We travelled overnight, arriving in Moscow at 00.55 and spent the next 5 hours trying to sleep in the railway stations. We were actually asleep on a bench in the Leningradskii station when two policemen woke us to tell us that there was a much more comfortable waiting room in the adjacent Yaroslavskii station. So we went there, only to find that other travellers were occupying all the benches. So we bought a surprisingly good coffee from an all-night stall, and eventually found a place to bed down for the night. At 07.00 we turned up at the Moscow Holiday Hotel and they let us into a room where we slept for all of 13th June.
On the 14th we went to see the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour which had been knocked down during the Soviet period but has now been rebuilt. Sadly we were unable to take pictures. We then went down the road to the Pushkin Museum which is not comparable to the Hermitage but has lots of good stuff.
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
Pushkin Museum
Rubens: Virgin giving rosary to St Dominic
Van Dyk: Lady Daubigny and the Countess of Portland, 1639
Van Dyck: Portrait of Adrian Stevens, 1629
Peter Breugel II, Winter landscape with bird trap, 1620
Peter Breugel II: Peasants fighting at cards, 1620
Peter Breugel II, Planting potatoes, 1620
Peter Breugel II: Skating, after 1620
Lucas Cranach the Elder: The fall of man, 1527
Byzantine mural: The Annunciation, mi-14th century
Jacopo Torriti, The Christ Child, 1296
Byzantine: Emperor Constantine VII crowned by Christ, 945 AD
Roman school: Saint Joseph, 705 AD
Master of Misericordia: The Annunciation, 1360
Simone Martini, Mary Magdelene, early 14th century
Botticelli: The Angel Gabriel and The Annunciate, late 15th century
Giovanni Santi: Madonna and Child, mid-15th century
Tintoretto: Portrait of a man, late 16th century
Michel Colombe: Saint George and the Dragon, 1508
Fragments of Coptic cloth, Egypt, 4th century
Sarcophaus, Egypt, Greco-Roman period, 4th to 1st Century BC
Sarcophagi, Egypt, Ptolomeic period
Trojan diadem
Frieze of battle scene, Taman Peninsula of southern Russia, 4th century BC
Assyria: Centaur from modern Iraq,
Assyrian carving
Assyrian carving
Vessel in form of a fish, from Naqada in Egypt, 3600 BC
Picture from an exhibition of the Leningrad Siege, drawing water from the River Neva