Note: I wrote this article in January 2016, I am dating it back so it fits in order.
We arrived in Moscow late in the evening. We stayed in a very nice Best Western Hotel. We had loads of towels including two bathmats and bathrobes. My room was on the 26th floor so I had a great view. The hotel was a few kilometers from the city center but there was a metro line so it was no problem. The hotel is part of a hotel complex. It was a bit confusing that our hotel was called Vega (Вега in cyrillic letters), while another hotel was called Beta (Бета) 😀
On the first day we had a bus tour through the city with some time to walk around the Red Square and the surroundings. I was a bit disappointed that Lenin’s mausoleum was closed. In the afternoon we visited the Moscow State Circus. The circus was very impressive with a great show including music and lights. The theme was a journey through Russia and they told a little story about a guy travelling through the country. There was a funny detail: They had two artists dressed as Stalin and Lenin! Obviously that would not have been possible a few years ago! In the evening I walked around a little more and took some pictures of Moscow by night.
- Lobby of our hotel
- View from my room
- The main building of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The central tower is 235m high!
- Saint Basil’s Cathedral
- Lenin’s mausoleum – unfortunately closed at the time
- GUM, an over 100 year old department store
- inside GUM
- Moscow State Circus
- Acrobats dressed as policemen
- Even Stalin and Lenin are there! 😀
- The light on this building is a video!
- GUM is illuminated like a christmas tree
On the second day there was a tour around the Kremlin, as well as a tour of the Moscow Metro. The Kremlin is a fortress and the innermost part of Moscow. It contains several churches as well as the President’s office. The Moscow Metro has very beautiful stations which have often been called „people’s palaces“. Afterwards, we visited Bunker-42, the former bunker of the Soviet government in the Cold War. In the evening we took the bus to go back to St. Petersburg.
- Putin’s office is somewhere in this building
- Moscow Metro
- The Red Square by night again
- This is the place where Boris Nemzow was shot just a few weeks before