Days 20-21-22 - Museums of Ethnography and Zoology and Church of Christ the Saviour on Spilled Blood
This will be my last summary post on Russia, I'll try to wrap up the last two days and a little of the flight back, and then anything else I post will just be musings if I think of something I'd previously forgotten (which is probably a lot of stuff to be honest).
I actually just posted out a bunch of gifts for people today, and I've sent postcards to my family in Australia. I'll give you guys your gifts when I see you as I'll have to explain what they are and where I got them. My friends in the US though (Nezu, Seijikat, Emily and Ana) you guys should get a package in a few weeks time. :3
So without further ado, on to the last couple of days of our trip!
With the Hermitage seen we decided to go through our options for the last couple of days, there were still a few things on our list we hadn't seen such as the Blockade Museum and other little tidbits, but we ended up deciding on the Museums of Ethnography and Zoology (two separate places) for reasons which I'm sure will become apart in the description.
Setting out we jumped on the Metro again and took a few stops down to the other side of the river than we'd been on a few days before, we knew we had a bit of a walk ahead of us but what started out being a 20 minute walk turned into almost an hour when we ended up taking a wrong turn and walking 20 minutes in the wrong direction. We became a bit suspicious when we hadn't hit the river and instead seemed to be walking into an industrial zone with nothing more around than the only real pedestrian light crossing we'd seen in the entire time we'd been in Russia.
We trekked back and thankfully managed not to slip over again on the sheets of ice along the footpath, but decided after being out for so long in the cold that it was time for a little lunch. We thus stopped at the first place we could find, the KFC near the station we'd started off from, which turned out be somewhat amusing when a homeless man walking in, asked the cashier for a freebie, then stole someones drink and walked out again while I was ordering.
Warmed up again we took off in the right direction this time and it wasn't long before we were wandering along the river and found ourselves walking past the sphinxes. Unfortunately my shots of them didn't turn out properly, but Mon may have gotten a shot in her stuff yet to be posted.
I did however grab a cute shot of Mon squishing her face when I turned to snap her picture
We also noticed that people had actually gone out onto the frozen river and written their names in giant letters by dragging their feet along the snow, it was quite large so I'm sure you'd probably have seen it flying overhead. I think Mon got a few shots, but mine was pretty indistinguishable, so I won't post them.
Getting quite cold walking along the river we thankfully found the Museum of Ethnography (also known as the Museum of Curiosities) a few minutes later.
They don't allow you to take photos inside the Museum, which is understandable given their content, I actually saw the flash of someone taking a picture at one point and one of the museum ladies quickly rushed over and began hurriedly telling people off, including us, despite us not really knowing what she was saying. I never did see who took the picture though, probably some tourist, whoever they were, they got away with it that time I think.
Anyway, the Museum is an odd one, it's very dated to begin with, the first section is a series of displays on ancient tribes, showing their different methods of making clothes, weapons and the like, including wax models of them wearing them, the whole thing would be a little crude if it weren't also quite interesting. We found ourselves getting a little bored of most of the displays though as it just went through stereotypical items from different cultures, Japan, the Middle East, Africa, and eventually we made our way up to the reason I'm sure most people come to this place, the room of jarred fetuses (fetii?) and deformities.
It sounds pretty crude, and it is, but the collection is one that was originally owned by 18th century collectors who initially just owned them as talking pieces. It was afterwards that they began to realise that studying these unfortunate deformities might be important for medical research, to learn what might cause them and what could be done to avoid it. A lot of discoveries were made through this in regards to preserving specimens and learning about things like blood circulation and the like. The collection however is unsettling, from cyclopses to babies with inborn legs and many conjoined twins. There are also some animals, which are sometimes fitting and sometimes very strangely placed. There'll be a display case of limbs and skulls and things, and then a random fish in the middle of it all, very very odd.
The skeletons I found the most interesting, the baby skeletons are almost cartoony in their proportion and the conjoined one almost looks unrealistic in it's abnormality. It's all a bit strange but very interesting to see, and they aren't displayed in a disrespectful way, it's just hard to display that material in any way that isn't a little bit shocking. Definitely a one of a kind thing to see in person.
With only a few more rooms to look at we decided since it was getting a bit late to head off, and picked up a t-shirt for Mon's brother featuring the aforementioned conjoined skeleton before making our way to the Museum of Zoology.
This place was both quite interesting, and a tad tacky at the same time. The vast majority of the place is made up of stuffed animals and animal skeletons. Walking in you enter a room of whale skeletons, the Blue Whale dwarfing all of the others by a pretty considerable proportion.
The most interesting thing about the place though is definitely the preserved Wooly Mammoth, it was found intact, preserved in ice in Siberia and is about 44,000 years old if Mon and I remember right, I thought it was 37, but either way, it was very old, and among the skeletons and remnants of tusks and other bones, it very impressive to see.
He's missing a lot of hair, but apart from that he just looks like he's sleeping, this shot makes him look a bit like an elephant actually, I think it was the lighting, he's actually a bit browner and quite a lot larger, with hairy tufts still there around the back.
There were heaps and heaps of other animals of course, including penguins, big cats, dogs, birds, well, pretty much everything.
I liked the Polar Bears, but they just aren't as impressive when stuffed
What are you looking at?
Anyway, by the time we were done there the other part of the museum, the live insect room was closing up, we weren't too fussed though and headed off to grab out coats. There were about 6 tiny souvenir stalls downstairs for some reason too, but all of them had basically the same stuff, and none of it was good. It seems everyone in Russia gets their souvenirs from the same place, but occasionally you get a few variations which the others don't have, and that was enough to keep us looking, despite never finding much of interest.
With that all seen and it starting to get dark, we decided it was time to head back to the hotel, but not before grabbing a little dinner. Russky Kitsch was thankfully on the way back, and one of the places I wanted to check out. The restaurant is pretty amusing, it's fairly classy for the most part, but then they have paintings of cartoon Stalin smoking a cigarette with other communist leaders, and party rooms with silly Russian memorabilia, and menus with fake Louis Vuitton pattern on the front and pictures of scantily clad women in party room in the back. A strange place, but the food was pretty good, we had some Russian dumpling thing for entree and some French wine with our meal, it was all very nice and we hung around for a while before finally dragging ourselves back out into the cold and back to the hotel to get up in the morning and drag our bags around for the last trip home.
Getting up early we packed up our bags, and threw out a bunch of our thermals and thick socks that we simply had no need for back in Australia, good thing too as we found out later that combined our suitcases matched exactly the allowance the airline gave us.
Checking our luggage in at the railway station we headed out to fill in our last day before we had to jump on the train back to Moscow that night. As we had a limited time we decided to first check out the Church of Christ the Saviour on Spilled Blood. The reason for the last part of the name is because Alexander the 2nd was assassinated there, blown up apparently, and a monument is on the site where it happened inside the restored church.
When we got to the Church we took a couple of shots of the outside before being approached by two people in costume, Peter the Great (and in his words) Catherine the Terrible, they wanted some money to take a picture with them in front of the Church, and while we turned them down, it did amuse us quite a bit.
Inside the place is very impressive, the icons and decorations on the wall are all done in mosaic, and all match together very well, the whole place is like one big picture, with several pieces flowing into each other without any kind of border. Mon has lots of shots from inside the Church and will post them on her own blog when she gets the chance, so keep an eye out because they're quite impressive. I will say though, my favourite is probably still Assumption Cathedral in Smolensk, it felt the most tasteful and while this beautiful, it was still a close second.
After a quick stopover at Kofe Haus we decided to check out the Udelnaya Fair as it is on the same line that we were on and Mon and I still wanted to pick up a few final gifts for people. Unfortunately when we finally got out there the place turned out to be quite crap, I was expecting a big bustling market like Izmaylovo which we visited in Moscow, but it turned out to be a small section of stalls mostly selling junk, more of a tiny Trash and Treasure rather than a Queen Vic Market. To make matters worse the whole area was covered in a sheet of ice so we had to slide around and avoid falling before we got back on the train and headed back in to spend the rest of the time doing some final shopping at the center near the station.
Finally, tired and in need of a good sleep we picked up our baggage and boarded the overnight train back to Moscow in order to start the final leg of our trip. There was nothing too exciting about the trip I'm afraid, we didn't really talk to the two people in our cabin as we were so tired we basically just set up our beds and went straight to sleep, and arriving at roughly 6am by the time we woke it was time to get up, make ourselves vaguely presentable and trundle out into the cold Moscow air. We did however have to wander past a policeman with an AK47 standing just outside the train when we exited, but thankfully he ignored us. I'm not sure if he was looking for something in particular, or just liked carrying it around, but it's certainly something you wouldn't see in Australia.
We did quite well to avoid the police during our time in Russia actually, we'd heard they were corrupt and like to shake down foreigners for small infractions so they can collect bribes, but we took note of the places it'd been reported before and generally just did our best to avoid them and not look too much like foreigners at most times, so we got through without any kind of issue. Mon did notice a couple of officers looking quite a bit sleazy towards a girl on the escalator once, but I didn't spot that, and for the most part they just looked like they were everywhere, so I guess with a large enough number you're always going to get a few bad seeds.
We only had a few hours to spend in Moscow before we were set to catch our flight, and what we really wanted was a shower. Unfortunately that wasn't really in the cards so we had to settle for a change of clothes and lots of coffee at one last Kofe Haus while we checked our mail and prepared for a very long flight. We sat in the non-smoking section though unfortunately which meant we generally got ignored for the most part, and they missed out on a bit of money from us as we spent quite a while waiting for another menu before we finally just got up and left.
Then we started the dance of metal detectors, both at the rail station as well as the airport, which are a lot scarier when you can't speak the same language as the person operating it. Thankfully we were well used to it by then and could forsee any issues with belts, boots and the like, and checked in for our flight with more than enough time to grab a nice pizza lunch and spend only an hour in the waiting area before we boarded the plane. Unfortunately during this time I somehow managed to make my Pepsi bottle explode and this spill all over the laptop we brought with us. Luckily the one we brought was the little netbook which was already fairly dodgy, and I was able to get some towels and mostly save it. I say mostly because now for some reason the left ctrl and space bar don't work, I don't know why as those aren't the keys it spilled on, so I assume there's actually some internal damage. I'll play around with it a bit later, but given that it lasted through our entire trip, I think it had a pretty good run for something which already reset every 2 hours for no good reason.
The flight was thankfully bareable, though our entertainment systems didn't work for most of the flight and Mon and I only managed to watch about 3/4 of a movie before they just refused to start playing them again. We were going to get them reset but they never seemed to do it, which may have been a blessing as it meant we actually slept on and off throughout the flight and weren't so dead tired when we arrived at 7:00pm back in Melbourne. There was of course a stop over on the way, but apart from a brief issue with the longest line in the world, that was fairly unmemorable. I will say however that other areas of the Abu Dhabi airport are not as dodgy as the one we were in, this one was a lot more like the airports we'd become used to, and thus the few hours we spend there were actually quite bearable.
So yes! We touched back down in Australia, and after getting into customs and saying that we had a matryoshka and a chocolate block to declare they let us out without even looking and we chuckled yet again at how simple it seems to be to get through customs if you actually decide to declare something.
Anywho, I'm finally up to date! If I find more pictures or remember more stories I'll see if I can post them up, but for now, I hope you guys enjoyed hearing about our holiday, and it's good to know this will be here if I ever want to look back and reminisce.
Until next time!
I actually just posted out a bunch of gifts for people today, and I've sent postcards to my family in Australia. I'll give you guys your gifts when I see you as I'll have to explain what they are and where I got them. My friends in the US though (Nezu, Seijikat, Emily and Ana) you guys should get a package in a few weeks time. :3
So without further ado, on to the last couple of days of our trip!
With the Hermitage seen we decided to go through our options for the last couple of days, there were still a few things on our list we hadn't seen such as the Blockade Museum and other little tidbits, but we ended up deciding on the Museums of Ethnography and Zoology (two separate places) for reasons which I'm sure will become apart in the description.
Setting out we jumped on the Metro again and took a few stops down to the other side of the river than we'd been on a few days before, we knew we had a bit of a walk ahead of us but what started out being a 20 minute walk turned into almost an hour when we ended up taking a wrong turn and walking 20 minutes in the wrong direction. We became a bit suspicious when we hadn't hit the river and instead seemed to be walking into an industrial zone with nothing more around than the only real pedestrian light crossing we'd seen in the entire time we'd been in Russia.
We trekked back and thankfully managed not to slip over again on the sheets of ice along the footpath, but decided after being out for so long in the cold that it was time for a little lunch. We thus stopped at the first place we could find, the KFC near the station we'd started off from, which turned out be somewhat amusing when a homeless man walking in, asked the cashier for a freebie, then stole someones drink and walked out again while I was ordering.
Warmed up again we took off in the right direction this time and it wasn't long before we were wandering along the river and found ourselves walking past the sphinxes. Unfortunately my shots of them didn't turn out properly, but Mon may have gotten a shot in her stuff yet to be posted.
I did however grab a cute shot of Mon squishing her face when I turned to snap her picture
We also noticed that people had actually gone out onto the frozen river and written their names in giant letters by dragging their feet along the snow, it was quite large so I'm sure you'd probably have seen it flying overhead. I think Mon got a few shots, but mine was pretty indistinguishable, so I won't post them.
Getting quite cold walking along the river we thankfully found the Museum of Ethnography (also known as the Museum of Curiosities) a few minutes later.
They don't allow you to take photos inside the Museum, which is understandable given their content, I actually saw the flash of someone taking a picture at one point and one of the museum ladies quickly rushed over and began hurriedly telling people off, including us, despite us not really knowing what she was saying. I never did see who took the picture though, probably some tourist, whoever they were, they got away with it that time I think.
Anyway, the Museum is an odd one, it's very dated to begin with, the first section is a series of displays on ancient tribes, showing their different methods of making clothes, weapons and the like, including wax models of them wearing them, the whole thing would be a little crude if it weren't also quite interesting. We found ourselves getting a little bored of most of the displays though as it just went through stereotypical items from different cultures, Japan, the Middle East, Africa, and eventually we made our way up to the reason I'm sure most people come to this place, the room of jarred fetuses (fetii?) and deformities.
It sounds pretty crude, and it is, but the collection is one that was originally owned by 18th century collectors who initially just owned them as talking pieces. It was afterwards that they began to realise that studying these unfortunate deformities might be important for medical research, to learn what might cause them and what could be done to avoid it. A lot of discoveries were made through this in regards to preserving specimens and learning about things like blood circulation and the like. The collection however is unsettling, from cyclopses to babies with inborn legs and many conjoined twins. There are also some animals, which are sometimes fitting and sometimes very strangely placed. There'll be a display case of limbs and skulls and things, and then a random fish in the middle of it all, very very odd.
The skeletons I found the most interesting, the baby skeletons are almost cartoony in their proportion and the conjoined one almost looks unrealistic in it's abnormality. It's all a bit strange but very interesting to see, and they aren't displayed in a disrespectful way, it's just hard to display that material in any way that isn't a little bit shocking. Definitely a one of a kind thing to see in person.
With only a few more rooms to look at we decided since it was getting a bit late to head off, and picked up a t-shirt for Mon's brother featuring the aforementioned conjoined skeleton before making our way to the Museum of Zoology.
This place was both quite interesting, and a tad tacky at the same time. The vast majority of the place is made up of stuffed animals and animal skeletons. Walking in you enter a room of whale skeletons, the Blue Whale dwarfing all of the others by a pretty considerable proportion.
The most interesting thing about the place though is definitely the preserved Wooly Mammoth, it was found intact, preserved in ice in Siberia and is about 44,000 years old if Mon and I remember right, I thought it was 37, but either way, it was very old, and among the skeletons and remnants of tusks and other bones, it very impressive to see.
He's missing a lot of hair, but apart from that he just looks like he's sleeping, this shot makes him look a bit like an elephant actually, I think it was the lighting, he's actually a bit browner and quite a lot larger, with hairy tufts still there around the back.
There were heaps and heaps of other animals of course, including penguins, big cats, dogs, birds, well, pretty much everything.
I liked the Polar Bears, but they just aren't as impressive when stuffed
What are you looking at?
Anyway, by the time we were done there the other part of the museum, the live insect room was closing up, we weren't too fussed though and headed off to grab out coats. There were about 6 tiny souvenir stalls downstairs for some reason too, but all of them had basically the same stuff, and none of it was good. It seems everyone in Russia gets their souvenirs from the same place, but occasionally you get a few variations which the others don't have, and that was enough to keep us looking, despite never finding much of interest.
With that all seen and it starting to get dark, we decided it was time to head back to the hotel, but not before grabbing a little dinner. Russky Kitsch was thankfully on the way back, and one of the places I wanted to check out. The restaurant is pretty amusing, it's fairly classy for the most part, but then they have paintings of cartoon Stalin smoking a cigarette with other communist leaders, and party rooms with silly Russian memorabilia, and menus with fake Louis Vuitton pattern on the front and pictures of scantily clad women in party room in the back. A strange place, but the food was pretty good, we had some Russian dumpling thing for entree and some French wine with our meal, it was all very nice and we hung around for a while before finally dragging ourselves back out into the cold and back to the hotel to get up in the morning and drag our bags around for the last trip home.
Getting up early we packed up our bags, and threw out a bunch of our thermals and thick socks that we simply had no need for back in Australia, good thing too as we found out later that combined our suitcases matched exactly the allowance the airline gave us.
Checking our luggage in at the railway station we headed out to fill in our last day before we had to jump on the train back to Moscow that night. As we had a limited time we decided to first check out the Church of Christ the Saviour on Spilled Blood. The reason for the last part of the name is because Alexander the 2nd was assassinated there, blown up apparently, and a monument is on the site where it happened inside the restored church.
When we got to the Church we took a couple of shots of the outside before being approached by two people in costume, Peter the Great (and in his words) Catherine the Terrible, they wanted some money to take a picture with them in front of the Church, and while we turned them down, it did amuse us quite a bit.
Inside the place is very impressive, the icons and decorations on the wall are all done in mosaic, and all match together very well, the whole place is like one big picture, with several pieces flowing into each other without any kind of border. Mon has lots of shots from inside the Church and will post them on her own blog when she gets the chance, so keep an eye out because they're quite impressive. I will say though, my favourite is probably still Assumption Cathedral in Smolensk, it felt the most tasteful and while this beautiful, it was still a close second.
After a quick stopover at Kofe Haus we decided to check out the Udelnaya Fair as it is on the same line that we were on and Mon and I still wanted to pick up a few final gifts for people. Unfortunately when we finally got out there the place turned out to be quite crap, I was expecting a big bustling market like Izmaylovo which we visited in Moscow, but it turned out to be a small section of stalls mostly selling junk, more of a tiny Trash and Treasure rather than a Queen Vic Market. To make matters worse the whole area was covered in a sheet of ice so we had to slide around and avoid falling before we got back on the train and headed back in to spend the rest of the time doing some final shopping at the center near the station.
Finally, tired and in need of a good sleep we picked up our baggage and boarded the overnight train back to Moscow in order to start the final leg of our trip. There was nothing too exciting about the trip I'm afraid, we didn't really talk to the two people in our cabin as we were so tired we basically just set up our beds and went straight to sleep, and arriving at roughly 6am by the time we woke it was time to get up, make ourselves vaguely presentable and trundle out into the cold Moscow air. We did however have to wander past a policeman with an AK47 standing just outside the train when we exited, but thankfully he ignored us. I'm not sure if he was looking for something in particular, or just liked carrying it around, but it's certainly something you wouldn't see in Australia.
We did quite well to avoid the police during our time in Russia actually, we'd heard they were corrupt and like to shake down foreigners for small infractions so they can collect bribes, but we took note of the places it'd been reported before and generally just did our best to avoid them and not look too much like foreigners at most times, so we got through without any kind of issue. Mon did notice a couple of officers looking quite a bit sleazy towards a girl on the escalator once, but I didn't spot that, and for the most part they just looked like they were everywhere, so I guess with a large enough number you're always going to get a few bad seeds.
We only had a few hours to spend in Moscow before we were set to catch our flight, and what we really wanted was a shower. Unfortunately that wasn't really in the cards so we had to settle for a change of clothes and lots of coffee at one last Kofe Haus while we checked our mail and prepared for a very long flight. We sat in the non-smoking section though unfortunately which meant we generally got ignored for the most part, and they missed out on a bit of money from us as we spent quite a while waiting for another menu before we finally just got up and left.
Then we started the dance of metal detectors, both at the rail station as well as the airport, which are a lot scarier when you can't speak the same language as the person operating it. Thankfully we were well used to it by then and could forsee any issues with belts, boots and the like, and checked in for our flight with more than enough time to grab a nice pizza lunch and spend only an hour in the waiting area before we boarded the plane. Unfortunately during this time I somehow managed to make my Pepsi bottle explode and this spill all over the laptop we brought with us. Luckily the one we brought was the little netbook which was already fairly dodgy, and I was able to get some towels and mostly save it. I say mostly because now for some reason the left ctrl and space bar don't work, I don't know why as those aren't the keys it spilled on, so I assume there's actually some internal damage. I'll play around with it a bit later, but given that it lasted through our entire trip, I think it had a pretty good run for something which already reset every 2 hours for no good reason.
The flight was thankfully bareable, though our entertainment systems didn't work for most of the flight and Mon and I only managed to watch about 3/4 of a movie before they just refused to start playing them again. We were going to get them reset but they never seemed to do it, which may have been a blessing as it meant we actually slept on and off throughout the flight and weren't so dead tired when we arrived at 7:00pm back in Melbourne. There was of course a stop over on the way, but apart from a brief issue with the longest line in the world, that was fairly unmemorable. I will say however that other areas of the Abu Dhabi airport are not as dodgy as the one we were in, this one was a lot more like the airports we'd become used to, and thus the few hours we spend there were actually quite bearable.
So yes! We touched back down in Australia, and after getting into customs and saying that we had a matryoshka and a chocolate block to declare they let us out without even looking and we chuckled yet again at how simple it seems to be to get through customs if you actually decide to declare something.
Anywho, I'm finally up to date! If I find more pictures or remember more stories I'll see if I can post them up, but for now, I hope you guys enjoyed hearing about our holiday, and it's good to know this will be here if I ever want to look back and reminisce.
Until next time!