Day 5, Moscow: Saint Basil’s Cathedral

We arrived this morning at 06:41 at the train station. Looking for a café to have a snack and hot drink as one does, we ended up in a Starbucks.

2 cappuccinos, 1 Nutella croissant and a chocolate cookie. The Starbucks girl gave us a knife and fork to eat our croissant & cookie. LOL.

We headed back to the station to buy our tickets to Kazan. We’re leaving on another night train in two days time. After that, we found our hostel, left our luggage, and headed into town. We haven’t washed since the night before last and I feel sticky. I’m looking forward to my shower later today.

Finding the red square was easy: just follow the road and keep going straight on.

Wow.

We set the plan: Sophie wants to buy tickets to see “La Bohème" at the Bolshoi theatre. A quick search in my offline Google map of Moscow downloaded earlier at the Starbucks. Great, it’s not the far.

Alas, it’s early in the day and not open yet. And there isn’t much information in English, so we decide to come back later.

We head for Saint Basil’s Cathedral which is back at the red square, we pop into GUM on the way. It’s the Russian version of Galerie Lafayette kind of, with a distinct British ambiance to it, according to Sophie.

Back at the red square, we jump in line to see Saint Basil’s Cathedral. 500 Rubbles per person. Ah no, sorry, that’s the price for Russians & friends. For us it’s 1000 Rubbles per person. One euro is between 70 & 73 Rubbles.

Ok, I can’t figure out how to do collages of photos without a PC, I’ve been struggling for half an hour and am giving up, so here goes one after another.

The Cathedral is a collection of churches. Each dome is a church. The Cathedral was built to celebrate Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan. Of course many pictures were taken, but they will be available in the Google photos album.

After the visit we go back to the Bolshoi via a different route and pop into a church. This is a common sight in all the churches and non-museum cathedrals we have visited:

• A welcoming scent of incense and honey-candles
• Women with scarves on their head
• People (mostly women so far) huddled against a picture of some icon deep in prayer
• A shop where you can buy many things jesus-related
• A decorated wall which hides the hostel from common-folk.

Bolshoi still closed, I turn roaming on briefly to check online: sold out. New plan is to show up tomorrow evening hoping for a spare ticket.

We then wondered around, through the “Alexandrovsky Garden”. Oh look, some soldiers garding an eternal flame.

Yes, I managed to create a collage, thanks to Google photos. Take that medium! We eventually ended up at the foot of this big statue.

Looking across the traffic, we wondered how to get to those golden domes.

One word about pedestrian crossings in Russia. They are few and far between, and people respect them. No jaywalking here. As they have timers on them, we sometimes see people running to cross while there are a few seconds left of the green man before he becomes red again. Red for a long time. A really long time.

Eventually, we get there.

I had correctly guessed that this one would be free to visit, but I couldn’t because “No shorts!” ah well, maybe tomorrow.

We walk all the way back to our hostel and enjoy a nice cold shower. This hostel is much cleaner than the previous one. We decide not to tire ourselves out and stay the evening at the hostel, shopping for dinner in the local supermarket.

It’s taking me too much time to write daily blog posts, especially if I keep this level of detail up. I’ll leave you for today with this last photo.