Exploring Russia: Moscow

Hello!
Today I'm going to write about an amazing experience that I had recently when I visited Russia on a trip with school. This trip, which included visits to both Moscow and St Petersburg, was absolutely amazing and I will remember the experiences that I had for the rest of my life. This post is going to be about Moscow, and I'll write about St Petersburg in a post soon. I study Russian at school and it is a subject that I am looking to pursue further in the sixth form, as I find it such an interesting language to learn. The oppprtunity to learn about Russian culture and to visit the iconic cathedrals and art galleries was fascinating and I learnt so much about life in Russia. I also had plenty of opportunities to practise my Russian, which was a really good experience for me. For example, my room in one of the hotels was absolutely boiling and I managed to communicate this in Russian to one of the ladies at the reception desk. I was very proud of this!

The first thing we saw in Moscow was Red Square. I was overwhelmed by the cold when we arrived! It was absolutely freezing but I was ok as I had lots of warm layers. We queued up for ages to go into Lenin's Mausoleum: a dark underground room which contained Lenin's preserved body. This was very spooky! Then we learnt some information about Red Square and St Basil's Cathedral from our guide before taking lots of group pictures by the cathedral. It looked magnificent. It was very colourful and grand. After this, we looked inside a shopping centre called the GUM, but I was astonished by the aesthetics. It was the grandest shopping centre I've ever seen, with pink blossom trees and ornate decorations. It was interesting to look around, as it was so different to malls that I am used to. Then we travelled to a large graveyard, with graves of various different famous people, like writers and actors. It was interesting to hear the stories that our guide was telling us. Another highlight of Moscow was the Old Tretyakov art gallery. Our guide had so much information and it was actually really interesting learning about the paintings. I didn't think I'd enjoy it but I found it really fascinating. We also visited a Cold War bunker. This was such an extraordinary experience. First we walked down 18 flights of stairs to the bunker and we were given various talks by a tour guide. I found the experience really interesting, despite the fact that after this we had to walk back up all the stairs!

One of the highlights for me was visiting a school in Moscow. It was so interesting to speak with the Russian students and they were all really keen to practise their English by talking to us! We also visited the Kremlin which was magnificent. All of the buildings had beautiful golden decorations and magnificent painted ceilings. Our last night in Moscow was a very memorable one. We did a mini tour of the metro, and I didn't really understand why we were doing this until I saw the underground stations. Every station was decorated in a different way, whether it had intricate mosaics or magnificent statues. I was amazed! Then we returned to Red Square to see it at night. Red Squre looked absolutely stunning, with beautiful twinkling lights outlining every building. If you ever go to Moscow, I would definitely recommend visiting Red Square at night- it is picturesque.

We then travelled to the train station to board the overnight train to St Petersburg. I felt quite apprehensive about travelling this way, but nevertheless I approached it with enthusiasm and it was actually quite a fun experience. Each compartment was tiny and had two bunk beds with a narrow alley way in between. My friends and I had fun trying to access our suitcases while accidentally falling over each other! I managed to sleep but woke up quite often as I'm not great at sleeping in unfamiliar places, so as you can imagine, I didn't get loads of sleep on a moving train! 

That's it for this post. Look out for an upcoming post about what I got up to in St Petersburg.