Moscow

Yay Moscow! 
We got here at 5:30 am on Saturday, tired as all get out.  The wind here is quite windy, but definitely not as bad as being here in January.  We walked down to Red Square and around Kitay Gorod in the morning, and then walked back and watched 1 and a half of the National Treasure movies in the hostel lounge.  We couldn't check in yet, so we were just lollygagging.  When we finally could check in we met all the really nice people in our room.  Instead of napping we talked to all of them for 3-4 hours.  At that point we were so hungry we could faint, so we went to someplace that had Hofbrauhaus signs all over it.  It was NOT a Hofbrauhaus, they only had a few Hofbrau beers.  SO disappointing.  Then we finally got some sleep after about 36 hours straight of no sleep.  Maybe some people can sleep on a train with lots of snoring people that stops every hour, but I couldn't.  It got really warm in there, душно, as we say in Russian. 

Sunday we got up at about nine and headed back to Red Square to have a chat with the dead body of Lenin.  Boy was that fun!  I hadn't seen him before, because his mausoleum has strange opening hours.  It was a really weird experience.  We had to wait in a huge line, check our bags (which we had to pay for), walk through metal detectors, and then through this maze of walkways with guards pointing the way at every corner.  The mausoleum was very creepy.  All the stone inside was black, and there was weird low level lighting.  Lenin's glass coffin (just like Snow White!!!) was surrounded by red velvet and velour roses.  We had to walk by him slowly, without stopping.  You're not allowed more than, say, 7 seconds to look at Lenin before a guard comes and taps you on the shoulder to get you to move on.  Livi discovered that you're not allowed to have your hands in your pockets while viewing Lenin either.  The guard was very adamant about that.  Lenin just looked fake.  He gets a new chemical bath every 18 months, and he is bathed every 3 days.  He looks like he's covered in shellack.  It's just so weird that they still have him here, so blatantly against his wish to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg.  They are considering moving him to St. P though. 

After that we tried to find a Starbucks.  The rest of the world seems not to have discovered the joys of drip coffee; all they have is espresso and instant.  But Starbucks, that's another story.  They DO have drip coffee, just like America.  Anyway, we settled for Shokolodnitsa, which turns out to also have American coffee and French press.  MMMM.  We ate lunch at the baked potato stand- cheap and filling!  Then, the highlight of my day:  THE SPACE MUSEUM!!!!!!  I finally got to go!  I tried to go in January, but it was only open for tours, weirdly.  Anyway, it was awesome.  They had the stuffed forms of Belka and Strelka (who were adorable doggies), Michael Collins' space suit (how'd that happen?), and a bunch of other cool stuff.  Cosmonauts used to wear suits on the space station that looked like they came right off the set of Star Trek.  We then took the metro to Gorky Park, but it was not exciting, so we went back to the hostel and ate giant bowls of buckwheat for dinner. 

Today we're going souvenir shopping and to see a new Russian movie in the evening.  It's a 3D movie in which there is a demon stronghold in Moscow State University.  I think it sounds hilarious.  We also might go wander around Patriarch's Ponds; try to strike up a conversation with the Devil (Master and Margarita reference.)