We were touring around Red Square and went through the Cathedral of St. Basil. It is a lovely building on the outside with all the pretty colored onion domes. The inside is a different story, since it is all cut up and a real maze. It was very disappointing to see such a neat piece of architecture with such a lackluster interior. This church also had a lot of religious icons which were everywhere. They are various sizes and have a particular saint in each. The actual face is sort of blacked out so only a silhouette of that particular saint. Our guide must love icons since she pointed out "lots" to the group. Needless to say, I don't care if I see another icon for a very long time. We have one poor photo since in most of the churches you can not take photos. In the Orthodox Church they kiss the icons and make a sort of sign of the cross. Most of those icons were covered in glass.
This is how icons look that are not behind glass or being kissed.
We ate lunch together with our little group of 8 including us. The place was called My My which is pronounced moo moo. Some of the restaurants have a plastic sculpture of a cow. This restaurant was a buffet type place where you could choose certain items to make a plate and with that came a dessert. It was good food and we chatted with a couple from England as we ate and drank our beer. The guide is driving us to drink. 😀. There is also a family with 2 adult children who are on holiday from England also. This so far is a very nice group, but we may or may not see them in St. Petersburg since we have a different tour number.
We have since used the Metro with better success but not all stations are terribly user friendly. The major ones near the Kremlin are, but you have to get on a smaller connecting Metro that does not have very good signage.
MONDAY JUNE 15, 2015
We were very fortunate that today's tour took us behind the Kremlin. We went through what is called the Armory. This huge museum is not just an armory, in fact very little of it is armory type items. There were lovely silver, gold, diamonds, emeralds, crowns and all sorts of royalty items, gifts as well as church icons. There were a lot of precious items housed in one large area. It wouldn't be Russia without a couple more Orthodox churches. Within the Kremlin, there were several along with a large bell and old cannon. We also enjoyed some relaxing gardens before touring on our own.
Another "big old church".
Large but damaged bell.
Nice relaxing gardens in the Kremlin.
The Helipad that Putin uses when on the grounds.
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