Final Dinner in Russia

Mike and Kyria went out to look at patchwork quilts they had seen in one of the walkways under the road and also to go inside St Basil’s. When they returned the boys went out to do some last minute souvenir shopping.

It was nearly 5 by the time Heidi woke up. I had wanted take her to a department store that was totally dedicated to children’s toys but we weren’t going to have a lot of time before dinner. So we decided to go to dinner early and see how we felt afterwards.

Dinner was quite fancy - they had people whose only job was to open the door for you! Eli was quite chuffed that one of the doormen understood French. He thought the Russians should know French because they used to speak it or something but he had had no luck so far.

There was some Russian wine on the menu which the others decided to try and then spent 5-10 minutes talking about how it felt in their mouth 😂 I don’t think they thought much of it.

It was a nice dinner and we ended up all going back to the apartment and packing our stuff up ready for leaving tomorrow. Starting to get over living out a suitcase!

We hadn’t managed to do everything I had planned for Moscow but we didn’t have a lot of time and it was tricky with Heidi at times. Hopefully everyone enjoyed something.

Eli had been reading a bit about the Gulag camps in Russia established under the Soviet Union which were like the concentration camps established by the Germans. At lot of the things that happened there were just as bad. Stalin made a forced famine by selling people’s produce and cattle to fund his utopia causing the death of 11 million people. In some ways it seems ludicrous that they have all these statutes of Lenin everywhere and the communism symbols considering what happened under that regime - it would be like going to Germany and seeing Hitler’s face and the Swastika plastered everywhere still.

Anyway, that was a last little bit about Russia before we move on! We all had a great time there. I think I liked St Petersburg over Moscow though.Read more