Moscow Madness

We began our adventures at noon on Saturday, December 22, on an Aeroflot flight headed to Moscow.  Despite all of the horror stories we'd heard about this Russian airline, the flight turned out to be relatively pleasant.  The plane was brand new and offered a wide variety of movies and games.  It also had a live feed video camera installed on the bottom of the plane, so that we could see exactly what the cockpit sees during take off (I could see how this might be too much information for some people). 

We had a 19 hour layover in Moscow (most of it at night, unfortunately) which we thought would be the perfect amount of time to check out the Kremlin and Red Square, and grab some dinner before settling into our hotel for the night.

Well, thank goodness we didn't have to worry about our luggage as a result of being out and about on a layover, because there were plenty of other things to be concerned about.  Like the fact that Moscow was suffering record-breaking lows, averaging a "modest" -20 degrees Celsius.  (Oh, just another deadly cold day.)

Or the fact that every single ATM in the airport and train terminal was conveniently broken (coincidence?  I think not -- especially as we were then extorted by an absolutely ridiculous exchange rate that gave us half the amount of money we were supposed to get).

Or the fact that the airport express wouldn't take my credit card.

Or the somewhat incomprehensible metro.  (I'd read up about the metro before we went and it sounded quite straightforward.  I even had a bilingual color map.  But I kind of underestimated just how confusing it can be when everything printed is in Cyrillic and everything spoken is in Russian, the train lines aren't clearly marked, the trains aren't labeled with numbers or colors or a destination, and the colors on the sign don't indicate the color of the train line.)  It also didn't help that everyone around us looked kind of surly.  After a lot of head scratching, asking three station attendants via a mixture of pantomime and broken English, and peering at the map,  we finally figured it out.  Here is an example of a sign that confused as for a good five minutes:

So to sum up, about two hours after our plane landed, as I fretted that I would lose my toes to frostbite, I was also kind of wondering what possessed me to want to see Russia in the first place.

But then we emerged from the metro (which is gorgeous, by the way - more on this in a later post), to this:

Hilton Leningradskaya, our hotel

And when I say emerge, I really mean it.  It took about 3 or 4 minutes to come up the escalator, and some lines were even deeper.  The metro in Russia is the deepest I've ever been underground.

Our hotel was really beautiful and interesting.  It is one of the famous Seven Sisters skyscrapers, which were built during the Stalin era.  The architects combined Russian baroque and Gothic styles, and intended for the hotel to be the most opulent hotel in the world.  I wouldn't say that they accomplished their goal per se, however, the sheer size and scale is breathtaking.  The lobby is also very grand.   Here are some snaps of the interior:

Laughably unattractive mustard hallways

We had some nice views from our room:

It was hard to leave our cozy hotel room once we settled in, but when we finally summoned up the courage, we were further rewarded with stunning sights such as these:

Entrance to Red Square

Lit-up shops on the edge of Red Square

St. Basil's Cathedral, arguably the icon of Russia

The Kremlin - the white shrouded thing is Lenin's tomb, which was sadly under construction so we couldn't see him

A view of the Kremlin from the bridge

Parting shots of our hotel in the morning, as we headed back to the airport to continue our journey to Finland: