Sam & Georgia's Travels : Moscow

After a 4:00am wake up, a delayed flight and a hurry through the Berlin airport, we touched down in Russia!

I must admit that it was pretty scary coming through Russian immigration, but we made it through all good. We were thrown into the deep end a bit, we decided not to get a taxi into the city, but to brave the express airport train and then the metro. All of a sudden we were trying to work out where we needed to go, trying to match words written not only in another language but with a different alphabet.
Somehow we managed to catch the right train and we made it safely to the main train/metro station in Moscow. Unfortunately by the time we got there it was peak hour and there was an absolutely ridiculous amount of people all trying to navigate the underground. We also had our packs which it made it feel like we were four people rather than two.

It was scary and intimidating, but we figured it out and arrived at the correct station and eventually found our hostel.

The hostel is great, we have a private room and it is close to a metro station, but only about a 15min walk from the Red Square. There is also plenty of food nearby.

We decided to have an early night recover from the early rise.

We caught the metro into the city centre. We had a look through the Kremlin, which is super cool. The Kremlin is made up of different government buildings, museums and cathedrals. It is the official residence of the President of the Russian Federation and houses the Senate, it dates back to the early Russian Tsar’s and was used through the Soviet Union period as the government head quarters.

It’s a really cool place, and a number of the Tsar’s have tombs inside the cathedrals, it’s has an extremely interesting history with all kinds of buildings housed in the walled area.

From the Kremlin, we walked along the Alexander Garden to the Red Square..
Through the garden there is all different monuments, and beside the gates there is a memorial for the Second World War.

The Red Square is amazing. The buildings that surround the Red Square are gorgeous and so full of detail, most of them now house museums of shopping ares. The Kremlin lines on side of the square on one side, and on the opposite is Moscow’s oldest shopping centre, which is celebrating it’s 120th birthday.
At one end is State Historical Museum while at the other end stands the beautiful and very colourful St. Basil’s Cathedral. The cathedral is spectacular, the shape is so different to the other buildings in the square and the colours make it even more interesting. Apparently the Tsar Ivan the Terrible blinded the architect so that they would never be able to design something as beautiful as St.Basil’s.