Monday, 17 August 2026

 

Start: Azimut Hotel Moscow (RU) 13:30

Arrival: Azimut Hotel Moscow (RU) 20:15

 

Total: ca 8 km on foot

 

 

A good day starts with a good breakfast. To go by that adage, today promised to turn out great. We went down to breakfast at the last possible moment, then lazed in our room until 1 pm, figuring out a strategy for the next two days.

 

Originally, we had planned to spend our time in Moscow organising a bank card and sim card. Reports from fellow travellers described it as challenging but not impossible. Now that we'd spent three days without phone and internet connection and without a working credit card, we decided that we would prefer to do some sightseeing instead of jumping through more administrative hoops. Paying nalichnie (cash) was perfectly fine, and not having a working phone felt oddly freeing. An hour or two on the world wide web each day was more than enough and could be done at the hotel. The rest of the time, we would explore the wide world for real.

 

 

The sun was shining brightly when we set out towards the Boulevard of Peace (in Russian: Prospect Mira). We purchased a 3-day metro card for 8 euros and down we went, into the bowels of Moscow on the longest escalator I've ever been on. The metro system is easy enough to figure out, the trains arrive every minute or so, the seats are soft and comfortable, and in no time we alighted in Kitai Gorod (which incidentally translates to Chinatown, though there's nothing Chinese about the area. Just a homonym in Russian, I think).

 

After we had finally figured out which way to go, I felt the beginnings of a sunburn, we were both sweating, Moscow seemed impossibly large and already my knee was hurting badly.

 

 

My mood barometer climbed out of the red when we reached our first destination of the day: Zaryadye Park. A beautiful new park bordering the south-eastern end of the Red Square. A huge pedestrian floating bridge lunges out in V-form over the Moskva River, affording some great views over the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments (one of the impressive Seven Sisters built in the Stalinist style, which I love), the river and the towers of the Moscow Kremlin.

 

Unfortunately, we were not the only ones who knew about this place. "I wasn't expecting quite so many tourists", I grumbled, while we ducked past selfie sticks, rivercruise touters and families with strollers. "It's only one of the top 3 tourist attractions in Moscow. And schools won't start for another two weeks", my sister pointed out. True, of course.

 

 

We finally fled the sun and tourist throngs into a quiet side street, in search of a café, which proved annoyingly elusive. "This is a major tourist hub in a city of 14 million and we'll be dying of thirst!", I sighed, just a wee bit theatrically. "Let's go in there", Sonia suggested, pointing at the entrance to a stately building. The GUM! What a perfectly splendid idea! We made a beeline for the Café Pushkin and treated ourselves to the possibly most expensive coffee and cake in all of Moscow. It was worth it though.

 

 

The GUM, the Russian answer to the Galleria Emmanuele Vittorio II in Milan and Harrods in London, features the same flagship luxury stores and high arcades, and is thus just as perfectly suited for window shopping and people watching. Like everywhere in Moscow, the visitors seemed mostly Russian as well as West, South and East Asian. We did not hear any Germanic or Romance languages at all, and most stores advertised in English, Chinese and Arabic. Maybe just as well, there were already more than enough tourists without an additional European and American presence.

 

 

Leaving the GUM, we walked right onto the Red Square. Maybe I'm a bit jaded, but I rarely have wow! moments anymore. This was definitely a WOW!! moment though. The multicoloured domes of St Basil's Cathedral, the dark green pines lining the wine-red walls of the kremlin, the long cream-coloured facade of the GUM, the rust-red sturdiness of the Historical Museum and the white lightness of Kazan Cathedral form such a perfectly eyepleasing ensemble. And the buildings are just so big, so in your face, so very three dimensional. My eyes couldn't stop drinking it in. Gulping it down, relishing its thick, creamy lavishness. All of it was just so very, deliciously, real. I could have spent hours just sitting there, looking at it.

 

 

In the end, we decided against becoming a permanent fixture of the Red Square and walked on, along the Alexander Gardens, dreamy trees and playful fountains with fairy tale motifs to the left, and the large, noisy Mokhovaya Street far off to the right.

 

"My leg is killing me", I whined and flopped down on a bench, longing to be back behind a wheel. "Let's go to Moskva City and have a steak there." We studied the metro plan and Yandex Maps. And figured Moskva City was not worth it with a bad knee. Maybe Arbat? In the end, my stomach made the decision. I typed in "steak house", Yandex Maps spit out two suggestions and the closest to a metro station won: Gudman Steak House, just across the street from stantzia Trubnaya.

 

 

The nearest metro station to Alexander Gardens was Bibliotek Lenina. "That's not Lenin", I said, when we spotted a statue in front of the large Russian State Library from across the street. "It's Dostoevsky", Sonia said. Then why is the library named after Lenin? Why not: Bibliotek Dostoevskovo? We crossed the street (or passed under it, rather) and yes, she was right, my sis: it was Fyodor Mikhailovich, not Vladimir Ilich. And as one can see in this pic, the man has some great books. But books don't fill my belly. Hence, back into the bowels of the earth.

 

Rush hour in the Moscow metro is a busy affair. A throng of people, all purposely hastening along the corridors and down the escalators, trains chasing one another. And yet, it never felt claustrophobic, people waited for passengers to get out before getting in, no one pushed, no shady people eyeing your backpack. Moscow feels like that rare pearl: a busy, thriving, international and safe metropolis. Yes, you guessed it, I would love to live here for a while, too. LOL

 

 

Alighting onto Trubnaya Square, we found yet another towering monument overlooking a large square leading to a pleasant park in the middle of a vast boulevard, rows of beautifully restaurated buildings to each side of a sprawling intersection. But feelings of awe and wonder would have to wait. "Where's that steakhouse?" There it was, next to an "open 24 hours"-coffee house. Those cakes looked tempting too.

 

In the end, Gudman proved an excellent choice. The steak was juicy, delicious and I relished every single morsel on my plate. The music was less obtrusive than the Indian musicals yesterday. A languishing female voice crooned out 80s songs, all of them reworked in an oddly similar way. The text was the same as in the original songs, but the melodies barely recognizable. I'd already heard such songs in a restaurant in Minsk: a plaintive female voice and oldies from Elvis to Europe and Aerosmith, reworked in the same fashion. Was this a Russian thing? Or might have been AI. Intriguing. If we had an internet connection, we'd have looked it up. But we didn't, so we discussed it instead. Much more social and creative and fun. The day had held what the breakfast had promised.