Yearly Archives: 2013

Moscow Kremlin

The Kremlin Armoury

We wanted to visit the Kremlin again, this time to see the Armoury Chamber – a purpose-built museum to house the riches of the Tsars. Getting tickets was easy, but they’re for timed “seances” of two hours in duration. We arrived at the gate about 10 minutes past the start of our allotted “seance”, to find an extremely slow-moving queue of one security gate at the southern Kremlin entrance, compared to the 8 or so for the main western one. 40 minutes later with half our allocation spent on queuing, we were in.

Third queue of the day – almost inside the Armoury!

On the positive side, the excellent audio-guide is included in the price, and for all we thought we would get rounded up at 11:30, our fears were unfounded and we were able to walk back through some of the rooms and re-visit their vast collections, ignoring the time constraints.

We agreed that this is the best, most well-laid out collection we’ve ever visited because of its size, variety of the collections, and for me at least, the way the exhibition differs room-to-room. For example, the first room contains religious iconography with intricate gold thread and jewels. The next contains weaponry: rifles, duelling pistols, swords and armour gifted to the Tsars and created by the craftsmen of the Armoury, and so on it goes, every room is something new and a change from the last which keeps the interest piqued.

The Kremlin Armoury (photo credit: thefrenchblue.com)

As part of the Armoury’s collection are 10 Fabergé eggs. Some of them were on loan when we visited, and it would have been thoughtful had they put a photo in their place – especially as the audio guide described two of the ones on loan! I didn’t know that they were made to order, some taking two years to make, and contain a secret inside that was relevant to the intended recipient. We’d have loved to have seen the Trans-Siberian Railway Fabergé egg!

The Trans-Siberian Fabergé Egg – with working miniature train! (photo credit: wikipedia.org)

The Kremlin Diamond Fund

After leaving the Armoury and the Kremlin for a spot of lunch, we queued again to catch the first afternoon “seance” of the Kremlin’s Diamond Fund.
We’d read plenty of information of how you actually get to it, and it all seemed a little complicated – indeed it is..
The Diamond Fund is in the Armoury museum building, but it’s managed by a different government department to the Armoury which means the tickets can only be bought once you’re inside. To get into the Armoury you either need an Armoury ticket or you can just say the Moscow Kremlin equivalent of open sesame.. “Diamond Fund”. This not only got us into the building, but past the ticket gates too – if you didn’t want the audio guide (and you had the front to try it), you could visit the Armoury for free! – up the stairs and en-route is the Diamond Fund entrance and ticket desk. There’s a small waiting area and despite queuing outside for half-an-hour past the stated opening time to get in we’d timed it perfectly.

The Diamond Fund has even tighter security – no cameras, phones, or bags are allowed and there’s an extra security checkpoint just before the entrance which feels like you’re stepping into a posh bank vault.

Oh but inside.. Wow! The darkened rooms accentuate the sparkling wealth on show. The first display cases contain un-cut diamonds grouped by size and colour, arranged in tubes about the size of toilet rolls, maybe 15 or so tubes per case and easily 40+ diamonds in a tube.

As you progress though the first of the two rooms, the diamonds get bigger and there are cut diamonds alongside other precious stones; rubies, emeralds, and sapphires – including the world’s largest sapphire.

In the centre of the room is a large square cabinet containing gold nuggets found in the mines of Siberia. Most are larger than your hand, and there are 3 Russian stamped gold bars on display too.

The Orlov Diamond (Photo credit: Elkan Wijnberg; http://commons.wikimedia.org; www.adin.be)

The second room contains intricate, ornate, and elaborate jewellery, including the massive Orlov Diamond, gifted by Count Grigory Orlov to Catherine the Great in the 18th Century, and believed to have been originally found in India, then subsequently stolen from a Hindu statue in 1750 by a deserter from the French army. Seeing it reminded me of the line from the movie Snatch: “Frankie four-fingers has a diamond the size of a fist” – it’s about the same size!

The two Kremlin museums are quite expensive to visit at ~£14 and ~£10 each respectively, but we thought they were worth it given the collections on display.

Travelling Underground in Russia

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When staying anywhere we like to use our own two feet to get around – it’s cheaper, we get to see more of the town or city, and the exercise does us good! However, staying in a big city means that sometimes walking just isn’t feasible or we’d be walking all day and not seeing the sight that we want to see. Moscow and St Petersburg are Russia’s two largest cities and so we’ve had to get to grips with their underground rail systems (buses and trams are usually trickier as maps of routes are not so readily available and stops not so well signed). Fortunately both cities have networks that are cheap and pretty straightforward to use.

The metro in St Petersburg is the deepest in the world (by average depth of its stations). The deepest station is Admiralteyskaya at 105m below ground. The escalators down to the platforms are ridiculously long (about 3 minutes by our reckoning). We kept trying to get a photo to show them, but it’s really tricky to get a good perspective. It’s just 28 roubles (about £0.55) for any journey. For that you get a token, something like a fairground ride token, which is fed into the station entrance to let you through the turnstile, you are then free to exit whenever, and from any station. Although stations are fairly far apart, the five lines reach most corners of the city and trains run every 2-3 minutes during the day from one end of the line to the other.

St Petersburg metro: Metro tokens, train arriving at the platform, inside the carriage

It’s a long way down!

The Moscow metro system runs in a similar way to St Petersburg but uses magnetic cards rather than coin tokens. You can buy cards valid for one trip (30 roubles, approx £0.60) or more with prices getting cheaper as you buy more (e.g. 300 roubles for 11 trips works out at approx 27 roubles or £0.55 per trip). It is a larger network with 12 lines and almost 200 stations and we found it a little more confusing to begin with, especially the signs which direct you how to transfer between the different lines within the connecting stations. It’s also been a test of our Russian reading skills as, for the most part, there are no signs (and certainly no announcements) in English. Having a metro map with the stations named in Russian and English has been invaluable and we’ve found that the best way to work out when to get off is to count how many stops we need and then keep track while we’re on the train although this did backfire on us once and we ended up overshooting by a station so we had to swap to the other platform and get the next train back! Moscow’s metro is the 4th busiest in the world (after Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing) and we really got a feel for that when travelling at rush hour.

Moscow metro: station name on platform (Belorusskaya), metro station marker on street, busy Taganskaya station

Some of the stations in St Petersburg are quite impressive with chandeliers and mosaics, and Avtovo’s glass faced columns were the real stand-out, but you can think of them as a warm-up act for the Moscow stations. Stalin ordered that the metro stations should be designed to glorify the the Soviet system and awe the people. We spent a few hours one afternoon hopping from station to station and admiring the designs (all for the price of one trip – good value sightseeing!).

Light and airy Avtovo station, St Petersburg

Different styles of decoration at metro stations (clockwise from top left): ceiling mosaic at Belorusskaya, station chandelier at Prospekt Mira, stained glass at Novoslobodskaya, wall mosaic at Kievskaya

Komsomolskaya station, Moscow

Andrew played with exposure times to show the movement in Prospekt Mira station, Moscow

There’s even a short stretch of monorail in the Moscow transport system

Victory Day in Moscow

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In Russia May 9th is a holiday, Victory Day commemorates the end of the Great Patriotic War (as the Russians call World War 2). In Moscow the day is marked by a big military parade in Red Square (we saw the end of some of the rehearsals for this earlier in the week), and celebrations throughout the day at Park Pobedi (Victory Park).

Soldiers after parade rehearsals with the Kremlin in the background

The day was sunny and we’d heard that there would be a concert in the park so we packed a picnic and headed off on the metro. As we arrived, we noticed lots of people carrying flowers (Russians seem to buy a lot of cut flowers generally and we have seen several 24 hour florists…). War veterans (presumably mostly from later conflicts than WW2) go to the park in their uniform and medals and members of the public give them a flower or two from their bunch, thank them and sometimes get their photos taken together. It seemed a really nice and touching way to remember what the veterans had gone through. Other flowers are placed on the various memorials around the park.

Veteran with a huge bunch of flowers

Flowers on war memorial

The park is pretty big, and as well as lots of grassy areas contains a small church, a large memorial obelisk, and a museum of the war. The military vehicles and fortifications part of the museum was open yesterday and we had a wander around with the crowds.

Park Pobedi on Victory Day

Us enjoying the sunshine

From 2pm there was live music on a stage in the park beginning with a concert by the orchestra from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg with their conductor, Valery Gergiev, and solo pianist, Denis Matsuev. Afterwards there were performances by military choirs and patriotic songs by (presumably well known) Russian singers.

Obelisk and concert stage

The celebrations ended with a firework display at about 10pm and us wondering how to get back across the city to our hostel. The huge numbers of people in the crowd mean that the metro stations around the park are closed down for the evening which we hadn’t realised in advance. Not having braved the local bus system in Moscow and being a little afraid to do so in the dark without knowing at least which number bus might take us in the right direction, we opted to walk with the crowd towards the city centre in the hope of finding an open metro station. Having walked for about an hour and past 2 shut stations, we paused and reconsidered the buses (nope still no good, we didn’t even recognise the listed destinations), so were left with either a 2 hour walk home, or trying to find a taxi which wouldn’t rip us off… Still unsure, we noticed a stream of people seemed to be going down the subway steps to the nearby metro station, so we followed – yay the metro was being reopened at midnight!

We arrived back at our hostel intending to drop straight into our beds, but the owner had just returned from holiday and we were invited to join him and some friends in the kitchen. It would have been rude to refuse, so we stayed up for tea, chats and a trip to the apartment block roof for a view of nighttime Moscow before crawling into bed at 2.30am – phew, what a long day!

Moscow by night from our apartment block roof

Reading Russian

Preamble

At first glance, Russian looks pretty impenetrable. It has 33 letters instead of the western Latin 26, but with a little knowledge about the difference in their pronunciation, you’ll find that most words are actually either English, sound English-like, or are borrowed from other languages (just as English does). That said, there are Russian-only words, so this doesn’t work all the time!

No change needed

A a, E e, K k, M m, O o, T t – all sound the same in Russian as they do in English.

Common Russian Letters

Like most western cities, there are lots of cafes in the towns and cities. The word “cafe” looks like “кафе” (and “coffee ” looks like “кофе”) which means Ф (ф in lowercase) in Russian sounds like “f” in English.

This cafe sign gives us some context to work with. Some other non-obvious but common letter sounds in Russian are

С which sounds like “s”
Р which you can remember as an unfinished “R”. Trill it if you can, as they do in Scotland, and
П which looks like the symbol for Pi, and sounds like “p”

With these, we can have a stab at pronouncing the first long word in our кафе sign: “ЭСПРЕССО” becomes “some-backwards-e-thing-spresso” – ahh! espresso! The backwards-e, or Э sounds like an e (that’s easy to remember!), so we get “espresso”.

The next word on our кафе sign is “КАППУЧИНО”. We already know the first 4 letters, so lets look at the last 5, they are:

У (or v in lowercase) sounds like “oo”
Ч looks like an upside-down “h”, and sounds like “ch” when you flip it back the “right” way
И, together with the backwards R shouts Russian to western eyes! И sounds like “i”, and
Н sounds like “N” because И doesn’t sound like an “N”

Let’s pronounce the whole thing.. “КАППУЧИНО” sounds like “kappoochino”.. Cappuccino!

And the last word of the three introduces one new letter: Б (б in lowercase), which looks like the letter b and, thankfully, sounds like a “b” too! That means the next word, “БАР” is “bar”.

There’s only one word left in the sign, and that’s “ХАУЗ”, which follows the word “кофе”. Context suggests it’s probably the name of the cafe, so it might not make sense to us, but lets have a go anyway.

There are actually two new letters here.. The first is “Х”, which sounds like the “ch” at the end of the Scottish word “loch”, and the second one “З”, not to be confused with the backwards-e (Э) looks like the number 3 and sounds like “z”. (Try to remember “three.. zee”). Putting it all together gives us “chaooz”. Try saying it out loud (or quietly like you’re reading aloud to yourself in a library) but remember the “ch” is soft as in the Scottish “loch” (so more like “h”).

Therefore, “КОФЕ ХАУЗ – ЭСПРЕССО КАППУЧИНО БАР” is a place is called Coffee House, and it’s an Espresso Cappuccino Bar!

More Common Russian Letters

While we’re on the subject of bars and liquids, perhaps you’ve seen this famous brand of Russian Vodka and wondered what it says?

Let’s read it! First, you need to nip out out and grab yourself a bottle so you can play along at home or at work..

The first word is “РУССИЙ”. We already know most of these letters, so we can get “Roosski”. The accented и: й makes the “i” sound like a “y”, so we end up with “Roosskiy”. For learning another letter, take a shot from your bottle. This is a Russian word and it means “Russian” in Russian!

The second word “СТАНДАРТ”, the new letter here is “Д” which sounds like “d”. Take another shot and read aloud “standart” – close enough to the word “standard” to my ears (and to yours too after two shots).

The last word on the front is “ВОДКА” – “bodka”, obvious really that this reads “vodka”, so the “В” (в in lowercase, and also looks like a 6 in some typefaces) sounds like a “v”.

“РУССИЙ СТАНДАРТ ВОДКА” is Russian Standard vodka. It’s good stuff too, especially the platinum :o)

A Few More Common Russian Letters

Now for a couple of letters that I find tricky to remember..
Taken in a supermarket – can you guess what it says?

Г sounds like “G”. This is the one I find tricky
Л sounds like an “L”, and not to be confused with П (“P”) – indeed, some typefaces use Λ which is easier to differentiate, but still tricky
Ь is a trick one – it’s essentially silent, breaking up a word if it appears in the middle

With our newfound knowledge, lets tackle the supermarket sign.. “ГРИΛЬ” sounds like “gril”.. I bet you can now see the rotisserie chickens in the background :o)

Finally, three more letters I don’t have a picture for..

Ц sounds like “ts”
Ш and Щ sound like “sh” and “shchY” respectively
Ж sounds like “zh”. Commonly used as the abbreviation for women’s toilets

That’s it for my list, though I haven’t covered all of the Russian alphabet, I hope it helps your Russian comprehension when you’re out and about!

St Petersburg round up

Here’s our St Petersburg round up:

What photo takes you right back to St Petersburg?

This was a tough one. We did so much that it was difficult to choose a single photo, but we decided on the magnificent Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood. Not only because its even more impressive inside than out, but our hostel was just a block away from it so we saw it every day.

Summarise St Petersburg in three words.

Splendour – From the State rooms in the Hermitage, the fountains of Peterhof, the various churches and cathedrals, and the architecture throughout and underneath the city, St Petersburg is a stunning feast for the eyes
Peter – Peter the Great was responsible for establishing a fortress here and (temporarily) moving the capital of Russia from Moscow to St Petersburg. His image is everywhere, and he gave the city its name!
Lie-ins – something about the city made us sleep later than usual – a difficult cycle to break once you’ve started on it. Maybe it was the later opening times of the museums (typically about 10.30am), maybe it’s just the Russian way (most of the people in or hostel seemed to keep similar hours), or maybe it was the vodka…?

You really know you’re in St Petersburg when….

All the signs look like they ought to be readable but when you try to read them, they don’t actually make sense. The Russian cyrillic alphabet is close enough to the English latin alphabet that you’ll recognise about a third of the letters, but even then you’ll find the pronunciations are almost always different.

What one item should you definitely pack when going to St Petersburg?

A spare camera battery (and sneak in a spare memory card too!)

two year trip

Andrew and Julie's Travelling Adventures