Saturday, March 15, 2014

Russia Trip: Wrapup and Table of Contents

I am back home, and recovering from jet lag. I wanted to wrap up my blogging about my amazing trip to Russia in two ways:
1) Here's a Table of Contents, listing all my posts in order, which is an easier way to access them than the most-recent-at-the-top way they appear in the blog. I have also added a link at the bottom of each post to the next post in the series, to make it easier to just read them in order.
2) Here are more photos that I had trouble inserting into blog posts while in Russia. I was taking photos with my iPhone, syncing them to the cloud using Google+, and then inserting photos into blog posts from my iPad. For reasons I still do not understand, not all photos were visible from my iPad, which was frustrating. I had brought along a separate device that was intended to solve this problem (it provides a local wifi network and memory keys can plug into it), but the software for it didn't seem to work with my iPad either.
Sochi:
In each city I visited, I saw these pipes snaking around,
along and over streets. They are gas lines,
which often tend to run above ground instead of being buried.
It lends a Brazil-like atmosphere.

Canada Olympic House (COH) at Olympic Park.
This is where the famous Molson beer fridge is located
- the one that opens only with a Canadian passport.
Unfortunately COH was open only to accredited athletes
and their families, so I could not get in!

There were swarms of volunteers everywhere, and they were very friendly!

The bear mascot sat down in an empty seat beside me at one game.

This is one of the funniest things I saw at the Games.

Once I had a photo with the bear, I had to try to complete my mascot collection,
so when the Snow Leopard came near, I grabbed a photo.
Sadly, I did not see the Rabbit at all during the Games.

 The competing countries' flags were displayed each game
on the top of the Bolshoi Ice Dome, with the scores added after each game.
This is after the Canada-US semi-final.

As close as I will get to riding a bobsled.

The Canadian Elvises entertained at every game
at the Bolshoi Ice Dome, and they were a row ahead of me
at the men's gold medal game.

Moscow:

 Tributes to cosmonauts outside the Cosmonaut Museum

 Approaching Red Square

 The Bolshoi Theatre

 A piece of the Berlin Wall, outside the Sakharov Museum

 Statue on the platform at the Revolution Square (Плошадь Революций) Metro station. There were dozens of these lining the platform.

Sign above metro station platform, indicating which stops can be reached
by the trains arriving at each side of the platform.
The metro system maps in the trains had station names
transliterated in Roman characters, but these signs,
and all the directional signage to various exits from the station,
were only in Cyrillic.

St Petersburg:
 
                            Dosteovsky Museum, just a few blocks from my hotel.



 The tend to transliterate without translating isn't limited to English words;
this says "Rive Gauche" (french for Left Bank), a trendy store.

 The circus.


            I kept seeing stores called "____ World" in Russian. This one is Art World.


 Butterfly World


                                                        Apartments World


 Flavour World (A liquor store)


                                                  World of Leather and Fur


 I'm not sure whether to translate this as
"Rose of the World" or "Rose of Peace".



 Bag World



 Fruit World



                                                      The New Mariinsky Theatre


 The New (left) and Old (right) Mariinsky Theatres


 
I love the logo on this truck. 
The lettering on the truck says Хлебтранс, 
which translates to "BreadTrans". 
The slices in the loaf/van roof are the nice touch.


 The old Mariinsky Theatre.


                                The cruiser Aurora, whose firing of a blank round
                                     signalled the start of the 1917 revolution.

                      At the СКА/ЦСКА playoff game; free T shirts for everyone!

                                                              The SKA arena

                      Frozen canals (these were all thawed by the end of my trip).


at 10:15 AM

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