DAY 156 TUESDAY AUGUST 28 OLGA OUR GUIDE

After the anxiety of yesterday we started the day in an apprehensive state of mind.  We went to breakfast at 8.30 and after searching around, found two places in a room which had a thousand plus chairs set up.  The breakfast buffet had quite a reasonable selection of food so we ate well.  We wondered why we could not find Pam and Ken in the room and found out later that they had been directed to another breakfast room upstairs, not quite as big. The size of the Hotel Cosmos takes some comprehending.  There are 83 bedrooms on our floor and there are 25 stories in all.  Perhaps there are as many as 3000 guests at a time.  It is probably designed on the same lines as a massive ocean cruiser.

It seems that the French government presented Russia with a statue of General de Gaulle and they placed it in the courtyard here.

 He was always above everyone else, looking down his nose at us. We waited in the lobby and our guide turned up at 10am on schedule, with a placard containing all four names.  She introduced herself as Olga and was a recent graduate linguist teaching French and English, so she was glad to spend the day with us conversing in English and translating Russian signs for us.  She took us to many different spots around Moscow and you might look at these photos and guess what they have in common as to their location.

This is a ceramic mosaic in the ceiling. One of many.

This is one of about 30 statues in this hall.

This hall had all marble walls, granite floors, chandeliers, elaborate ceiling paintings.

Dozens of these fancy light fittings in another hall.

Murals at each end of this hall.

Dozens of stained glass windows in this hall. Here is a final clue from the names on the walls of these locations.

In one hall there were displays of stuffed animals and models of animals from around the world. These included a frillnecked lizard and a Tassie Tiger.

 One hall was on a bridge in the middle of the Moskva River with a road running above it.

We returned to some of the halls as we moved around Moscow.  Final clue if you have not guessed.

The Moscow Metro carries 8 million passengers every weekday, more than Paris and London.  The trains are very quick and are never more than 3 monutes apart.  The stations are breathtakingly beautiful.  Other places we visited were the Kremlin and Red Square, which was almost deserted because of the rain. A band were practising the 1812 0verture inside a tent so we could not see them but it was appropriate music to accompany our walk starting from 0km

across the square towards St Basil's.

Opposite the Kremlin is a huge capitalist style shopping centre with artificial trees and fountains.

and outdoor cafes indoors

The bike shop had a display right along the hall but there are few places to ride safely in Moscow.

 Olga took us down Arbut St and into a souvenir shop, and we had lunch at a Russian Pancake Shop. We saw Puskin and his wife's Statue and Turandot in gold.

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We visited the Exhibition Centre in the rain and finished the day there because it was near the Cosmos Hotel.  We will be back to the Exhibition Centre on Thursday so more about it then. We received an email from Igor saying we would receive a refund of $300 for the missed transfers in St Petersburg and Real Russia would pay $50 each for us to see the Dance Spectacular in the Hotel Theatre on Wenesday night as compensation.  He is back in the good books now.