Tour of the city

On Friday night we went to a Mexican restaurant just to see what it was like. As expected, it wasn't that great. They are very fond of oil in this country and after putting about an inch thick of cheese inside the tortilla, they drowned it in olive oil. It was a fun experience, though. They played a lot of very well-known music and they had dancing and live music after a while.

I've been taking note of all the American things they have here translated into Russian. Besides Starbucks, they have McDonalds, Coors Light, Red Bull, Coca Cola, BP gas stations, and a million other very familiar things.

Yesterday we took a bus tour around the city to check everything out. We started out by going to Moscow State University, which is a beautiful building in the highest part of the city.

(The University close up)

(The view from the hills by the University)

Apparently there are similar buildings around the city that Stalin ordered back in the day to be built, but this is the largest. After going to the university, we went to the Novodevichy Cemetery, which is the most famous cemetery in Moscow. I was a little dubious when we were going into the cemetery that it would be enjoyable, but there are famous people that even I knew buried there, like Mikhail Bulgakov (the author of The Master and Margarita, the book we had to read for the program), Anton Chekhov, Khrushchev, and Yeltsin. All of the graves had sculptures and were beautifully decorated with flowers and very well kept up.

We left the cemetery and went to a park that had a bridge that everyone getting married in Moscow went to. They have a tradition of putting locks on these "trees" on the bridge and if they did, it meant they would stay together forever. We saw quite a few wedding parties coming through and taking pictures, but I did not see anyone put any locks on the trees.


After leaving the park, we went to Red Square.
St. Basil's Cathedral was very beautiful and an interesting landmark, but it has always looked a little odd to me since all of the domes are decorated differently. Our guide told us that when they built the cathedral, the domes all looked the same and it wasn't until much later that they put the bright colors onto the domes. There is a shopping center in Red Square called "GUM" that has a bunch of very expensive stores and reminded me a lot of Stanford Shopping Center. We ate at their "Italian Cafe" - which meant pizza and salad. (I look very puffy in the picture because I was wearing about five layers - it was cold!)

For breakfast every day I've been eating "kasha" - what seems to be a buckwheat porridge but I understand it can refer to many different types of porridge. Also we have yogurt and tea at every breakfast. Yesterday and today for breakfast we had syrniki, a type of little pancake made from cottage cheese. They are delicious. Another food they seem to be very fond of here is sour cream. They put it on top of syrniki and in a million other dishes I've had. Their sour cream tastes pretty normal, but the milk has a funny taste to it. I'm not sure why that is, and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. It is whole milk, but it definitely tastes different from the whole milk at home.