Zombie!Lenin
May. 2nd, 2006 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyOkay, this is probably the entry half of you were waiting for.
Wednesday, April 19
We went to Lenin's Mausoleum! Squee! Of all the things that I'd wanted to do in Russia, visiting Lenin's waxy corpse got me the most teasing from Anya. Apparently, on a trip to Moscow when she was 10, her mom had tried to take her and she'd steadfastly refused. I think she only went along with it this time for the humour value.
Security is tight—they search you, and you're not allowed to bring a camera in. [Sorry, guys. A picture of me posing with Zombie!Lenin would have been the best camwhoreage in history, but I couldn't do it.] You need to open your bag and walk through a metal detector. The mausoleum itself stands out from the rest of Red Square—stark high modernism in contrast to the onion domes and cobblestones. I'm usually not a fan of that sort of thing, but it was actually very beautiful—a solemn structure reminiscent of the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh.
Lenin's Tomb is just to the right of St. Basil's. You can see it better in this entry.
The body itself doesn't look real, and I suspect that it isn't. Surrounded by a red velvet shroud and bathed in red and white light, the spectacle somehow manages to be both morbid and awe-inspiring. We passed through quickly, my eyes fixed on his closed—probably missing—eyes.
He's shorter than you'd think.
Along the wall of the Kremlin, we passed the other graves of Soviet notables. Among them was a plaque in English—William Haywood, a.k.a. Big Bill. I'll have to check and see if it's the same one, since I was under the impression that the only American buried in the Kremlin wall is John Reed. [Note: It is Big Bill, or half of him, anyway. The other half of his ashes are in Chicago, hence my confusion.]
Also, it must be someone's job to make sure that there are fresh flowers on Stalin's grave. That has to be among the strangest jobs ever.
We spent the early afternoon wandering the Kremlin, where all the old buildings feature exhibits of treasures belonging to the tsars. It was all very beautiful, but you can really get an idea of why the Revolution had to be so bloody—the opulence must have been sickening for people who couldn't afford bread, let alone their own private churches.
Monument to Revolutionary Thinkers.
Kremlin pic-spam:
We then went to the Old Arbat, a lovely, if touristy, shopping district, where I indulged my penchant for Soviet kitsch. I also bought a bottle of some sort of cranberry vodka, with the very noble intention of sharing it with my friends at home. Of course, we popped it open when we got back to the apartment.
Old Arbat.
It's apparently some anniversary of Pushkin's marriage. This is supposed to be romantic. Too bad he died in a duel over her!
This awesome kitty was just chillin' in a bucket all day, helping to raise money for an animal shelter.
I had my first taste of Georgian food, which was good, although not quite so appealing as the Russian food I had the first night here. [Note: That's because it wasn't really authentic. I later went to a Georgian restaurant that blew my mind.] The Georgians seem to be disproportionately hawt compared to the general population, although Anya says that this just holds true for the younger folks.
Tomorrow, we're waking up early (alarm clock willing!) to go to Novodevichy Cemetery, the last big thing on my Moscow to-do list. I am strange and morbid, it's true, but there are a ton of amazing writers buried there—and most important, the grave of Kropotkin....
P.S. Tanya is convinced that I don't like food, and Natasha thinks that I am too skinny and need to eat more. Both are wrong; I'm eating more here than I ever have in my life and I'm going to weigh a gazillion pounds by the time I get back to Canada. Also—nearly a week in Russia and I'm still a vegetarian. Go me. [Incidentally, I did manage to stay vegetarian the entire time I was there; it helped that I went during an Orthodox holiday where they're not supposed to eat meat, so all of the restaurants had at least a few vegetarian options. What I didn't manage to do was stick to my Nestle and Coke boycotts—which are ideologically more important to me than not eating meat. You can't drink tap water there, and everything, even what I thought at first was local bottled water, is made by Coke. Evil.]
EDIT: You know, I'd never heard of Ambien before my flight to Moscow. Now that I'm back, all of the same spammers who want to sell me Cialis and "give her a better sex" are trying to sell me Amb1en too. Do they read my LJ?
Wednesday, April 19
We went to Lenin's Mausoleum! Squee! Of all the things that I'd wanted to do in Russia, visiting Lenin's waxy corpse got me the most teasing from Anya. Apparently, on a trip to Moscow when she was 10, her mom had tried to take her and she'd steadfastly refused. I think she only went along with it this time for the humour value.
Security is tight—they search you, and you're not allowed to bring a camera in. [Sorry, guys. A picture of me posing with Zombie!Lenin would have been the best camwhoreage in history, but I couldn't do it.] You need to open your bag and walk through a metal detector. The mausoleum itself stands out from the rest of Red Square—stark high modernism in contrast to the onion domes and cobblestones. I'm usually not a fan of that sort of thing, but it was actually very beautiful—a solemn structure reminiscent of the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh.
Lenin's Tomb is just to the right of St. Basil's. You can see it better in this entry.
The body itself doesn't look real, and I suspect that it isn't. Surrounded by a red velvet shroud and bathed in red and white light, the spectacle somehow manages to be both morbid and awe-inspiring. We passed through quickly, my eyes fixed on his closed—probably missing—eyes.
He's shorter than you'd think.
Along the wall of the Kremlin, we passed the other graves of Soviet notables. Among them was a plaque in English—William Haywood, a.k.a. Big Bill. I'll have to check and see if it's the same one, since I was under the impression that the only American buried in the Kremlin wall is John Reed. [Note: It is Big Bill, or half of him, anyway. The other half of his ashes are in Chicago, hence my confusion.]
Also, it must be someone's job to make sure that there are fresh flowers on Stalin's grave. That has to be among the strangest jobs ever.
We spent the early afternoon wandering the Kremlin, where all the old buildings feature exhibits of treasures belonging to the tsars. It was all very beautiful, but you can really get an idea of why the Revolution had to be so bloody—the opulence must have been sickening for people who couldn't afford bread, let alone their own private churches.
Monument to Revolutionary Thinkers.
Kremlin pic-spam:
We then went to the Old Arbat, a lovely, if touristy, shopping district, where I indulged my penchant for Soviet kitsch. I also bought a bottle of some sort of cranberry vodka, with the very noble intention of sharing it with my friends at home. Of course, we popped it open when we got back to the apartment.
Old Arbat.
It's apparently some anniversary of Pushkin's marriage. This is supposed to be romantic. Too bad he died in a duel over her!
This awesome kitty was just chillin' in a bucket all day, helping to raise money for an animal shelter.
I had my first taste of Georgian food, which was good, although not quite so appealing as the Russian food I had the first night here. [Note: That's because it wasn't really authentic. I later went to a Georgian restaurant that blew my mind.] The Georgians seem to be disproportionately hawt compared to the general population, although Anya says that this just holds true for the younger folks.
Tomorrow, we're waking up early (alarm clock willing!) to go to Novodevichy Cemetery, the last big thing on my Moscow to-do list. I am strange and morbid, it's true, but there are a ton of amazing writers buried there—and most important, the grave of Kropotkin....
P.S. Tanya is convinced that I don't like food, and Natasha thinks that I am too skinny and need to eat more. Both are wrong; I'm eating more here than I ever have in my life and I'm going to weigh a gazillion pounds by the time I get back to Canada. Also—nearly a week in Russia and I'm still a vegetarian. Go me. [Incidentally, I did manage to stay vegetarian the entire time I was there; it helped that I went during an Orthodox holiday where they're not supposed to eat meat, so all of the restaurants had at least a few vegetarian options. What I didn't manage to do was stick to my Nestle and Coke boycotts—which are ideologically more important to me than not eating meat. You can't drink tap water there, and everything, even what I thought at first was local bottled water, is made by Coke. Evil.]
EDIT: You know, I'd never heard of Ambien before my flight to Moscow. Now that I'm back, all of the same spammers who want to sell me Cialis and "give her a better sex" are trying to sell me Amb1en too. Do they read my LJ?
