buffet we went for the next best thing and committed the cardinal tourist sin by going to McDonalds for breakfast. Though to be fair we were hungry and one of the people in our group was pretty picky about food. The breakfast was actually far better than the McDonalds breakfasts I’ve had back in the US and tasted like real food! A double egg mcmuffin and a coffee was $3.
After breakfast we hit the Metro to go out to Tsaritsyno Park. A single ride on the Metro is 50 RUB, or only 75 cents. It was a beautiful day, if not a little warm for walking around, as the temperatures were nearly 80 degrees F.
A view of one of the main drags in Moscow
A Moscow metro station, beautifully designed and free of the stench of homeless people & urine (unlike many US cities)
After finishing up here, headed back into town and got lunch only a couple blocks from where we had dinner the night before. Lunch was at Hacha, a Georgian restaurant. Basically the whole table had kebabs of different varieties, Georgian wine, and other various appetizers.
Post lunch we went out the museum and Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Cool to check out some of the art work and more walking around the city from the Metro to the museum. As a still/perpetually single guy the ladies of Moscow deserve their own thread and photo album. I’ll need to come back here to find Mrs. Krazykanuck.
I had fun checking out the Tinder scene while we were here… It was at this point that the girl that misplaced her passport now misplaced her iPhone. She figured it was at a store we stopped at after lunch, so we found a phone and our sole Russian linguist called the store and they had it behind the desk. So we had to make a note to stop there when we went back to the hotel to grab bags.
Artwork.
Some picturesque monument on the way to the cathedral
The cathedral
We took a cab back to Red Square with the intention of checking out St. Basil’s Cathedral, but we missed the final entrance by 15 minutes. Since we had to be at the train station by 10 pm for the overnight trip to St. Petersburg, we grabbed dinner in the high end mall that is adjacent to Red Square. We went to the cafeteria on the top level and devoured too much food since we were all pretty hungry from walking all afternoon.
Dinner, which was all of $10, including the beer
The ladies took a cab back to the store mentioned above to retrieve the lost iPhone, while I and the other 2 guys decided to walk and meet them there. It was a beautiful night and I wanted night shots of St. Basil’s, Kremlin, etc. We actually wound up getting to the store faster than the women in their cab!
Back at the Courtyard we got our suitcases and had the hotel call 2 cabs for us to get to the train station. It was a pretty quick drive this late at night and a reasonable fare.
Not sure why, but I was expecting a train station like Budapest Keleti and got something like Vienna Westbahnhof. It was fully enclosed, nice, and shiny. But not many unoccupied seats or many outlets to charge phones. We had 60 mins before our train left so we went to the restaurant on the 2nd floor and had a drink where draft beers were a very reasonable 180 RUB. The 1st floor has all sorts of convenience and souvenir stores.
After a quick beer/coffee - depending on the person, we boarded the train. The sleeper setup is 4 bunks to a car, so we put 4 people in 1 car, and one of the other guys and I were in the next compartment over sharing with 2 random girls, eerily reminiscent of my trip last year from Budapest to Prague. The fare for the overnight train is pretty cheap at 1700 RUB, or $28 Sorry no pics here as the 2 random girls were already in the cabin when we arrived. We set out for the bar car shortly after dropping our bags in the cabin, which of course was at the complete opposite end of the train since we were in car #1 which is at the back end of the train.
The bar car had a decent beer selection, with some beers as low as 180 RUB ($3) for a 16 oz can. They even had sparkling wine available by the bottle! The also had a TV with what I assume was Russian MTV playing. There was a dude with a cat head dancing. I swear I wasn’t drunk. It’s true! After a couple rounds, we all hiked what felt like a kilometer back to car #1 to go to sleep. I slept fairly well for being on a train. What’s nice is they have outlets next to each bunk to charge your gadgets and free wifi which was actually fast enough to be useful on my Android.
Next up: St. Petersburg!