Airplane, Metro, Tretiakov Gallery

The 19 year old German pilot landed his Cessna on the bridge right in front of our hotel window back in 1987. He then taxied to Red Square. He so embarrassed the Russian military that more than 2000 officers lost their jobs, including the defense and air defense ministers, who were opposed to Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, so Gorbachev took this opportunity to fire them. The pilot Mathias Rust was prompted arrested and was enprisoned for more than 400 days before being released and sent home. We were told that he tried recently to obtain a visa to Russia and was denied, now why would that be?! From our hotel window, we had a good view of the bridge and could imagine what it was like 19 years ago!

We took a tour of several metro stations in Moscow. The metro in Moscow is famous for its art and design in many of its stations. The metro also served as bomb shelters, and were very deep underground. There were some really long escalators which were impressive. The first station we visited Ploshchad Revolyutsii (Revolution station) had many life-size bronze sculptures. The ones with a dog had very shiny dog nose because people have been petting it for good luck for decades!

Then we went to visit the Tretiakov Gallery. Afternoon was free time, we walked along Arbat street then back to the Metropol Hotel, and went inside the St Basil's Cathedral. It was really interesting because each dome we saw was really aa separate little church, which eventually combined to become what we saw today. It was like a maze inside. We went up the tallest and steepest stairs in a small stairwell to get to the first level where most churches were, and had to find out way around the various hallways to make sure we saw all the churches. It was kind of fun. We also caught another singing in one of the churches.

For dinner we went to a Georgian restaurant, which had live entertainment of music and dancing I assume in the Georgian style. The food was good but not super. We had a crazy taxi taking us back to the hotel. Afterwards, we took another walk to the Red Square to see it at night.

Here is a video of the dancing at the Georgian restaurant.