Thursday, June 1, 2017



May 30 & 31, 2017             Amsterdam & Moscow

We went to the Rijksmuseum and the Heritage Amsterdam, two places we have visited many times before.  The Rijks has a fabulous collection of Dutch paintings as you would expect.  The Hermitage Amsterdam is a satellite museum of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  It has exhibitions from the St. Petersburg collection.  The exhibition on display was about the 1917 Russian Revolution; it consisted of many documents, photos and personal items.  If you like history, it was very interesting, if not then not very interesting.  We went to another favorite restaurant for dinner and then home early to bed, because the airline said we should be at the airport THREE hours early.

The next morning we took a city bus near the hotel to the airport and we did arrive the suggested three hours early.  The lines were actually pretty short.  The security screening was very intense.  The bags went through the usual x-ray machine and then another agent goes through the bags to identify any objects that couldn’t be identified in the first screening.  I can imagine that this will get more intense as they try to prevent laptop battery bombs.  The flight to Moscow was 2’40”.  Getting through customs went without any problems.  We had read on various travel forums that the people in Russia don’t smile, and boy is this true.  The Aeroexpress train from the SVO airport into Moscow was pretty easy, but we wandered around a bit from there to our hotel.  I’m blaming that on the in-out GPS signal to Google Maps.  But we eventually made it to the “posh” Savoy Hotel.  Sue picked this as a present for my 70th (yikes) birthday.  We unpacked and then picked out a place to eat.  This walk went better, although the road to the restaurant was under construction.  We had another great dinner, the beer was very good, and we are easy to please.  The link below is to the photo album.
 
 

No comments:

Post a Comment