June 2, 2017       Moscow: Kremlin Armoury Chamber, The Diamond Fund, Cathedral Square, The Great Bell Tower and Moscow 1980 Olympics

We had reserved Friday tickets for the 12:00 entry to the Armoury Chamber, a museum inside the Kremlin.  I’ve learned that kremlin is Russian for fort, and that other cities have kremlins, but Moscow’s kremlin is The Kremlin.  We picked up our tickets in Alexander Park and then went through security and then into the Armoury Chamber.  The museum web page sells tickets for timed entry, and you “only” have two hours to view the exhibits.  Our experience is that they didn’t look at our tickets.  Now perhaps if we stayed for longer than two hours they would have taken notice and asked us to leave, but it was never that crowded.  The museum displays clothing, jewels, carriages, armour etc. from the Russian Imperial period.  I started taking photos but soon learned that photos were not allowed.  There is some neat stuff, but I don’t know how you could stay there for two hours.  Of course others can’t imagine how we can stay in art museums for hours, to each their own.  There is a separate museum the Diamond Fund inside the Amoury.  Tickets are only available once inside the Armoury and entry is definitely timed, and NO photos are allowed.  There are big diamonds, colored diamonds, crowns, jewelry, piles of diamonds and other precious stones and huge gold nuggets, some weighing 36 kg.  We have a brochure with more information, but in the interest of posting something before our six week trip is over I won’t bore you with that stuff.

Then we went to the Cathedral Area.  We went into the Church of Laying Our Lady's Holy Robe.  The interior space is actually small.  The Orthodox Church has a wall called an iconostasis that is a wall of icons and religious paintings, separating the nave from the sanctuary.  There are also many tombs of priests and maybe saints that didn’t leave much room to walk around.  This was the only church we went into.  We spent the rest of our time in the area trying to take a “good” selfie.  You will see from the photos I wasn’t successful.  I may have to take a class to learn how it should be done.

The next goal for the day was to go to the Olympic Stadium area.  We always try to visit Olympic stadiums when we get the chance.  We were able to take the Metro pretty close to Luzhniki stadium.  The entire area was fenced off because of the construction going on in the area.  We were specifically looking for the Olympic Cauldron.  I had located the Cauldron on Google Maps Street View.  We wandered around for a while, but we eventually found it and Mishka the bear mascot so we could take our corny photos.  Having completed this mission we took the Metro back to our hotel.  We went out to eat at the G.U.M. department store.  It is a highly recommended place to eat on trip advisor.  We had lots of help in line, and we did a lot of pointing.  It is actually a three level shopping mall full of high-end brand name stores that normal Russian’s couldn’t shop at.  We ate at the cafeteria that has traditional Russian food.  It was very cheap, and on Friday night it was crowded.  Then it was back to the hotel to go to bed.

Sue is laughing at me because I am sooo far behind in posting.  It takes time to craft these masterpieces.

 

2017 06 02 Moscow