Moscow
May 22, 2011
Note: Get ready for lots of photos of churches with pretty gold domes!
Slept late. Needed to! Then off to my tour of the Kremlin.
The tour didn’t start well, as it was quite hard to find the office. I was afraid I’d simply miss the tour completely. The office was hidden in a large, partially under construction office complex, and I finally got to where I was going after enlisting the help of about half of the people who worked at other business in the building. 
My bad impression of the tour company was exacerbated by their near-inability to deal with payment by credit card. I don’t mind if you can only take cash, but if that’s the case, don’t make a big deal on your website that credit cards are okay.
I also made another realization a few minutes after our rather pro forma tour guide began leading us toward the Kremlin: I prefer expat American or British tourguides to native ones. Does this make me a bad person? If so, well there you have it. It’s not just the facility with English that I prefer, but it’s just that every native English speaker tour guide I’ve ever had has been livelier and more fun than the perfunctory locals.
I could barely understand our tour guide on this tour, not only because of her thick accent but because she spoke way too softly. Come on, sing out, Louise! 
Anyway, even a boring tour guide couldn’t make the Kremlin boring. It’s a magnificent, ancient miniature city that’s the historic center of the Moscow. The walls have been built and rebuilt many times. It’s full of amazing churches, several of which we investigated. The interior of Orthodox Christian churches are completely covered with icons, which are religious paintings or carving depicting basic Christian symbols or subjects. They differ in importance from Western religious art in their high degree of devotional importance. In addition to inspiring and informing, they are also meant to be a focus of meditiation. This reverence for concrete images has made the Orthodox church a target from the West, as it has been equated with idolatry. The Orthodox insist that they do not worship the icons themselves. Perhaps, but let’s remember that Catholics also insist that they don’t worship Mary, and it sure seems like they do. (They do.)
Anyway, we saw beautiful icons that were as much as a thousand years old in the beautiful, gold-domed churches inside the Kremlin.
We also saw a gigantic cannon, hundreds of regular-sized cannons captured from Napolean in 1812, a huge broken bell that seems to be an actual monument to failure, President Putin’s offices, some fabulous Faberge treasures, and lots of other stuff.
I enjoyed chatting with fellow tourist Barbara who was in Moscow working like me. She was heading up some workshops for the local Avon team. We both complained about sore feet and laughingly realized we had both taken “preemptory” Advil before starting the tour. Nevertheless, poor Barbara was exhausted and didn’t make it to the end of the tour. She collapsed after the fourth church, couldn’t get up, and they had to put her down. Poor thing.
Dullest Tourguides
- The chainsmoking yawn in Brussels
- The soft-spoken unintelligble baboushka in Moscow
- The perfunctory prefect on my first trip to the Great Wall
