Adyin biliet pasalsta!

I publish this text from Beijing on 1.9.2009 00.30 A.M. (GMT +8) and it does not contain pictures, because they are still unprocessed etc. I suppose I could add them later on if possible, or on another text. Anyway, here is something I wrote along the way in Moscow of the stay there.

Hello and welcome to that's amaezin with me, Junnu!

Even though our kind and matushka-like hostel-keeper lady told us that Gorky Park is a boring place, from the beginning of the journey it was merely a question of when - rather than if - to visit The Place That They Sung In The Song By Scorpions (Wind Of Change). The park was pretty empty as it was a somewhat rainy day. Otherwise I'd imagine people - both domestic and tourists - would come there and enjoy themselves in the form of rollercoasters and whatnots of a basic theme park. And of course there was lots of green areas and ponds plus the great river Moskva beside the park.

The above bit was from 24.8, the day on which we walked at least 15 kilometers, going on about to see e.g. the tallest orthodox cathedral in the world, Arbat and New Arbat streets (ulitsa) which were packed with tourist shops and trendy boutiques, respecfully. The most renowned and busiest street in Moscow, Tverskaya street was filled with traffic, people and stores, but not much else. We decided to wander around a bit after strolling past Pushkin square in the middle of Tverskaya and ended up catching a monster of a rainfall and hanging out in a local store until we got bored to it and decided to get a bit wet. A kartoshka booth with its microwave-baked potatoes with cheese and ham toppings lured us from the relentless rain to the safety of the inside. After the rain receded we walked all the way to the red square and St. Basil's cathedral. Great. Kremlin would wait for us tomorrow.

On the morning of 23.8 (going logically in reverse temporal order) we arrived to Moscow with our Tolstoi train to Leningradski station. Our cabin was an upper-lower four-bed thingy with relatively soft beds. Our wagon-booth fellow travellers were Ilya and Vadim, nice chaps to say at least. Ilya was a 30ish man on a vacation in Finland and was a professional violin player. Vadim did not speak English apart from few words, but as an old blabber-mouth he was talking to us everything in Russian (and talked uninterrupted to Ilya for the whole nine yards from Hki to Mcw). Talking to Vadim was a challenge, but luckily Ilya came to the rescue and translated the most crucial parts. The most "connecting people" moment was when I played Tapio Rautavaara's old melancholic and Russian national anthem songs to these guys. Vadim, an old-school gentleman as he was, knew most of them. We also got pretty good tips from Ilya where to eat and what to avoid.

The metro system in Moscow is incredible, it works like a train's toilet (and is at least as noisy though..) and takes you anywhere your heart desires. It was a bit hard in the beginning as we had no idea of the cyrillic alphabets. But little by little by comparing some maps I brought with me we learnt to read Russian actually quite well. Now I can say I can read Russian!

Our hostel was well-hidden so it was a bit of backpacking'n'walking until we by coincidence found it with the help of some guy living near the place. It was situated in a multi-storey building in the 3rd floor and the staircase looked like a basic slum-style with its detached floor slabs and cigarette butts everywhere. The only sign for this place was a printed paper saying "Capital Hostel" beside the entrance in the 3rd floor. The place was to my surprise very good. There was Internet (although the pc-terminal was all worm-infected), big flat-tv in the living room, 24 h service desk, clean toilet, a bathroom with washing machine and a shower with hot water. The kitchen was neat although there was no breakfast excluding tea and coffee, which were free. There were like 6 other guests there, and pretty much all were Russian and kept to themselves, so not much talking there. Apart from a guy called Ruslan, whose gf Nadja didn't say a word. Ruslan told us about about Russian mentality and how one would learn to talk Esperanto in two weeks, and that we would have to try to learn it in Beijing :).

After settling down to the hostel (23.8) and taking a quick nap after the relatively-well slept night onboard the Tolstoi, we decided to head off to a metro station VDNKh. There was this Kosmonaut-museum we had read about. There were like all sorts of Russian space rockets, all the space heros - such as Juri Gagarin - in various profile depictions and artistic paintings, and there was even a NASA style full-sized command center for following (probably) ISS (international space station) trajectory.
In the evening of the first day we went to eat to a restaurant called "Shesh-Besh", which offered the best meal in Moscow: a buffet with all the Russian specialties, pickles, marinated mushrooms, herbs, all kinds of lovely salads and meats of all sorts. Just wonderful! Having eaten we headed off for some high-culture in the form of Tretyakov art gallery, which was like MASSIVE and we actually ran out of time, but probably did see at least the half of it in 2 hours (and we really gave the paintings maybe a glance, no more). Lots of nice-looking and atmospheric impressionist and realism paintings they were, at least that's what we thought.

The last day in Moscow was a more relaxed day, and sleeping until like 10.30 a.m. Before heading off for Kremlin we grabbed some Shasliki from Shesh-Besh. Meat was, again, excellent. The Kremlin ticket arrangements were a tad confusing but we managed to get to the armoury along with its king wardrobes, chairs, scepters and guns, armours and wagons (plus an incredible amount of golden and silver splurge objects like platters and whatnots). The actual Kremlin area is quite huge but the area in which the tourists are allowed is not that big. The Russian senate and the old presidential residence are located inside the Kremlin but to those we weren't allowed to go into. All we were allowed was a number of cathedrals with murals everywhere but no altar. The same religious images were present in every place so it was pretty monotonous. Had we owned some kind of an introduction to these cathedrals, it would maybe have had been more interesting (although I like to think it wouldn't had made any difference). After visiting the Kremlin we walked around in one of the city's big shopping malls, the GUM. It was a three storey, massive-splurge-sized fashion center along with its Stockmann-like delicacy stores, from which I bought Moskovskaya, a local Vodka for the upcoming Transmongolian trip. Also some noodles, fruits, bread, sausage plus cheese were included in the traintravel-bag.

As it probably is apparent from this text, the two nights in Moscow affected the schedules so that at some point it felt more like executing some predefined code than casual strolling, because, in short: lots to see in Moscow, so little time. So it was quite a rush. But I'm happy we did it anyway, because in the alongside I did see lots of neighbourhoods and people, whom though I did not understand at all. And still we got along fine, although avoiding the local police, which were by the way swarming the place, was a number one priority for me.

Now it was time to leave Moscow and head off to Jaroslavskiy train station and hop on to the Transmongolian express, on which new adventures would await us..