We had a lovely indian meal last night at the local veggie Krishna cafe, Andy had a huge thali and I had lovely veg pakora with mango sauce, and best of all, they did BURFI (slightly Russian style, with pine nuts in). A top meal all round, slightly preceeded by us buying some books in the English bookshop opposite for the 27hr train journey we have tomorrow to Yekaterinburg.
Andy has a stinking cold at the moment, but that hasn't stopped him insisting that we try to get across Russia without going on the trans-siberian train route. Does this sound like the Andy you know and love? Anyway, needless to say we are booked on the No 16 train at 4pm tomorrow which goes south throughthe Urals and is very beautiful apparently, but not at all trans-siberian. I'm sure there is more fickleness to come.
We went to the Kremlin today, having lunched it out badly yesterday. We paid about 850 roubles each to get in. That's most of todays money gone then! The cathedral square has more cathedrals than are strictly needed in any one place, but they are very beautiful, with delicate C17th murals depicting biblical scenes in surreal and bizarre ways, right up to the dimness of the roof far above.
We also decided to try our luck getting into an exhibion that we weren't sure we had paid for. More bling than you could shake a gangsta rapper at. We saw the Dresden Green diamond. We did, we did!!! It was beautiful, delicately coloured HUGE diamond in a hat pin thing. Really, really sparkly. There were lots of other things there, but that not only took the biscuit, it absconded with the entire luxuary assortment.
We also went to the Kremlin Armoury, which was almost equally fabulous, but we were quite treasure-fatigued by this time and enormous gold plates, massive emeralds the size of stones in my garden, more pearls than rain and more diamonds than stars in the London sky were just, y'know, things. Nice things, mind. We missed the Diamond fund exhibition with the really good stuff in though, due to the fact that you don't know it's there or that you have to spend another 300 roubles getting in until you pass the exit!
Off home now, might go to the market to get omething to eat for dinner, otherwise, it's catfood.