Tuesday (Moscow)

From the train we went directly to our hotel. The hotel is quite a ways from the center of Moscow and I would rate it two stars. It’s nothing special but it is clean and it has hot water for showers and a nice restaurant.

I had a cookie for breakfast on the train. For lunch I ate a piece of bread and half a slice of cheese at 2pm. After that we went touring the Kremlin and Red Square (over 8 miles of walking according to my pedometer-equipped roommate) and now I’m waiting for supper and I’m hungry--to put it mildly.

The word “Kremlin” in old Russian means “fortress.” Every city had a Kremlin and Moscow was no exception. Several hundred years ago Moscow became the religious and cultural center of Russia and eventually became its capital. The Kremlin started out built of wood but is now all brick and stone. Inside the Kremlin are several churches (we visited the church of the Assumption), the president’s office, a cultural arts center (where Mark Finley preached in 1993) and an armory. We also saw a canon that is supposed to be the largest in the world but it was never fired and a huge bell that weighs over 200 tons but was never rung. The story goes that the bell was involved in a fire and when they were extinguishing the flames, the bell cracked apart. The piece that came off weighs 11 tons.

We toured the armory museum which contains very few arms but lots and lots of jewelry, clothes, carriages, thrones, and gold dinner ware. It was quite interesting but we didn’t spend a lot of time there because we wanted to be sure we had time to see Red Square; which we did, and I got the picture to prove it.

Today has been a very event-full day and after supper I think I’m going to sleep well. My roommate is Roland Smith, he’s a retired financial advisor from Maryland. He’s a nice guy and I expect the room situation to go smoothly. He mentioned, however, that he snores, so we’ll have to see how that goes.