Still Lonley, Still Cold

September 14th

Urgh. This was the worst day. I was alone again and the weather couldn't have been worse. Cold, windy, rainy and just miserable. See?

With only four English channels on TV at the hotel, I was eventually forced to leave for sanity sake. I navigated the crazy Russian subway alone people! On a normal day the Moscow metro carries over 7 million people, which is more than the New York and London subways combined. And since it was basically a game of "match the symbols" and "count the stops" and "don't get pushed down by grumpy Russians" I was really impressed that I changed train lines and still made it to the correct destination.

But then I realized my fatal mistake - The Pushkinskaya train station is nowhere near the Pushkin Museum. Dag. So I walked in what I thought was the correct direction. Turns out I was wrong about that as well. I knew I was lost for certain when I saw this wacko building.

The thing about Moscow was it all started to look the same. They have some pink and yellow houses, mixed in with a gross block style communist apartment building, tossed up with a gray sky, and lots of busy streets with no pedestrian walkways. Wham, Miss Banana was lost.

Not only was I lost, I was cold, lonely, and generally pissed off. See?

And this movie poster was everywhere. It looked scary.

Eating out in Moscow was really difficult and scary because things were all in cyrillic, super expensive and always centered around some over the top theme. If this photo of a typical place doesn't show you what I mean, I don't know what does.

Anyway, once I finally un-lost myself and walked ten million miles back to the hotel, I met some other folks for a Lebanese dinner, complete with belly dancer. And guess what? It was next to the fricking Pushkinskaya train station! Irony is a bastard.

After dinner I convinced another courier, Elizabeth (pictured below), to swing by the Red Square/Kremlin area for some photos at night. You can see more of them here.

I felt like a metro expert by the end of the day. I even managed to snap some photos of the interior of the Lenin Library stop. Because Stalin paid artists to design the stations, they were actually quite beautiful (not that you would notice during the daytime crush).

Here is your cold wet miserable Stray Dog Of The Day. I felt similar to this poor bastard.