We started our day by taking the subway to a big church. The site originally held a church which was demolished by Stalin in the 30’s (I guess he didn’t like churches), and the intention was to construct a giant tower in its place. They never quite finished that, and during world war 2 the partially completed structure was taken apart for war materials. After the war, a giant public pool was built, which Roman’s Dad has apparently swam in. In 1995, they got rid of the pool and re-built a church, coming full circle.

After spending enough time to sufficiently appreciate the church, we started doing a walking tour (I think from Cynthia’s guidebook), and headed over to the Kremlin. We circled around a bit, saw the presidential entrance, then stood in line for awhile to pay to go inside. Once inside, we walked around, looked at some more churches, as well as a very big cannon and a bell.

After the walking tour we went to the Elki Palki near the Ritz-Carlton for lunch. Elki Palki is another fast food place whose theme was the forest or nature or something (apparently all of these places have themes). After lunch, we went back to red square to see it properly (i.e. without being quite as severely jet lagged), and took a bunch of pictures. We went back into GUM for refreshments, then continued the walking tour, on which we saw the Bolshoi. The tour ended once we reached KGB headquarters, which is across the street from Kids World (a toy store).

After taking the metro back to the hotel, we headed out to a more “russian” restaurant (whose name I forget), where I had wild boar and buckwheat (which was actually pretty good). After dinner, we went to red square yet again, in order to take some pictures in the dark.