Привет!
This will be a very quick post - I just wanted to let everyone know I've actually arrived in Moscow (finally!). I flew on Wednesday and was in the office Thursday morning. I'll try to get a more extensive post up next week, but I thought I deserved a bit of time to settle in first.
In the mean time, things are fine. The hotel is gorgeous and has great facilities, like the extensive breakfast buffet where I've been making a concerted effort to eat my weight in smoked salmon every day. And the gym in the basement, which has really nice treadmills and a nordic style sauna and a Russian style banya (yay!). And my room has an adjoining sitting room and small kitchen. There's even a shuttle bus that takes everyone between the hotel and the office every day. It's a pretty sweet set-up, though I sense it could become a gilded cage.
There's also a grocery store in a little mall in the basement where I've been attempting to stock up and roll out my very dodgey Russian. It's an adventure, that grocery store, because of course all the packaging in in cyrillic.
I did a walking tour of central Moscow hotspots yesterday, which was a good way to get myself out of the hotel and into the streets. Red Square, St, Basil's, Lenin's Tomb, GUM, the Bolshoi, blah blah blah. Oddly, there were many times when I could recall perfectly being there four years ago with my tour group. Like here, for instance:
That's all for now - I'm off to my first run with the Moscow Hash House Harriers this afternoon, and will try to write a proper blog post for next week. In the mean time, just to prove I'm really here, a wonky self portrait of me with the Bolshoi Theatre in the background:
This will be a very quick post - I just wanted to let everyone know I've actually arrived in Moscow (finally!). I flew on Wednesday and was in the office Thursday morning. I'll try to get a more extensive post up next week, but I thought I deserved a bit of time to settle in first.
In the mean time, things are fine. The hotel is gorgeous and has great facilities, like the extensive breakfast buffet where I've been making a concerted effort to eat my weight in smoked salmon every day. And the gym in the basement, which has really nice treadmills and a nordic style sauna and a Russian style banya (yay!). And my room has an adjoining sitting room and small kitchen. There's even a shuttle bus that takes everyone between the hotel and the office every day. It's a pretty sweet set-up, though I sense it could become a gilded cage.
There's also a grocery store in a little mall in the basement where I've been attempting to stock up and roll out my very dodgey Russian. It's an adventure, that grocery store, because of course all the packaging in in cyrillic.
For instance, who can tell me what this is? It took me about 15 minutes and two halting conversations with dour Russian store clerks to find this.
I did a walking tour of central Moscow hotspots yesterday, which was a good way to get myself out of the hotel and into the streets. Red Square, St, Basil's, Lenin's Tomb, GUM, the Bolshoi, blah blah blah. Oddly, there were many times when I could recall perfectly being there four years ago with my tour group. Like here, for instance:
Red Square
And here... a nearby food court where I remember going with the gang. It was a very odd sensation being somewhere so manifestly foreign and yet also familiar.
And I do mean background. That lovely square is TWELVE lanes of crazy Moscow traffic from me and my camera.
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