Advertisement
Published: October 3rd 2011
Edit Blog Post
We began our latest adventure by flying a Russian airline called Aeroflot out of JFK. If any of you have seen the recent PanAM TV show commercials, the flight attendants wore outfits just like that except bright orange. Their uniforms featured matching high heels, scarves, and cute little hats bobby pinned to their heads. Very 1960’s!
We arrived in Moscow around 1pm their time, which was about 30mins later than planned as we ended up sitting on the tarmac in JFK for 1.5hrs waiting to take off. We made it through Passport Control with no problems at all and met up with our guide for the day, Irina. She & I had an instant bond as she pronounced her name just like mine, but just with an “a” tagged on the end of it. Irina is a middle school history teacher in Moscow, and works as a guide in the summer and on weekends when she can. She was quiet in terms of being “chatty,” but very informative. We took an express train into the city, and then the metro to Red Square. Both were very easy experiences with Irina leading the way.
Entering Red Square and seeing St.
Basil’s was exhilarating. It was just another one of those moments where Matt & I immediately looked at each other and said “Can you believe it? We are in Russia…in Red Square!!” Nothing compares to seeing the real thing, and the Red Square did not disappoint. It is surrounded by the Kremlin, the History Museum, Lenin’s Mosque, and a large beautiful building that used to be a department store but is now a high-end shopping mall (called GUM). There was also a rebuilt church, as most were destroyed during the 30’s during the rise of Communism - since “Communism was the only religion.” Overall first impressions of Moscow were much different than we imagined. It had a very nice European look and feel to it, and more modern than we thought.
Irina took us through GUM quickly, which was very nice before we walked towards the Kremlin to watch the changing of the guards that happens hourly. All boys are required to go into the military at age 18 for 2 years, unless they choose to go to University. If they go to University, they then can serve just 1 year after they are finished and also enter as
Officers. Women are allowed to study for, and then choose a career job in the military such as a nurse, but not serve.
The Kremlin, meaning “fortress” was very neat. Inside are the administrative offices of the President and government as well as 3 cathedrals and 2 churches that are original. The insides were very beautiful. It was sad to hear that Napoleon had used these as horse stables and wineries at one time as an insult to the country.
After the Kremlin, it began to rain and we took a short walk through the city next to the Moscow river and went into Cathedral of Christ the Savior, their national cathedral. The equivalent would be St. Peter’s in Rome, their national cathedral is home to their pope. This was also not original and rebuilt in 1991 after being blow up in 1931 when Stalin decided that it was too close to the Kremlin - he wanted to keep religion at a distance. The inside was very beautiful and they worked hard to replicate what was there historically. Some interesting facts about Russian churches: There are no sculptures, only icons in churches. They stand the entire service, so
there are no pews. Also no musical instruments, only choirs are used.
Irina then took us to several different Metro stops as they are all different and many of them feature beautiful architecture and mosaics. Believe it or not, between our travel time of an hour from the airport and the sites that we visited, our 6 hours was up and we needed to return to the airport to get our next flight.
Our flight from Moscow to Munich was one of the best flights we’ve ever had. So smooth, and the decent/landing felt like we landed on a cloud. People actually clapped after we touched down. Once we got our luggage it was time to get our rental car for our first driving overseas adventure! We ended up with a Peugot 508, which is a beauty of a car with the entire roof being a glass sunroof…awesome. The first challenge was that we paid for navigation, which was “in the car” they told us. They were correct, it was in the car, but all in German. Now in my car, which is also of German descent (Go Mini!), I have the option to change the language, so
we assumed that there had to be a way to change it to English. Matt was pushing all kinds of buttons while I tried to look through the all German owner’s manual for any clues. We finally gave up after 15 min and went back inside. They gave us a portable unit to use, and then we were on our way to the Movenpick Munich Hotel.
Our awesome car with the amazing sunroof is a manual, since renting an automatic is virtually impossible and almost double the cost. We missed our turn to the hotel, so Matt went to turn around and pulled into a parking lot…..shift to reverse (all the way to the left and up) and car goes forward. Try again…car goes forward. Matt tries lifting up as he shifts….car lurches forward. So repeat us sitting there for another 10 min once again searching the owner’s manual for some German clue as to what the secret to reverse was…then we found it! There is an inset ring under the shift knob that you lift into the knob as you shift into reverse….duh! hahahaha, why didn’t we know that??? I guess all of the old British cars we
drive didn’t help us out in this situation. It was hilarious. Needless to say, we made it to our hotel about midnight and got a good night’s sleep to start our official first day in Germany!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.061s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0389s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Sue Rigos
non-member comment
and St. Petersburg next year. Our church is going on a mission there in May. I'm not sure I will do that. I would rather just go on tour and skip going into the countryside and seeing no museums.