Lee and Clare, The road home

Dead Lenin

1^st October 2003

We saw dead Lenin today. Quite weird. You queue up to go into his mausoleum, then you file by him and have a look at him lying there. He looks pretty waxy. He's got his right hand closed and his left hand open. Does that have some sort of communist significance?

We've had a really chilled day today. Really hot here today, probably about 22 or 23. We sat in the sun and probably got a bit sunburnt. Lots of English accents around today as Arsenal is playing here tonight. They were all eating in McDonalds of course and drinking beer. You could hear their voices above everything. Quite weird as we're used to only hearing Russian voices. It kind of changes the feel of the place.

We walked down by the River this afternoon; sounds nice, but its not, as it runs by an 8 lane highway and was extremely polluted. The smog here is really bad. There's more pollution than air. We did make it to Gorky Park for a look, but didn't go in as it looked like crap. We've both heard of Gorky Park, but can't work out what it's famous for. Can anyone tell us? There's a fun fair in there anyway. We didn't see any of the rides going though, and there were hardly any people in there.

Gonna head over to Red Square after this to see what it's like at night. It was closed off when we went to see Lenin's Mausoleum today, but hopefully we'll be able to get on part of it.

We'll head back that way tomorrow for a few photos of St Basils through the smog.

Lisa, you said that you found Russia intriguing but a dump. We don't find it a dump at all. It must've come in leaps and bounds since you came here. St Petersburg was really quite beautiful and had a really relaxed feel with lots of cafes. Moscow is really different but still cool in it's own way. There is a lot of air pollution (yuck) but everything is perfectly clean. You don't even see cigarette butts or chewing gum on the ground anywhere. There are really nice grassy bits and fountains for chilling out. Don't know if this is just the touristy bits, but even when we headed out to the suburbs it seemed okay. Saw some huuuuge apartment blocks today by Gorky Park that must've been vestiges of Stalinist times? But no, not a dump at all. Also quite a few friendly people around, especially if you make an effort to speak Russian. We got dva kartoushkas for lunch today! (two potatoes).

Must go. Remember we're off to Kazan tomorrow. Been reading about it in the book. Apparently it's the capital of Tatarstan. They want to have their own independence, but are not allowed. We are considering arriving there in the morning then getting a ticket to go out again in the evening so we can stick on our itinerary, but we'll see how we go and how much sleep we get on the way there in our 54 bed dorm!!

Lee and Clare