Where was I? Oh, yes. Finally, Moscow (or, does anyone care whether she gets to Moscow?

It's been a 4,735 mile journey (across 7 time zones), but our heroine does finally arrive in Moscow.  It is a city of 12,500,000 people, and 850 years old  (it doesn't look a day older than100 - okay, maybe two...)

.........they always find time to feed us....

;;;this was a chain restaurant, actually, serving Georgian food..

This is called the marriage bowl....

....a visit to a school for gifted children for a concert...

....this is apparently where a lot of our current crop of Russian performers got their start...

....we stopped to play in a park...

...noone has more fun than our tour guide.....

This is the infamous St. Basil's cathedral.....

........and the infamous Kremlin.....

.....if you look carefully in front of the wall, you will see Lenin's tomb...

....this lake was meant to be the inspiration for Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake...

....all I can say is, he must have had some imagination....

.....up to Sparrow Hill, for an overview of the city....

The Russians are very proud of their space program, as is evident from the Memorial Museum of Cosmonauttics.  Below, the monument named "\To the Conquerors of Space"...

........after admiring the museum (I have never been much of a space person, but even I was impressed), we had a Q & A with a real cosmonaut, Sergi Zaloytin...

.....and, in one of the few reminders of the past, a tribute to Galileo...

.....yet another eating opportunity.....

.......back at the Kremlin....

We went to the Tretyakov Gallery, an oligarch of his time, and apparently the first to collect Russian art.

.......lovely cannon, like new, never been fired...

One of metro stations, all different, all works of art.  The metro was started in 1938, and there are 216 stations...

......The above were all in different metro stations.  They really are works of art, and spotlessly clean.  There is no food sold in the metro, and apparently steep fines for littering.  Very user friendly too; Manhattan, take note...  (have I mentioned that they have Uber in Moscow?  Vancouver, take note...)

.....We went to the Arbat Street of literary fame, now a walking/shopping street.....

...and ended this part of the trip with a lovely farewell dinner.    Tomorrow, I fly to St. Petersburg, to continue my journey by river boat, from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Can't leave Moscow without saying how much I loved it.  I was always (in my head, since I have never been to either) a St. Peters burg girl, but I don't know, this is a pretty spectacular city.  I could live here, or, at the very least, come back for some opera....