Thursday March 29
We left very early this morning for Moscow. From St. Petersburg to Moscow, it’s about a ten-hour drive, so we were on the road pretty much the entire day. Even though it was a pretty long drive, we still managed to sleep and have fun on the bus, so it wasn’t too bad. We also stopped for a few hours in the city of Novgorod, which is the oldest city in the whole country. The city really has an old feel and has been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
The first mention of Novgorod can be dated back to the mid 800s, when it was said to be a major station on the trade route between the Baltics and Byzantium. Officially, the city recognizes 859 as the year it started. By the 900s, Novgorod was widely considered the hub or capital of the Russian civilization.
We went on a really nice tour of the old city of Novgorod. It was very historic, and we got a lot of information about the history of Russia. The main part of Novgorod used to be a big fortress, and some of the original walls are still standing, so it was pretty cool to get to see that. On the tour, we also learned about the architecture used to build a lot of Russian churches and cathedrals. One really interesting thing I learned was that the tops of the church towers are often bell-shaped (or shaped like Hershey’s kisses) not just for decoration but because this design does a better job of keeping the heat in the building. When the buildings were first built, there was no internal heating system and so the architects tried to build them in a way which would minimize heat loss.
After the city tour, we had a quick break for lunch and then went to visit the Centre of Musical Antiques. This place was super cool because it holds the largest collection of antique musical instruments in the world – and most of them were found during different excavations of the ancient city of Novgorod. The guide took us through from the oldest to the newest instruments and talked a lot about their development over the centuries. It was interesting to me that a lot of the instruments were first used as means of deterring evil spirits from the body and homes of people.
After the presentation, we had to hop back on the bus and spent the rest of the day travelling to Moscow. We arrived at the hotel around 1am. This was a real hotel, so I was Kayla and I got to share a room to ourselves. We passed out right away – it was certainly a very long and exhausting day.
Friday March 30
We started today with my favourite part of a hotel: the buffet breakfast! Afterwards, we hopped on the bus and headed out our first look of Moscow on the city tour. The hotel is a little bit out of the city, although easy to get to by metro, so it was nice to be able to drive around and get a sense of what the city centre is like. We visited the Sparrow Hills, saw some nice views of the whole city and of course visited the Red Square. The Red Square is pretty much the central square of the city. It connects the old Kremlin Grounds to the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral. Originally, the Red Square served as one of the main marketplaces in Moscow. Today, it is very much a tourist destination, but it still surrounded by malls, shops and restaurants.
One really interesting point in the Red Square is the tomb of Lenin. As most of you probably know, Lenin was a Russia communist revolutionary and was head of the government of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union from 1917-1924. Like I mentioned before, the Russia Revolution took place in 1917 when the Tsar Nicholas II and the royal family was overthrown. So Lenin is still so famous in Russia that his tomb is right in the middle of the Red Square. Even his body has been preserved and is on display for people to go and visit.
After the city tour, we had some time to grab lunch before our tour of the Moscow metro system. These metro tunnels are meant to be the most beautiful in the entire world. It was commissioned by Stalin who wanted to show the superiority of socialism over the capitalist world. The construction started in the 1930s, when most of the Western world was in the Great Depression, and Stalin wanted to show that the Soviet Union was powerful and unaffected. In my opinion, the subway stations are really beautiful. They are all decorated differently with statues, paintings and artwork and I think that were definitely worth the visit. One thing that I thought was interesting about the metro stations was that most of them are decorated in a way that idolizes Soviet people, war victories and generally a sign of the Soviet society.
I was really interested in the metro tunnels, and I did a bit more reading about them after the tour. Most of the articles I read glorify the Moscow metro as a symbol of Russian pride. But one of the articles talks about the negative effects of the construction of the metro system. Mainly, so many people were employed to build the tunnels in such a short period of time that there was a food shortage for the workers. To solve this problem, most of the grain harvested from the farming regions of the country was taken. This left many people on the farms without food and has a pretty direct link to the famine that occurred within the Soviet Union in 1932-33.
Once the tour was over, my friends and I had dinner near the Red Square and then used the metro to get back to the hotel for the night.
Saturday March 31
Today we also had two tours to attend. The first tour was of the Kremlin Grounds. Kremlin actually means “fortress” in Russian, and the first Kremlin was built in Moscow in the 1100s. It was used for centuries as the residence for the Russian royalty, and today it is the official home of the president of Russia. From what I could tell, the Kremlin was pretty much its own city within Moscow for a long time – it actually reminded me a lot of the Forbidden City in Beijing. There were a lot of buildings to see within the Kremlin, including a bunch of cathedrals. My favourite was definitely the Assumption Cathedral because of the gold domes on the top. It is also the burial place of many Russian princes and tsars.
Our second tour was to the Gulag museum and was a much more serious and humbling visit. The term gulag essentially refers to the forced labour camps that prisoners were sent to during the reign of Lenin and Stalin. I didn’t know a lot about the Gulags before visiting the museum and I learned a lot about their history during my visit. The camps were used mainly as a method of political repression within the Soviet Union, and many times people were convicted of crimes they hadn’t committed, and many inmates were political prisoners.
The museum was really interesting because it involved a lot of personal stories and interviews of people who were sent to these camps. Our guide was the head of the museum and told us that his main goal was to represent the gulags as accurately as possible in order to ensure that this type of thing never happened again.
After being on the road for so long, we were pretty exhausted and decided to just head back to the hotel for dinner. Afterwards, Kayla and I watched a movie and headed to bed.
Sunday April 1
This was our last real day of travelling, and we started with a visit to the Moscow TV Tower. This is the tallest building in the city and offers really impressive views of Moscow. The tower was built in the 1960s and at the time it was the tallest building to have ever been built. I thought it was really strange that the security at the tower was so tight. We had to show our passports and go through metal detectors. I don’t really know why it was so heavily guarded, and I couldn’t find anything online about it either.
We didn’t have much time after the TV tower to do anything but grab a quick lunch because Kayla and I booked tickets for the Musical on Ice show “Ruslan and Ludmilla.” It was a figure skating musical performed by several Russian Olympic Champions. I don’t know what I expected from the show, but it was really amazing to see. There were light effects, music, props and at some points I even forgot that the performers were skating. I originally hadn’t planned on going to this show, but I am very glad that I did. It was nice to end the trip with a fun activity that wasn’t so much about history and culture.
We had to meet to leave for home around 11pm and drove all night to arrive in St. Petersburg. It was definitely exhausting, and when we stopped in St. Petersburg for a couple of hours none of us had any energy to do anything but find breakfast in a local café. We left St. Petersburg at about 1pm and were back in Finland around midnight. There was a quick stop at the duty-free shop during the border crossing, but other than that we drove straight to Jyvaskyla.
I never imagined that I would be visiting Russia, and I especially didn’t know what to expect. The country is very different from anything I’ve seen before, and I really enjoyed my visit. It was especially nice to be able to travel with my friends and I think for all of us, this was a trip we will always remember.
Thanks for reading! :)
