As I was riding in the taxi to my hotel the driver asked me what I would be doing in Russia. My first thing would to be to go downtown and see some of the sights there and also meet my pen pal and translator Oxana. As he pulled into the hotel he pointed across the street and said that there was a metro station there that could take me downtown. Then in the hotel lobby he showed me a map of the metro and pointed out where I was and where Red Square was. It seemed simple enough... the desk clerk gave ma a paper copy of the metro map, I was all set.
So after I unloaded my things in my room I walked over to the bus stop that was on the corner and waited for the next bus. As I stood there I noticed a LOT of people walking past the bus stop in the direction towards town. I wondered why the did not ride the bus since it went that way... in hind sight I should have investigaed that thought but oh well.
The bus came and I got on it, it was tan, the stop was tan, the line that I was following on my map was tan, I was all set. It didn't take too long to figure out that the bus made a lot more stops and was not going in the direction that the line on my map indicated it should. No knowing what else to do I rode along for a while. Maybe the map was not that precise and only showed major stops. I just rode on looking for the red stop that would get me to the red bus. And I rode and rode and rode. Finally I decided that I must have traveled too far so I got off. But there was nothing to identify where I was so I asked the only people that were there, they were operating a road side shop like the ones pictured below. No English capabilities of course but I eventually communicated to them by pointing to the ground and to the maop that I wanted to know where this places was on the map. What they could not communicate back by pointing was that the place where I was was not even on the map. So they got out their mobile phone and and called someone who spoke English to explain this to me. I told him where I was trying to go and he gave me what in hind sight were pretty good directions I think-but I did not understand them. He gave me a bus number and told me to ride in until it went underground and then gave me a different rout to follow. In Russia the subwas is called the underground. not knowing this I rode the bus expecting to go thru a tunnel whcih of course never happened. Finally the bus reached the end of its rout and the bus driver made me get off because it was the end. I wandered around a few blocks in every direction and stil there was nothing that looked like downtown but I did find a large sign with a map just like the bus map I was carrying. It was next to the subway tunnel. This is when it finally occurred to me that my map was a subway map, not a bus map. Ding!!!
Using the pointing tequnique again I was after a while able to find someone who could point to where I was at on the map but according to their direction I was no closer to downtown than when I started. Thinking that they might not have understood me I asked another. They confirmed that indeed I had been traveling in a counter clockwise direction around the city instead of heading toward the center.
But knowing where I was and realizing that I was using a subway map I was able to count the stops between where I was and the Teatralnaya station as 7. This time it worked. I reached downtown on my own and it only took me 3 1/2 hours.
I spent another hour wandering around Moscow until I came across Red Square. Most of these pictures were taken during my wandering there. After visiting Red Square I returned to the Teatralnaya station and met my pen pal Oxana. What a nice lady she turned out to be. We walked around some more had dinner and then she put me in a taxi back to the hotel. Amazingly it only took 15 minutes by taxi.
I visited a new contry, saw some famous places as well as some places that I'm sure tourists never see, I met a lot of people, I rode a subway for the first time in my life, ate some Russian food bought in a genuine Russian market, had a new adventure... it was a good first day!
p.s. The following morning I pondered my errors and thought about all of the people walking past the bus stop and the bus driver pointing out where I was on what I now knew was the subway map. I went back to the bus stop and watched people walking down the hill past the bust stop and then noticed that none of them walked up the hill on the other side. I realized that there must be a subway station down there so I followed them and sure enough there it was. When the taxi driver was pointing to the metro stop he was not pointing to the bus stop but the subway station behind it.
The advertisement in the following picture is really a giant LCD screen. They have them all over the place. Much more high tech than our freeway bill boards.
One does not cross the street in downtown Moscow. Instead there are tunnels under the street. Below you can see one such tunnel. Across the street behind the white care is the other side of the tunnel.
The glass dome below is actually a sky light for the subway station that is directly below this plaza.
Red Square
St. Basil's Cathedral is located at the far end of Red Square. It is probably one of the most recognizable buildings in Russiaas we have probably all seen pictures of it. But the pictures can not do it justice in my opinion. I think it is the most beautiful building I have ever seen. The curious thing about it is that, even though it is a church, there is no sanctuary. It consists of a lot of rooms with shrines where someone could go and pray. But no sermons or group worship went on there I'm pretty sure.
This picture is from an amazing toy store that I ran across.
These pictures are from the grounds of the hotel that I stayed in. It actually consisted 6 different buildings each with their own lobby and restaraunt, etc. My request to the travel agent was I don't care what hotel you put me in as long as they can speak English. And sure enough there was one lady in one of the lobbies that did. It took 2 days to find her because she was not in MY lobby.
