I’ve mentioned a few times that I find St. Petersburg to be a city eerily similar to New York. However, having just returned from Moscow, that statement needs to be slightly amended. Moscow is probably much more similar to New York in terms of its overall size, its population (double or more than that of Petersburg), and its status as a tourist destination (I heard more English being spoken on the streets in 3 days in Moscow than I have heard in over a month and a half in Petersburg). However, it is incredibly dissimilar to New York in the sense that it both looks and feels like it was designed by M.C. Escher. Go google a map of Moscow, I’ll wait. Yeah, we had to navigate that sight unseen for three days. I could do a play by play of each day we spent there, but honestly, our schedule was so disjointed that it would make that style kind of hard. Since bulleted lists seem to be my forte here, I see no reason why I can’t run down the highlights in that fashion here. Tally ho!
The Weather: I never thought that there would be a place in the entire world that would make me long for the temperate climate of the city that was built over a damned swamp, but Moscow taught me the dangers of using the word “never”. My hotel room was, upon entry, over 30 degrees Celsius. Now I can never remember the conversion for Celsius to Fahrenheit, but I will estimate that it comes out to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And on the street, where there was open air, it was only moderately better. I think I was moderately to severely dehydrated the entire time we were there, and not for lack of consuming water.
The Metro: So if you googled that map of Moscow like I told you too, you might have noticed that it looks like it was the product of some spider beast. I think their metro might be a diagram of the structure of said beast. It’s pretty cool actually, but if you don’t have much time to get acclimated, it is a bitch and a half to figure out. Also, unlike Petersburg, which was a planned city, important areas are in no way denoted by stations with connections to other stations. You can roll through to a 3 station junction, emerge from any of them, and be greeted by nothing but pharmacies, but go to a lone stop way out on the green line and you get 5 different museums and clubs within spitting distance. I guess the thesis here is that you simply have to know where you’re going and can’t try to make judgments about areas based on metro popularity like you could in NY or Petersburg. This would have been nice to not have learned the hard way Saturday night when Chris and I went to every junction in the middle of the circle line looking for some damned thing to do only to walk away disappointed and a little more tired and wet from the kilometers we walked in the rain trying to find diversions.
National Holidays: Pay attention to when they are, or like my entire group, you may wind up schlepping all the damn way down to Red Square to go see Lenin only to find after arrival that there’s one going on and the Mausoleum is closed. As are most of the museums in the city. Yeah, thanks for the superb planning, CIEE. At least the Bulgakov house and Patriarch Pond were accessible, as it means I basically got my wishlist granted for the trip (yes I know there is much more to see there, and I would have been interested had we not only been there for 3 days).
Walking: be prepared to do a lot of it. I probably walked twice as much per day in Moscow as I do in Petersburg, and I walk at least a good 2 miles per day here. I think I ruined every pair of socks I brought with me.
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