July 8, 2019

Today we had a plan to visit Gorky Park and one of the hipster areas in Moscow, in which gentrification has been taking place, not unlike what has happened with the inner city areas in Melbourne over the last 15-20 years.

But we did so much more than this.  I put the spanner in the works, when I mentioned to Pam, that I wanted to do a self guided photo tour of some of the iconic Metro stations.  After spending about half an hour after breakfast, planning for this -unplanned- activity, we set on this task.  The plan was to visit 6 Metro stations, so as to take some photos of this iconic stations, which are richly decorated and in some way mark the evolution of the USSR and its social, political and economic philosophies.

Socialist symbols like the sickle and hammer pepper the designs within some of the stations. Statues and images of socialist figures abound. Originally, the metro stations also served as showcases of socialist realist art.

We have used the Moscow Metro trains on a daily basis, whilst exploring this city.  It is so cheap, less that a dollar.  It’s frequency is also amazing, today is Sunday, and we only had to wait just over 1 minute to take the next train.  We were expecting that today’s Metro would be not so crowded, well not so, lots of people were travelling today as well as during the working days.  It took us just over 1 hour to do the whole Metro stations photo tour, at a cost of 2 dollars for both of us. A great experience.

Afterwards we resumed the planned activities for the day.  Our first stop was Gorky Park, another massive park in central Moscow. We visited the Gorky Park Museum, which details the development and original aims for this park.  It emphasised that importance of the development of the mind and body, and also acted as a political propaganda for the socialist ideals of that time, in the early 1930s.

This park has numerous areas in which people of all ages can participate in all sort of physical and artistic endeavours.  We spent most of the day in this park, as there was so much to see and the weather was superb.

Following this visit, we headed to see the church of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. This church sits on the northern bank of the Moskva River, a few hundred metres southwest of the Kremlin.

The current church is the second to stand on this site. The original church, built during the 19th century, was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture composed by Tchaikovsky. It was destroyed in 1931 on the order of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The demolition was supposed to make way for a colossal Palace of the Soviets to house the country’s legislature, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Construction started in 1937 but was halted in 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Its steel frame was disassembled the following year, and the Palace was never built. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the current church was rebuilt on the site. It was interesting to see a “proper church, as supposed to the ones we saw in the Kremlin, which were museums, rather than churches.

We also strolled along one of the busiest tourist shopping street in Moscow.  This street is dotted with cheap souvenir shops as well as many restaurants for the large number of tourist groups that come to visit this area. Next to this area is a hipster area, which as I mentioned earlier, is the product of gentrification which is taking place in Moscow in recent years. We were looking for a restaurant, but most of the places in this prescient tended to be bars rather than restaurants. One of the most interesting buildings in this area used to be a chocolate factory, is has now being redeveloped to house a variety of trendy shops and upmarket bars.  There main river in Moscow cuts across this area, so many small ships travel through this area daily.  There is also a massive monument of Peter the Great in this area.

We decided to have dinner at the hotel tonight, as we had a number of chores to do today, such as doing some washing and also packing as tomorrow we are leaving Moscow.

See some more photos from today’s journey here: https://adobe.ly/32aJJOd

Another  great day in Russia.