A late start today ... aided by a comfy hotel and a 4 hour time difference from London. Mind you, the gas mask in the cupboard was hardly reassuring:
No time for the typical tourist trail today ... so forget Red Square and St Basil's ... anyway, I've strolled around there so many times in the past (
good name dropping, eh?) ... instead, it's off to Yaroslavsky station to check out the trains (5 kms round trip on foot) ... and then the additional 12 kms round trip to the little Real Russia office where we collected our train tickets. In truth, we would have used the Moscow Metro for this outing, but it would have required several changes of line, and probably as much time as walking through Sokolniki Park.
And besides, we would have missed the offroad campervans that were being assembled for a forthcoming show in the Sokolniki Exhibition centre ... Vincent Wall, these look just like the ones down under:
And we wouldn't have experienced railway crossovers Moscow style:
While I'm on the subject of road use, it's amazing that so many cars are still running on studded tyres so late in the year. Given the game of chicken that many Russian drivers play with pedestrians at the best of times, their inability to stop (
the coefficient of friction between metal and a road surface is minimal) means that the pedestrian will never win.
Finally I leave you with a photo of our local Sokolniki Russian Orthodox church ... not as beautiful as St Basil's ... but then the designer was probably not handicapped for being so brilliant ... Tsar Ivan IV was reputed to have blinded the designer of St Basil's so that he could not build its equal, let alone something better, elsewhere:
I wonder perhaps if the hotel had heard about Peter's plum intake and had installed a gas mask in the Horan/Alderson room............further comments appreciated :-)
ReplyDeletePut this over your nose and mouth and breathe normally ... as Prunella would have said
ReplyDelete