Awesome Blossom: Moscow, Day 3

I woke up on Saturday so excited to see Lenin's Mausoleum. Unfortunately after walking to Red Square we discovered that it was still closed. You can see the building here completely covered with scaffolding from the Victory Day celebrations.

Since we couldn't hang with Lenin, we headed over toward the other side of the Kremlin to get tickets to see the armory. We passed this museum on our way with these excellent Victory Day banners:

We also passed through Alexander Garden again:

And saw these incredible fountains:

The Armory was awesome. It was a little complicated to get tickets, but well worth it. The building used to be an armory, hence the name, but it is now a museum that houses the Tzar's treasury. It had some pretty incredible stuff. You can't take pictures, and yet somehow I managed to snap a few, but that's why they aren't the best quality.

Some of the Tzar's silver collection:

Some crowns:

A real Faberge egg:

Some of the royal dresses:

One of my favorite things was seeing these coronation crowns. Of course they would have fur on them since they are Russian. Too funny.

Some of the carriages. There was an entire room full of them.

After seeing the armory, we continued further into the Kremlin. In case you are wondering what "the Kremlin" is, it's the Russian word for fortress. Moscow's Kremlin is the most famous one and thus it is often referred to as THE Kremlin, when really there are kremlins all over Russia. Anyways, inside the Kremlin is Cathedral Square. You can stand in one spot and see maybe 5 or 6 different churches. Pretty incredible, but difficult to capture a picture of them all at once.

We went inside most of the cathedrals and they were all decorated similarly with paintings covering every inch of the walls and ceilings.

In addition to tons of cathedrals, the Kremlin also has many governmental buildings, including the palace where Putin "lives" except he doesn't really live there, he just works there.

There are also some gorgeous gardens. Coming off of a Russian winter I was shocked to see so much green and so many flowers.

Just hanging out by a peacock fountain:

We exited the Kremlin by crossing the one remaining bridge left from back in the day when there was a river that ran under it.

From there we headed back toward Red Square.

Remember when I mentioned that you are technically allowed to ring the bells of any cathedral in Russia the week after Easter? Well, I was determined to be a part of that tradition, so I dragged some of the other girls with me into a cathedral right on Red Square (not St. Basil's though). I saw that this one had a bell tower and had heard the bells ringing the day before when I learned about the tradition.

I walked up to an old lady who was selling the candles and icons and whatnot that the Russians use to worship and I pointed to the door that I assumed led up to the bell tower and asked if I could go up there. She looked surprised and said "why?" I motioned with my hands and said "to ring the bells!" very enthusiastically. Again she looked surprised and simply said "dah!" She then went and found an old man, who I guess is the "Quasimoto" of this bell tower, though not a hunchback, and he took us up the very narrow stairs and ladder to the bell tower. This was the view from the tower:

And here are Paige and I ringing the bells for everyone on Red Square to hear:

After we had all taken a turn ringing the bells, the man went up and played a song by ringing all of the different bells. He had it rigged so that he rang the giant one with his foot and then pulled on different ropes in order to ring the different bells surrounding the tower. It was pretty epic. I'm glad I didn't go deaf. You can see his legs in this picture behind me pumping up and down to ring the giant bell over my head:

After ringing the bells, we headed over to St. Basil's to see if we could go inside.

Luckily we could, and the interior was gorgeous. I have to say that I still like Spilled Blood better because it is all mosaics and St. Basil's is painted.

In the main chapel area (if that's what you even call it) they had an acapela group that sang every so often. That was pretty incredible to hear.

I loved all of the fun patterns on the different walls.

After seeing St. Basil's, we headed over to Moscow State University because we had heard that it was cool to see. It definitely was:

On our way back we hit a little rough patch when I led us through what looked like a flat park on my map, but turned out to be a small mountain with no walking path. Oh well.