Spring is here!

Now to recall all that has happened since April 7^th… umm… I managed to slide down an entire flight of marble stairs. My bottom is still bruised… probably drinking entirely too much lately… I’ve lost so much weight, my clothes no longer fit (yey!)… if I keep drinking, I’ll gain it back…had the first taste of peanut butter since leaving America, it was a strange experience. I had forgotten how to eat it…umm… I know!

Last weekend was the first really nice weekend we’ve had. Most of the snow seemed to melt overnight. Oliver and I headed to a park near Kievskaya and sat on a bench in the sun. We stayed all day, people watching and petting dogs.

The next day I literally rolled out of bed and half crawled, half stumbled to Metro Ploshchad Revolyusii and met my co-worker, Sasha. We both looked a state as we croaked and tried to stay steady as the escalator slowly crawled to the surface. We stopped to take pictures in front of the bright pink church and stumbled towards a noodle bar for a hangover cure. Unfortunately, it was closed. So we went down the street to Subway and ordered breakfast sandwiches and the hair of the dog. Then we shuffled to the dining room filled with people who looked worse than we did. At least Sasha and I had managed to shower and put on fresh clothes, these people were still in their tattered clubbing clothes.

Not too bad for such a hangover!

Sandwiches are not my hangover food, so Sasha ate my food while I nursed the beer. We then stumbled out of the shop and started towards Red Square, but we were too busy dwelling on our upset tummies and aching heads and took a wrong turn (in fact, we shouldn't have taken a turn at all). So we arrived at the Kremlin a bit later than expected.

By that time we were feeling a bit more human and Sasha managed to get our tickets for 80% off. Thank goodness for sneaky Russian speakers. However, he failed a bit when the ticket man asked where our child was and he said “oh he’s with grandma, you know how ten year olds throw temper tantrums.” But he let us pass any way.  I spent the walk up to the Kremlin musing how old I must look and what a spoiled child I have.

We hopped around taking pictures of all the cannons and got shooed away by some nice men with guns. For some reason we weren't allowed to see everything the map told us we could see and we were restricted to the churches only. Thank goodness we didn't pay the $25 to get in, it was defiantly only worth the $5 we spent.

My favorite church inside the Kremlin (and the first one we went into)

The churches were very nice, very beautiful, but you lose your excitement after the fourth church. They are all Byzantine style, with beautiful murals everywhere. Most of the churches were built in the 14^th and 15^th centuries and many of the paintings and relics from Ivan the Terrible had survived.

Finally our stomachs roused us to find food and we attempted the noodle place again. It was open! It is a little dive literally situated on a staircase. You order your food at the bottom of the stairs and walk up to find a table on one of the landings or a beanbag chair on a stair. We had the place to ourselves to enjoy our delicious soba noodles and more beer (the first one didn’t really cure us well). Unfortunately, soba isn’t my hangover food either. So, we rushed out into the “fresh” air and walked around the center.

We spotted the Soviet Diner, and I was quite curious what a Soviet diner looked like, so we popped in. It is remarkably like an American diner; only the long tables that filled the place only had one chair each.  It wasn’t Soviet sparseness, but the fact that they had just opened and hadn’t received all of the chairs yet.  Classic Russian movie stars and newspapers lined the walls. The menu was entirely Russian, with some burger options. I ordered an apple pie and a cream soda. The pie was really a strange pastry that reminded me of sweet pizza dough, filled with a couple of apple chunks.  Sasha ordered Navy Macaroni (think goulash with spaghetti noodles). It was ok. Russian food really has no flavor.

After the diner, I finally felt normal. So we walked along the Moskva River. About an hour after eating at the Soviet Diner, we stopped for food again, this time ordering some sushi. It was the best sushi I’ve had in Moscow. Thank goodness it was, because when the bill came, we nearly had a heart attack. Those helpful waiters decided to double our order since we were sharing (I was thinking it looked big), so we didn’t save any money by sharing food. Never trust a place in Moscow with an English menu!

We wallowed in our loss of money and finished our journey at Gorkey Park. It looks much better when it isn’t flooding, and I hear it looks even more beautiful when the grass actually grows out of the mud.

The week went by with nothing too exciting happening. The normal crap. Friday finally rolled around and we were meant to have a going away party for Sasha. However, his cousin rolled into town and started him on a traditional Russian binge and Sasha couldn’t even say his own name, let alone make it to Mintino for the party. Everyone managed to get over their hangovers enough to meet at Kolomenskoye Park on Saturday. We sat next to the river until food roused us (seems like food is the only thing that gets us moving on sunny days). Then we found a shashlik place and devoured quite a bit of meat and beer. I think Sasha had a great send-off (he probably didn’t think so on the way to the airport this morning).

 

Church at Kolmenskoye Park