{"id":1851,"date":"2011-05-28T13:00:22","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T20:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayivey.com\/wordpress\/?p=1851"},"modified":"2011-05-28T13:00:22","modified_gmt":"2011-05-28T20:00:22","slug":"spring-forward-may-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rayivey.com\/wordpress\/spring-forward-may-71\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>\"instagram\"<\/a>

Moscow
\nMay 22, 2011\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Note:\u00a0 Get ready for lots of photos of churches with pretty gold domes!<\/h3>\n
\"The<\/a>
The magnificent Christ the Redeemer Cathedral. It's brand new. It replaced a swimming pool.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Slept late.\u00a0 Needed to!\u00a0 Then off to my tour of the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

The tour didn\u2019t start well, as it was quite hard to find the office.\u00a0 I was afraid I\u2019d simply miss the tour completely.\u00a0 The office was hidden in a large, partially under construction office complex, and I finally got to where I was going after enlisting\u00a0 the help of about half of the people who worked at other business in the building.\u00a0\"gold_domes_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My bad impression of the tour company was exacerbated by their near-inability to deal with payment by credit card. \u00a0I don\u2019t mind if you can only take cash, but if that\u2019s the case, don\u2019t make a big deal on your website that credit cards are okay.<\/p>\n

\"gold_domes_2\"<\/a>I also made another realization a few minutes after our rather pro forma tour guide began leading us toward the Kremlin:\u00a0 I prefer expat American or British tourguides to native ones.\u00a0 Does this make me a bad person?\u00a0 If so, well there you have it.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the facility with English that I prefer, but it\u2019s just that every native English speaker tour guide I\u2019ve ever had has been livelier and more fun than the perfunctory locals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I could barely understand our tour guide on this tour, not only because of her thick accent but because she spoke way too softly.\u00a0 Come on, sing out, Louise!\u00a0\"gold_domes_3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anyway, even a boring tour guide couldn\u2019t make the Kremlin boring.\u00a0 It\u2019s a magnificent, ancient miniature city that\u2019s the historic center of the Moscow.\u00a0 The walls have been built and rebuilt many times.\u00a0 It\u2019s full of amazing churches, several of which we investigated.\u00a0 The interior of Orthodox Christian churches are completely covered with icons<\/em>, which are religious paintings or carving depicting basic Christian symbols or subjects.\u00a0 They differ in importance from Western religious art in their high degree of devotional importance.\u00a0 In addition to inspiring and informing, they are also meant to be a focus of meditiation.\u00a0 This reverence for concrete images has made the Orthodox church a target from the West, as it has been equated with idolatry.\u00a0 The Orthodox insist that they do not worship the icons themselves.\u00a0 Perhaps, but let\u2019s remember that Catholics also insist that they don\u2019t worship Mary, and it sure seems like they do.\u00a0 (They do.)<\/p>\n

\"pleasure_palace\"<\/a>Anyway, we saw beautiful icons that were as much as a thousand years old in the beautiful, gold-domed churches inside the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s offices, some fabulous Faberge treasures, and lots of other stuff.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed chatting with fellow tourist Barbara who was in Moscow working like me.\u00a0 She was heading up some workshops for the local Avon team.\u00a0 We both complained about sore feet and laughingly realized we had both taken \u201cpreemptory\u201d Advil before starting the tour.\u00a0 Nevertheless, poor Barbara was exhausted and didn\u2019t make it to the end of the tour.\u00a0 She collapsed after the fourth church, couldn\u2019t get up, and they had to put her down.\u00a0 Poor thing.\"skinny_tower_with_sun\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dullest Tourguides<\/h4>\n
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  • The chainsmoking yawn in Brussels<\/li>\n
  • The soft-spoken unintelligble baboushka in Moscow<\/li>\n
  • The perfunctory prefect on my first trip to the Great Wall<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Average Rating: 5<\/span> out of 5<\/span> based on 188<\/span> user reviews.<\/span><\/div><\/p>

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