Lonely Cold Banana In Moscow

September 13th

My work completed and the trip to St. Petersburg not looking likely, I had time to kill. All the other American museum folks were working so I spent the day by myself in Moscow. You can see photos from my entire day here.

I wandered near the Pushkin taking photos of the colorful buildings. I really like the pastel pallet they use in this part of Moscow.

Because I was cold, I went inside the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. After the death of Lenin, the largest Orthodox church ever built was demolished by order of Stalin to make way for a Palace of the Soviets with a giant statue of Lenin on top. This project was never completed and the flooded abandoned foundation hole was eventually transformed into the largest public swimming pool in the world by Nikita Khruschev. With the end of Soviet rule, the Russian Orthodox Church received permission to rebuild on the site and this church opened in 2000.

Several controversial innovations happened during construction, including replacing the original marble reliefs with these ugly modern bronze ones.

Because much of the money for construction came from public funds, it makes this church really popular with the locals, including all the babushkas. This is one of my favorite photos from the trip.

Behind the church is a bridge with great views of the city and some German tourists took this windy photo of me.

Later I decided to fork over 300 rubles to some lady in a booth and got on an old rust bucket (you can see it in the background of my photo above) with three other Russians for a tour on the river. There was no commentary or information about the sights so I didn't really know what I was seeing.

This, however, is a chocolate factory. You could smell it and I bought goodies in the grocery store for the office because of the bizarre Gerber Baby wrapper.

And the boat tour got up close and personal with my old pal Peter The Great.

I wish I knew more about these Stalin era buildings. They sort of grew on me after awhile.

But mostly... I froze my ass off on the boat and was lonely and homesick.

Here is your Stray Dog of the Day.

I like to imagine there are rival gangs of Russian Moscow dogs. This bunch of thugs has the lucrative babushka heavy church territory locked down.