As the semester winds down (I've only got one full week left before I leave next Sunday) I've begun to realize just how much I still haven't seen in Moscow (though, I also realize that many of the things I haven't seen are museums, so I'm kind of OK with that). One of our most recent excursions was to one of those very important places that I'd yet to see - the place with that really famous Soviet statue of the guy and girl with the hammer and sickle (Stalin's Amusement park place).
The Soviet-statue-of-the-guy-and-the-girl-with-the-hammer-and-sickle.
Anyway, so we actually left early, hoping to go to Ismailovo again to get some more souvenir shopping out of the way. Turned out that we left way too late for that, given the meeting time for the excursion, so we decided to just go straight to ВДНХ and see what was up there and meet Lena when she got there.
The place is big. Like, really effing big. Just walking to the entrance (which is huge) is a task, requiring you to walk from the metro across a big park area to a giant arch-gate-thing, behind which I could see the biggest ferris wheel I'd ever seen in my life.
*shiver*
Anyway, we got inside and made our way down a really long road with small rides on either side and a little train that worked as a marshrutka, letting people plop themselves down on it and avoid having to walk that oh-so-terrible 5 minutes to the actual building.
After 10 minutes of walking we got to the main exhibition center (that's what all of the buildings in this area were originally - now they all just have markets inside). The building was impressive...
Impressive, huh?
...but I particularly liked the statue of Lenin in front of it, which I did my best to impersonate.
V.I. Radenhausen.
After about an hour, Lena and a little boy, who I recognized as the son of the director of our program at GRINT, arrived. It turned out that Aleksei (the kid - I'm pretty sure that was his name) would be our guide and Lena would translate. Wow, that kid knows his history. He explained all kinds of history of the buildings, like how each of the buildings surrounding this one golden fountain represented one of the major Soviet republics.
The golden fountain. Each girl represents a different republic. The girl holding something like the Statue of Liberty in the middle-left represents Russia.
We made our way then to the mechanical square, where there was a life-sized airplane as well as a smaller-than-life-sized (I think) rocket.
Rocket.
Aleksei led us farther and farther into the park, giving us interesting tidbits along the way. For example, he explained that the building next to the Ukrainian building (I think it was Belarus or something) has a star on top, which according to legend comes from the Kremlin because they made more stars than the Kremlin had towers.
The Ukraine building. Definitely the coolest-looking.
That's the star he was talking about.
This was all interesting, and since we were winding down, we decided to stop at the bathroom. I really had to go. The woman's bathroom was easy enough to find, since its entrance was at the front of a building. There was an M with an arrow next to it, signaling to the men that their area of relief is just around the corner.
Or not. There was no bathroom around the corner, so I wound up not going to the bathroom for another hour. If there's one thing you learn about in Russia, it's just how much your bladder can take. Though it was nice to learn that Russians appreciate good music, even if it replaced a nice WC.
Weeeeeeww! Beatles!!
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