Cemetarys and Toppled Sculptures

So here I am in an underground mall underneath Red Square filling in my last couple of hours in Moscow before we lump our packs across a town of 10 million people in peak hour and I thought I´d fill y´all in on my last couple of days.

Yesterday with the sun shining on us and a blue sky for only my third day since I´ve been in the Northern Hemisphere we went to visit the Nodovechy Convent. The trip gave us stunning views of the Moskva River and when we got to the monastery it looked beautiful against the blue sky. A series of buildings, several hundreds of years old, linked by snow covered paths with a couple of very peaceful museums. After a couple of hours strolling aimlessly in the gardens we were very chilled out indeed.

Two pictures of the Nodovechiy

Then we visited the adjacent cemetary that serves as the final resting place for Mayakovsky, Kruschev, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Eisenstein, Chekov and various other politburo heroes. Unfortunately without a map the only noteworthy person we could locate was Gorbachev´s wife.

And last night we went to dinner with our two hostel friends, Dave (an Aussie from Brisbane who went to school with Marcel and knows Kieran) and Morgan, to bid them godspeed.

Today we visited Gorky Park and the Sculpture Park next door. The Sculpture Park is one trippy place. It was built to house all the sculptures that were toppled after the fall of the revolution. So of course the ones we were particularly interested in were of Iron Joe but they had statues of Brezhnev, Lenin, the former head of the KGB and various other party functionaries.

Oh and they're playing Nora Jones, just like every other place I've visited on this trip.