Alexander's garden

After a breakfast buffet (which I found a little less exciting than the dinner), we were due to meet up with our guide in the lobby. We booked our Russian itinerary through a tour company with the rather official sounding name of Russian National Tourist Office. The tour is either alone, or with a group, depending on demand. So Tessa wandered around the lobby asking English speakers if they were from our group. It turns out, there were multiple people who had booked through the same company, but only 5 were on our tour. Our tour guide for Moscow was Olga - a local of Moscow who's favourite city is St Petersburg.

We went on a city tour by mini bus. Olga told us a load of facts, and since it's been several days since then, we've forgotten most of them already - except that Moscow was founded in 1147. We stopped for photos at a look out point and some probably overpriced souvenirs at a local store and then Olga showed us around Moscow’s underground rail stations. That probably sounds terribly tedious but the Soviets had beautifully decorated many of their main stations in the Moscow area. One particular station had many sculptures of people doing everyday things and there was a belief about some of the dog statues that if you touched their noses, you would have good luck. We saw many Moscow locals touch the dogs’ noses as they walked past and you can tell from the differences in colour on those statues as they had been worn down by touching over time.

On this particular tour we have our afternoons free to ourselves, so we wandered over to the Red Square for some lunch and a general sticky-beak around. The food was excellent and I had probably the best beef stroganoff I had ever had up until that point. Our waiter was very friendly and we had a chat about his sister who now lives in Australia. Unfortunately Red Square was packed with stadium seating for their annual celebrations of the city’s beginnings 869 years ago (quite young really) so we didn’t perhaps get the best view of whole surroundings but it was still great to walk around.

Back near our hotel, we headed to a local tourist village, I guess you would call it. It was a modern reconstruction of some older style Russian buildings with a truckload of souvenir stores and minor museums. We did check out the museum of vodka, because we were in Russia after all. We tasted some old-style vodka and some flavoured vodka, which were both nice, and chatted to the two ladies who were looking after the museum who wondered why we’d come so far to see Moscow. We also got a little distracted by two cats snuggling each other in the museum’s lobby section.

We finished up the day by ordering room service at our hotel which was quite a trial as they initially managed to forget to bring up one of our drinks and two of our entrees. Luckily our waiter had a translation app on his phone so Tessa managed to reach a mutual understanding between him, her and the cook who the waiter had to keep ringing. Unfortunately the result was a little disappointing for Tessa when all was said and done as the dumplings just weren’t up to scratch.Read more