Underground Museum

привет, my friend!

During our last vacation, we traveled to Turkey and visited a place called the Goreme Open Air Museum, a place filled with caves that were used as churches by Christians from the 13th to the 19th century. It was called Open Air Museum because each cave was painted with beautiful frescoes and one only had to walk 500 feet to go from one cave to another.

I guess I just found the Moscovite equivalent to the Open Air Museum, but it happens to be underground: the Moscow Subway system. Today I spent about 3 hours visiting several subway stations, which were built under the orders of Stalin in the 1930's and all bear communist themes in the form of mosaics, sculptures, and porcelain.

Each station has a different theme, e.g., Bieloruskaya features farmers from Belarus, Kiveskaya portrays the friendship between Ukrainians and Russians, Komsoloskaya has mosaics of past Russian military heroes, and Mayakovskaya is entirely art-deco.

Since my brother is the photographer of the family, I will only post a couple of my crappy pictures.

Check the links below for panoramic pitcures of a couple of stations taken by a professional photographer:
Ploschad Revolyutsii station: http://beeflowers.com/Metro/PloshadRevolutia/mainpage.htm
Kievskaya station: http://beeflowers.com/Metro/Kievskaya/Kiev1/mainpage.htm
Prospekt Mira station: http://beeflowers.com/Metro/ProspektMira/mainpage.htm

After such an odissey, I tried to take a walking tour from my Lonely Planet guide book but was overtaken by exhaustion and returned to my hotel. Today I woke up at 2 o'clock in the morning, had breakfast at 3am and went to the gym at 4am. That's New York time, of course, but I am sure that's how my body reacted.

I have been battling sleep for the last couple of hours, as I want to go to bed at 2pm (10pm NY time). Hope I don't fall asleep on my keyboard.

пока!