MOSCOW, Sunday, 5 September 2004

GOODBYE MOSCOW

I had banana split on my mind from last night, so here I am at Phlegmatic Dog where you get one banana and three scoops of excellent ice cream -- strawberry, chocolate and vanilla.

It's bright and sunny outside but it is past the tee-shirt weather that welcomed me 12 days ago. I could do very well with a sweater under my jacket.

Today, I took my luggage to the Komsomolskaya train station. I had thought of leaving it at the Hotel Rossija's storage room but thought better of it when I considered it must cost a fortune. I took it to the train station and left it there for a pittance.

Yesterday, I spoke with the only pleasant person working at Hotel Rossija. She is the one who used to plug in my battery charger. I was paying for an extra day yesterday because I had miscalculated and pair through the 4th, not the 5th. So, when I returned to the hotel at about 6 o'clock, I had been locked out of my room. I was straightening this out when she came to see if she could help.

She wondered when I would be back and told me that they had plans to demolish the hotel and put up a smaller, more expensive one. I wished her the best getting a job with the new hotel.

Today, I rode the ring metro and stopped at about three or four to take photos, all the time clearing it with the police who were quite pleasant.

Thanks to the Bolshoi, I have remained in Moscow about twice as long as I had planned. Despite all the agida, Moscow is one of the highlights of the travelling bug that I caught in the summer of 1969, the bug that took me to the expo in Montreal.

I look forward to visiting and spending a lot of time in The Hermitage, Catherine the Great's Winter Palace.

I have not decided whether I should leave Helsinki for Copenhagen, or head from Helsinki via Estonia, Latvia and Lithuana for Warsaw. The main question is whether or not I wish to postpone Warsaw, and I really can't think of any great reason why I can't.

I edited this post to mention my biggest puzzle about Moscow: the fact that not once was I stopped by the police and asked for my passport. I have no explanation for it. Not that I feel neglected by the police, no, just because everywhere I go I see them asking people, especially, Russians for their IDs. OK, then, I've said everything I wanted to say.

So, Farewell Moscow!

Farewell, my friends!

Patrick Barry Barr