Moscow

After a horribly complex visa process, dropping a larger chunk of change than I would have liked and doing a 3 hour red-eye flight (that's right, an overnight flight that was only 3 hours, landing at 4:30 in the morning), I finally made it to Russia. That sounds like complaining, but it was totally worth it as visiting Moscow was an awesome and unique experience.

I'll start off before my trip with the visa process. For a person to visit Russia not only do they need to pay a little cash – they need to get an "invitation" and visa voucher from someone in the country, usually a hotel or a travel agency. Then they need to get a passport photo (even though the visa doesn't even have a photo on it…?).  Then they need to get verification that they have health insurance that is valid in Russia.  Then they need to fill out a visa application form, which for US and UK citizens is twice as long as the regular form and includes questions like "list every country you have been to in the past 10 years". Then they have to turn this in to the Russian Consulate either by paying another visa assistance firm to do this for you or going to the Consulate yourself, which for the Netherlands is in The Hague (about an hour away for me) and is only open from 9am to noon. THEN, to pick up the passport with visa you have to come to the Consulate from noon to 1pm – a one hour window! Needless to say, this process was a little annoying and probably means I won't fool with going back to Russia any time soon, but regardless I think it was worth it to go for the first time.

So, after my Friday night flight and getting in at 4:30am I thankfully made it through passport control without a hitch and made my way into the city. The first thing I noticed was how weird it was trying to navigate the Russian signs. They use a Cyrillic alphabet which uses a combination of normal English-type characters as well as a bunch of Greek-type symbols that I'm used to only seeing in math equations. A lot of the characters are the same, but are used for different letters which makes looking at the language very strange – you feel like you should be able to decipher some of the words but after looking closer it's all just looks like gibberish. As far as I can tell the only letters that are completely the same are A, E, O, T, and K. The rest are basically switched up – a "C" is used instead of an "S", a phi is used instead of an "F" or "PH", "P"s (uppercase) or rho's (lowercase) for "R"s, "H"s for "N"s, "N"s for "I"s… very confusing. I think after 3 days I was starting to get the hang of it, but still very weird.

Some Russian on my tickets

Anyways, I made it into the city and to my hotel bright and early and luckily was able to check in and take a nap to recharge before heading out for the day. My hotel was in a great location right next to the Kremlin and Red Square, so I got started on all the famous sites. Red Square was very cool with all the unique and historic buildings around. I went into the Lenin Mausoleum first, which was pretty cool and really creepy. It's basically a square black marble building with one dark main chamber where Lenin's body is lit on display in a glass box. Supposedly it's actually his preserved body sitting there right in front of you, but there's plenty of speculation that it's just a wax figure – to be honest I couldn't really tell (you couldn't get that close and, I mean, I don't really know what preserved bodies look like after all). After that interesting introduction to Russia, I continued on to St. Basil's Cathedral, which was even cooler in person than in all the pictures I'd seen. It's kind of surreal, seems like it was taken out of Candyland or a fairy tale or something, but really awesome.

Kremin walls and towers

State History Museum on Red Square

Lenin Mausoleum

Trinity Tower - Entrance to the Kremlin

St Basil's Cathedral

After that I walked around a bit looking at a few of the churches which dot the city. I was really surprised at the number of ornate, gold-domed churches around. Even the small, not-famous ones were very cool to see. This was one thing that was very unique about Moscow – most European cities I've been to have pretty "standard" (though also very neat) church architecture which is more or less similar across countries, but Moscow's multi-domed, colorful churches were very different and all over the place. On this jaunt I also stumbled upon The Church of Christ Our Saviour, one of, if not the largest church in the city.

Cool lookin' church on Red Square

Church of Christ Our Savior

Cool domes

.. and more domes

Then I came back to the Kremlin and went inside to see what that was all about. Inside there are many large official-looking buildings which you can't visit, some more crazy churches, some museums and some gardens that you can explore. I went to the Armoury, one of the museums, which houses a bunch of the relics from the Russian Tsars – lots of really ornate and ostentatious jewelry, some crazy blinged-out bibles, royal carriages, thrones, robes, crowns, armor and swords, all from around 1400-1800. Pretty cool stuff. After that I checked out all the cathedrals around the appropriately-named Cathedral Square, which were again very unique and stunning.

Tsar Cannon and The Assumption Cathedral in the back

Annunciation Cathedral

Ivan the Great Bell Tower

Cathedral Square

Tsar Bell. They had to one-up the Liberty Bell I guess...

The Church of Laying Our Lady's Holy Robe

That was a pretty full first day, so I crashed for a few hours and then had a relaxed night of sampling some Russian fast food and finding a sportsbar/sportsbook that was showing soccer and the NBA playoffs. They had a line listed for the Washington Wizards (NBA) vs. NY Rangers (NHL), but I decided against pointing this out to the Russian bookie. I figure that was a good decision. I also took some cool night photos on Red Square.

This is actually a big mall, though it looks much more stately

On a beautiful Easter Sunday I started off by travelling a little ways outside the city center to go to a Russian café that had been recommended. It was very much worth the trip as the russian pie, borscht and coffee were all delicious. I then spent about 2 hours riding around on the Metro, which may sound like a mistake, but it was actually intentional (it's the #3 sight to see in the city according to TripAdvisor!). The Moscow subway stations are very nice and some of them are incredibly ornate. All of the stations are very spacious and clean, and particularly on the circle line many of the stations have chandeliers, paintings, sculptures, mosaics and stained glass windows decorating the walls and ceilings. You can see some of the cooler ones below.

mmm meat pie

At the conclusion of my Metro tour I popped out and walked down Arbat Street, a pedestrian street with street performers, vendors and the like. This was definitely one of the weirdest moments of my trip – the street was filled with thousands of teenagers dressed in costumes (many of which included cat ears and cat face paint, I don't know why) and walking around with signs saying "free hugs", "kiss me" and many Russian ones that I couldn't read. At points there were rings of kids dancing, singing and playing some sort of games. I had no clue, and still don't really have a clue, what was going on. After some internet searching the only thing I could find was an event called "Dreamflash" that occurs on Palm Sunday every year and apparently involves everything I mentioned above as well as lots of blowing bubbles (?), but Palm Sunday was last weekend. I still haven't figured out if this just happens every day/weekend there, or if I just stumbled into some Dreamflash-like thing the week after, but either way it was quite interesting. Needless to say, I felt a little weird with all these 14 year olds walking around me with signs that say "kiss me", so I got out of there pretty quickly, haha.

After a little more walking around the city I rested for a little bit then went and got some Azerbaijani food for dinner. Delicious, and another new experience, so that was cool. I was pretty exhausted after the two days of sightseeing, so after dinner I just dropped by the same sports bar to check up on the games and have a drink and then headed back to the hotel. On Monday I only had a half day before flying out, so I checked out this Russian chain called Moo Moo (spelled "My My" in Russian) for lunch, strolled around a part of the city I hadn't been to yet, and then just chilled for a while in the sun outside the Kremlin. The weather was amazing the whole time I was there – mid to high 60s and sunny every day – so I couldn't have asked for much more there. Now I'm writing this on the plane back, having successfully made it back through Russian passport control.

Moo Moo

Overall I really enjoyed Moscow. It was certainly very unique and it was really cool to see a country, a language, a cuisine, a culture and historic sites that I had never seen before – and I made it back without any broken bones, so that counts as a win in my book. Now before I go and for your viewing pleasure, I've compiled a barrage of American restaurant/fast food logos looking very strange written in Russian. Enjoy.

Papa John's

McD's

Cinnabon

Sbarro

Starbucks Coffee

Subway

TGI Friday's

Chili's

Bruges and Antwerp

I thought it was a little strange that I hadn't spent any time in Belgium yet since it's so close by, so Saturday I did a little day trip to Bruges and Antwerp. It was great weather yet again, and they were some good cities so it was a nice day on the go.

I went to Bruges first. I'd heard really good things about Bruges, and it definitely lived up to expectations. It was a little like Amsterdam - there were quite a few canals and riverboats, and some similar architecture with the narrow houses and tall skinny windows - but also a little different. It's a really small city (although there were still plenty of tourists all around) so it's a little quieter, and it definitely had a little Brussels feel to it too. The two main points of the city were the Church of Our Lady and the Belfry, which were basically two ginormous towers in this tiny little town. The Belfry is also on the Markt square with lots of shops and restaurants and cafes around. I took the opportunity to grab a chocolate covered waffle and grab a beer while I was around there (chocolate, waffles and beer, that's what Belgium does...)

the Markt square

the Belfry

nice scenic view of the Church of Our Lady

They did have some delicious Belgian beer pretty much everywhere you turned. I found this one place which had what seemed to be every Belgian beer in a case on the wall. It's pretty funny how in the US these are pretty much delicacies and here it's just normal fare.

all the Belgian beers...

and just another beer store...

After a good chunk of the day in Bruges I took the one hour train to Antwerp (where I had actually transferred through in the morning) and spent some time checking out that city as well. I think Antwerp was a little less unique as a good portion of the city was urban and modernized, but the old town center was still really cool. They again had a completely out-sized tower (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal) and a neat square with the Town Hall and a bunch of cafes and restaurants and such. They were actually setting up for the Antwerp Marathon the next day, which I didn't even know about. The flags and banners kind of got in the way of my pictures, but oh well.

Town Hall and a statue of Brabo (?) throwing a giant's hand into the Scheldt River (?)

obligatory huge tower

Het Steen (literally "The Stone")

Overall there didn't seem too much to do in Antwerp, but that was ok because I was pretty tired after travelling around all day. I decided to call it a day as it was already pretty late. On the way back though, I did see the pretty strange site of a huge inflatable monster lizard. It was some sort of haunted house type thing right in front of the Central Station where you walk into the mouth and through the thing. Ironically it was right next to a pink merry-go-round for the little children.

the monster

cool-looking Central Station

An exhausting but fun day. Now hopefully on Monday I'll get my passport back so I can make it to Russia next weekend...

Rotterdam

My passport is currently with the Russian Consulate in The Hague getting a visa, so I can't leave the country - but that turned out to be perfect because the Rotterdam Marathon was this weekend. It's one of the fastest marathons in the world, with I think 4 of the 5 fastest times ever or something like that, so I was excited to see it. It was also great weather and there were 7 elite runners running, so there was a decent chance of seeing a world record.

The leaders at around 16 miles

Winner - Wilson Chebet

Waving to the crowd after the win

It didn't turn out to be a world record performance (it was a little hot actually), but the winner still ran 2:05, so very fast. It was also a good atmosphere - maybe not as fun as Boston, but still cool.

Afterwards I met up with a friend from work who lives in the city and he and his girlfriend showed me around. We first walked through a pretty cool neighborhood, one of the few that wasn't bombed during WWII, so it's one of the few with the typical, traditional Dutch architecture. The rest of the city is actually very modern compared to Amsterdam or The Hague because it all needed to be rebuilt. We also went to the EuroMast, this big spire that was built for a World Expo or something about 50 years ago. You can take an elevator halfway up, and then the rest of the way you can ride a rotating circular elevator that gives you some very cool views of the city - downtown, the ports and the big bridge.

After that we took a boat taxi to the Hotel New York, which is actually housed in the old Holland America building. Holland America is a cruise line that started doing voyages and shipping to the US back in the 1800s. Now they just do cruises I think and they're headquarters is in Seattle, but the building was cool and the weather was perfect for a cold beer.

Almost the same as that bridge in Boston - or at least half of it

The Holland America building

We then did another water taxi back towards the downtown area and hung out with some of their other friends on a rooftop terrace for a while. All in all it was a cool day with beautiful weather, and it was great to see a marathon and another Dutch city.