#they had our opener who got there at like 5am stay till 2pm | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

aroundtheglobeandbackagain · 6 years

Photo

•• Moscow-Ow Part #1••

“Alright this is it. This is the address of your hotel.” Declared the driver as he pulled up to a nondescript brick building. He had picked us up less than half an hour before at 4am when we finally stumbled off the oppressive four day long train to sweet fresh air and freedom.

We groggily inquired, “…Are you sure?” squinting at the uninviting building, “Where’s the… hotel?”

That turned out to be a very good question, one that wouldn’t be answered for almost an hour.

After circumnavigating the building by foot, which appeared to have no obvious entrance, we eventually found a small piece of paper tacked to a plain door that had the name of our supposed hotel printed on it. Ahah! Triumphant at last. However, upon further inspection of the Russian words beneath by our driver (who turned out to be a very good guy to help us with this) he sheepishly told us the paper stated that the check-in time was not untill 2pm, it being currently about 4:45 AM that wasn’t the best news. But oh wait it got better! It also stated that the hotel was no longer active on these premises as it had been closed down. The driver looked at us apologetically but shrugged, seeming to say ‘well that’s rotten luck, but there’s not much I can do about it”.

There wasn’t much we could do about it either. It would be impossible to find somewhere else to stay at this point, not only because it would be for that night for three people and expensive in a big city like Moscow but the World Cup was on right now. Everything had been booked up for months. Any hotel room you could find at this point would be astronomically expensive (later we looked up the cost for one night in the Radison which we could see taunting us from across the river and it was over $2,000 usd). We didn’t even have a Russian SIM card to make local calls to try to sort this mess out. Not to mention we were tired, hungry and probably smelled even worse than we looked having not showered in the past five days.

We begged the car driver to use his phone and after much angry yelling, numerous calls to people less than pleased to be woken up before 5am, plenty of broken English and broken Russian, and a fair bit of irritated stomping in circles a young groggy guy met us and walked us the block to the new location of the ‘hotel’.

After being led into another nondescript, decidely un-hotel like building and up to the sixth floor we were met by a very angry Russian lady. I thought Papa K could be scary when angry, this lady was terrifying. After being serverly reprimanded for talking too loudly and waking up other patrons and for arriving well before check-in time we got her on the phone with our travel agent (that had made this disastrous booking). They argued for a while, then we argued with the travel agent, then the travel agent argued with her some more, and so on until finally a resolution had been achieved with which no parties were very satisfied. We DID have a room for the next three nights (which had by no means been a sure thing throughout this process) but we could not have it, or anywhere to be, until 2pm. Which is how we ended up spending the next several hours chilling on a cement air vent eating convenience store breakfast wraps and drinking a liter of juice from the carton. The only silver lining to the morning was the chance it afforded us to watch the city from the bank of the river in the wee hours of the morning when it was still peaceful.

At 9am we met with our tour guide who was supposed to give us a couple hour walking tour of the city. We had still not showered since our four day train or changed clothes, but we set out to get the lay of the land embracing our unavoidable grossness at this point. She showed us where the main sites were including the entrance to the Kremlin, the main promenades, the Bolshoi Ballet theater, and one phenomenal supermarket. Opened inside the old mansion of some past royalty or well-to-do in old upper class Russian society, this supermarket is like any other selling eggs and milk and frozen hotdogs except it’s located in an insanely opulent and lavish room: chandeliers, deep purple walls, huge gold stucco embellishing the walls and ceiling. After our guide left us we continued on to see the Novodevichy Convent which was unfortunately mostly under construction with the famous gold dome hidden under scaffolding. Mid afternoon we returned to our hotel where we could finally enter our ‘room’. Sharing a bathroom with several other rooms, it also felt like our room might have been converted to house guests a bit last minute as it was next to the staffs room and housed a couple of odd chairs and other stored items. But I finally got to take that blessed shower and wash off 5 days of grime.

The next day we journeyed to Sergiyev Posad by train, which turned out to be a bit of an adventure locating the correct train but all went well and 2 hours later we arrived in the town. We walked through town to what drew both tourist and pilgrims to this place:

●Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius

It was founded in 1340 by Russia’s patron saint, St. Sergius of Radonezh and is the holiest site in the country. An epicenter of Eastern Orthodox worship, pilgrims have been journeying here since the 14th century. Within the bright gold and blue complex, we admired the gold domed Trinity Cathedral, the 1585 Cathedral of Assumption, the tomb of Boris Godunov who is the only tsar not buried in the Kremlin or in the SS Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Peteresburg, and the bright vision of the teal five-tiered bell tower.

We wandered through the souvenir market on our way back through the town, stopping to pick up some ingredients to cook dinner and some bread stuffed with potato or cheese for lunch.

0 notes