My First Time In Moscow | Russia
Hey everyone, welcome back to a new video. My name is Ricardo and today we are taking the Sapsan high speed train from Saint Petersburg to Moscow. I am visiting Moscow with a friend and this is our first time in the capital city of Russia, even though we are both half Russian. For the next five days we will be exploring the city, so i'm excited to share this experience with all of you. Hopefully I can give you some valuable insights into some of the places that you can visit here. I'm going to be pretty straightforward about the prices of everything, so I'll start with the train, we got our tickets from Russiantrain.com and it was about four
thousand rubles on the way there and six thousand rubles on the way back, so in total it added up to like nine thousand seven hundred rubles, so a hundred and thirty dollars round trip. We got to the train station and we have to take the metro over to our hotel and leave our stuff there so we can go exploring. This is the Moscow metro, it's my first time here so i'm trying to compare to the Saint Petersburg metro that I'm familiar with. So far it's nice, it's pretty but I wouldn't say it's better than Saint Petersburg, although I haven't seen many of the stations yet.
Now, the metro is a little bit more modern but the map of the metro lines is a mess compared to Saint Petersburg, it's so many more stations. So, if you want to use the metro in Russia, you should, it's super cheap and it's probably the best way to get around. I got a metro card here in Moscow because my Saint Petersburg metro card wouldn't work and I added some money to it, I think about 500 rubles covered the cost for the five or four days that we use the metro. So now we got to our hotel, we're in a very nice area next to the Kremlin, so we'll see the Kremlin walls in a bit, but we got it through Airbnb and it was pretty cheap. I think there was some construction
going on in the hotel so the prices were very low, I think we were paying like $30 a night. So now we are here at the Bolshoi Theater and I was excited actually to maybe watch a show but this was during the off season. So right after we dropped our stuff off at the hotel we decided to go towards the modern part of the city, and see the new skyscrapers that are being built here in Moscow, so we're heading to the north (west*) of the city towards Mezhdunarodnaya metro station, and that's where we see Moscow City or Moskva City. And these are skyscrapers that have been
built pretty much in the last 10 years, and it's an area of Russia that i've never seen before so i'm excited to share with you guys. We're actually going to go up to the top of one of these buildings because Katya saw that there's a observatory museum so let's check that out. So most of the metro rides are underground, but here we go up above ground and we can see the Russian White House, and in 1993 this building was shot at by tanks, it's the parliamentary offices and the government offices. And here's a picture of what it looked like.
So we've made it to the north (west*) of the city and this is interesting, the metro pops out right under a skyscraper and we are here in an office building walking out, and that's interesting, I don't see many people in suits in Saint Petersburg and wow skyscrapers! So here on the left is a mall, in between all of these skyscrapers, and at the end of the street you can see there's new buildings being built. There's actually a lot more buildings planned for this area too. So Katya said that there is an observation deck at the top of this building so we're gonna head in there, it is on the 65th floor or something like that but yeah let's head up. Which way do you want to go first, this way? You know, when I think of Russia this is not what I think of, skyscrapers. Well there's a bunch of them being built here and these are all very recent
So something that is familiar about the Moscow skyline is that building on the left side corner of the screen now, that is one of the seven sisters these are soviet buildings built from 1947 to 1953. But these big skyscrapers were really not cost effective they were extremely heavy compared to American skyscrapers and there's only seven of them, but you can see a lot more of them across eastern Europe because the soviets took that model and built it pretty much everywhere. So in general my first impression of the modern side of Moscow, I think it's pretty impressive. I did not think of this being in Russia and it looks like it's expanding pretty fast so that's exciting for Moscow, it makes me wonder if we're going to see this kind of growth in Saint Petersburg as well, there's already one super-tall skyscraper but there's a few more proposed. Katya, what do you prefer so far, Moscow or Saint P? Saint P. It's only day one but i'm
already noticing that Moscow feels a lot bigger than Saint Petersburg. In Saint Petersburg you can pretty much walk anywhere, in Moscow it feels like you have to take the metro a lot more and it doesn't feel like it's built for walking, but that's all right it's only day one. And now we are taking the metro and heading over to the Kremlin, this metro station is actually located inside of the mall that we saw before.
So I think Katya and I saw everything that we had to see over in the modern area of the city, we even went up the tower for the view, now we're gonna head over to the Kremlin and start doing our tour of the Kremlin. I think maybe we'll do two days today evening and tomorrow morning. This building that we're about to go into is called the GUM - Glavny Universalny Magazin - it means main department store, and it's a mall, but before I tell you about the building I want to explain a little bit about the history of the Red Square, so for that we have to go to the end of the 1400s. The Moscow Kremlin is a fortress, a part of it on the South is protected by the Moscow river. All of the sides have high walls but the tallest walls are on the Eastern side which was
most likely where an attack would occur, so at the end of the 1400s Ivan the Great, Grand Prince of Moscow, demolished all of the buildings 234 meters from the Kremlin walls in this direction so that cannons mounted on the walls could easily fire at incoming enemies on the cleared area. The square was used for trade and eventually wooden buildings stood there as marketplaces. After a huge fire in 1547, the wooden structures were removed and new stone buildings were built farther away from the Kremlin walls. It wasn't until 1804 that the field was paved with stones. The GUM replaced the older trade centers in 1893 and it became a successful shopping center partly because of its architecture. People from all of Russia and around the world would come to see the 60,000 panes of glass that would make up the glass roof.
During the soviet union the GUM was closed for a while and it was used as offices and residences but then it was opened up again and it was used as a model department store for soviet goods. And then after the fall of the soviet union it was privatized and now it's a pretty high-end mall. So now we're coming out of the GUM and right across the Red Square there we can see Lenin's mausoleum. Unfortunately it's closed right now because there is going to be a concert, so we are going to head over to the most iconic church in Russia, Saint Basil's Cathedral. So in the 1500s there was a wooden church that stood here in the middle of the busy marketplace. After Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan, the wooden Trinity
Church was demolished and the cathedral dedicated to Saint Basil was built in 1561. Something that I didn't expect about this cathedral is that it's not one big open space, but instead it's a maze of nine different churches that were connected in the 1680s. It took us about 30 minutes to get to the other side of the Kremlin and from here we can see the presidential palace there in the middle. And we are going to go into the Kremlin but not today, that'll be in the next video. Here's the plan for the rest of the trip, I made these notes just as a guideline to follow, we don't follow it exactly, but we do go to most of the places on this list.
For now we are gonna head back to the hotel, rest for a bit, and then go out to dinner. I'm gonna get a few shots of Moscow here at night, and then just rest so we can have a full day tomorrow. This was only a half day but we did so much already, I think we walked like 35,000 steps in our first day here in Moscow. Also if you've made it this far into the video, make sure you subscribe and
like the video, it really helps the channel and I hope you guys don't miss out on the next videos. So we were standing right here and then these fountains turned on, refreshing surprise. So actually before heading back to the hotel we came back to the GUM because we remembered that there was an ice cream stand, and we were craving some ice cream. Now these decorations, I don't know if they're here the whole year round, but it looks kind of like Christmas time, and it's not Christmas yet, so I wonder what the people of Moscow think about these lights. I kind of like them when they're turned on at night, so i'll get a shot of that. I'll come back after we rest a bit at the hotel, now we're here, mango my favorite.
So after dinner and after resting a bit at the hotel we came back out because we wanted to show you guys the lights as they turned on here at the Red Square. You can see that the kremlin walls are lit but also the GUM is very well lit. And I also wanted to show you guys the decorations, what do you guys think? Leave a comment below if you think they're nice or not. All right, so that's the end of today's video, right now we're just gonna go have dinner, we're pretty tired from the trip but um yeah see you guys next time! Bye!
2021-10-26 23:59
