From Russia with love

I don't have time to write a detailed (or even a brief) account of this whole Russian experience, but here's a little instalment to keep you up to date. I'm in Moscow at the moment, which is fantastic. Though I like St. Petersburg better, Moscow is just as fascinating. I'm up to my eyeballs in Russian history, Romanovs, Tatars, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, Gorbachev, Putin, the list goes on forever (trust me). It is all incredibly fascinating, I just hope I can remember it all to tell you all properly when I get to Dublin.

I just wanted to share my incredible day yesterday. After dragging myself out of bed and helping myself to a buffet breakfast (say what you like about Russia, their hotels know how to do a buffet breakfast like the best of them) we were off to the Red Square to check out Lenin. We barely had to queue (an unheard of luxury, perhaps due to the drizzle) before we walked into the mausoleum complex where Lenin is buried. When I say the place is crawling with guards, you can regard that as an understatement. There are two outside, then groups of three of them every time you turn a corner in the mausoleum. The place is dark and the steps and walls are black so you can't really see where you're going. You go around yet another corner and up some stairs and there he is, laying in a coffin with red velvet cushioning. The whole place is dark save for the light shining from above the coffin onto Lenin's face, which gives him a kind of angelic aura (I don't think any of us were fooled). Even in the darkness it's hard to ignore the seven or eight guards around the coffin. You walk around him and don't stop (if you do you'll get "nietted", more about this later), and then you step outside into the daylight. Then you're supposed to walk around the back of the mausoleum out of the Red Square, but as there were not many people there, I asked Richard (our Tour Manager, alias Richie Rich) if I could go around again. He said to grab a buddy and give it a shot. So Kath and I jumped over the fence and went round again, sure that we would get "nietted", but though the guards gave us funny looks, they didn't say a word. So we got to see Lenin a second time, which was awesome since the first time I was so preoccupied with the guards I didn't have time to really get a sense of the whole Lenin thing. He's really small, and waxy looking, but it still gave me the shivers when I looked at him and thought about all the things he did and lives he cost. After that we went around the back of the mausoleum and saw where a whole lot of other Russian important people are buried, including Stalin.

Anyway, after all this excitement, you'd think my day couldn't get any better, but you'd be wrong! That afternoon when we went to visit the Kremlin (more about the Kremlin in a later post, I'm running out of internet time) we were waking between buildings and who should drive past but Vladimir Putin, President of Russia! So I got a real buzz out of that and the thought that I saw Lenin and Putin in the one day. Am I a politics nerd or what?

Got to go now, Moscow circus tonight, that should be awesome, I'll write more probably at the end of my tour when I have time, and I promise I'll tell you all about the "niet-niet ladies" and getting "nietted". Prepare for a long Russian history lesson!!