Weekend in Moscow

Saturday was a fun day with Terri, Dave and I hanging out together and going to breakfast, mastering the metro, going to a local market area and then going to dinner at a co-worker of Dave's.

First, a little about the money.  Here's what it looks like, front and back.  It's weird dealing with the huge amounts.  This 1600 rubles is worth just under $52.00 today. It's hard for me to quickly do a conversion to think if the price of what I want to buy is reasonable.

We went to breakfast at a little American style diner!  Sausage AND bacon along with pancakes, eggs and fried potatoes was a standard breakfast!  And, after two and a half months in a land of no pork, I had some of both the sausage and bacon! 

As we walked to the diner, we saw signs over the metro entry and figured out it was closed.  We didn't realize immediately, that it wasn't just that entrance that was closed, but instead the whole line!  Thank goodness Dave was with us, or Terri and I wouldn't have been able to go to the market.  We had to walk about three city blocks to an entrance to another line of the metro and then use three different lines to get where we were going.  But, the good thing about this is that I then saw more of these fantastic Metro stations!  Here are a couple of photos:

This station was dedicated to Dmitri Mendeleev, who developed the presentation of the periodic table!

Beautiful stained glass in this one.

Riding the rails home with my goodies -- it was COLD and wet!

Thought I was back in Turkey and the old Roman and Greek stuff!

Great mosaics!

 

The market was an outdoor market with a lot of junk and then a few fantastic booths in between. We had fun looking and then bartering for our chosen items and ran out of rubles rather quickly.  Actually, I used up my dollars and Euros and held on to the Rubles that I had.

Here's a couple of things to notice -- kind of like Juneau with the wet and the cold.  People really do wear there hoods here, and not just the men.  Check out the shopping cart: there was a woman pushing this through, selling hot coffee and tea and other snacks.  Not in the picture, is the DVD sales booth.  All illegal I'm sure, like in Peru.


We ended up buying a few things from this guy.  Absolutely loved his work.  He does some of the paintings and his wife the others.  Most of their work is take-offs on the artist Klimt who did the famous piece called "The Kiss". 

And here is what Terri got:

Old man winter with some of the patterns incorporated from the Klimt art work.

They are absolutely beautiful and so much detail.  The egg on the left actually depicts a piece by artist Mucha whose museum I visited in Prague.

We had a dinner invite from one of David's co-workers which turned into a very interesting time for me.  The man is from Norway, his wife is from Canada, and they have two teenage daughters.  They have only been here since this past summer.  They live on a "compound" - gated community - on the outskirts of the city.  The American School is literally right next to them, so this neighborhood is full of ex-pats with kids attending school.  They have lived in Singapore, Azerbajan, South Africa, and Houston.  Some were short stays and others were longer, for example, they lived in South Africa for six years.  Both girls were very nice and enjoyed sitting around and chatting with us.  The woman is a nurse and is working at the American School.  (She didn't  know the librarian Anne, as Anne left before she got there.)  Oh, and we had smoked pork for dinner!  And mashed potatoes and a green salad!  Was wonderful to be in a familiar environment! 

Posing in Lynn's Russian hat and holding a bottle of Vodka.