The Itinerary of MY 1997 European Trip

Day 1 (Saturday): Taking Austrian Air from Washington Dulles Airport to Zurich (overnight)

I bought the ticket from SwissAir - the No. 2 airline in the world. But then they use Austrian Air to fly the DC-Zurich route. Something they call "code-sharing" or whatever. At least it's better than you buy tickets from Virgin Airline and then ending up in the ValueJet.....

Day 2 (Sunday): Arriving at Zurich, aking a nap' at the waiting area, then taking SwissAir 490 to Moscow. We arrived at Moscow at 3:40 pm local time .

Finally, it's SwissAir!! The plane is small, but the seat is wide and the food is decent. No wonder it is the econd favorite airline' in the world. Since I've fly Singapore Airline (No.1), Quantas (No.3), and Cathay Pacific (No.4) already, that means I've flew all the Top 4 airlines in the world. Which one is No. 5?

Representative from UniWorld (a beautiful Russian woman) picked us up at the airport. Then we were driven to board our cruise boat, where I and my mom will stay for the next 14 nights. No real activities today. Everybody had free time to recover from their jet lag, which is 8 hours ahead of Washington, DC.

Tip of my day: Melatonin doesn't work for me.....

Day 3 (Monday): The tour officially began! UniWorld arranged us in 6 tour buses and headed for Moscow city tour. We only made stops at some points, including the most famous one - Red Square. We had chance to walked around in the square and got the best angles of Cathedral of St. Basil, the most famous landmark in the whole Russia. This cathedral's mult-colored onion domes is the classic example of the traditional orthordox architecture. Other points stopped: the Novedovichy (New Maiden) Monastery and Moscow University. And the last one, Radisson Hotel for exchange Russian Roubles, I doubt if that counts as a stop.

You know about "city tour", you sit in the bus all the time and the tour guide keeps talking and talking:"At the right, it is blah blah, look at your left, it is dadada....."

In the afternoon, I had chance to wander around with my mother in the streets of Moscow. We walked from some place called litsa 1905 Goda' outside of Moscow's "Garden Ring " to the east end of Arbat street, some old-historic-street- turn-new-chic-place in Moscow. After the long walk, we took metro back to the pier.

Taking metro for a non-Russian readers in Moscow is a very challenging experience, specially if you are traveling with your mom, who happens to want to see all the metro stations with the grandest interior decoration but feels daunted by the Cyrillic alphabet...... For more about the metro(subway train) systems in Russia, see my separate article about it.

There is a folklore concert tonight on board. It was also the first time I heard the most famous Russian folklore song "Kalinka"

I would hear that songs dozens times more afterwards, just like hearing "Macarena" on a Caribbean cruise.

10:30 pm, we set off for an "optional tour" (which means extra charge) of "Moscow by night". We went back to Red Square and Moscow University again. The Cathedral of St. Basil looks even more exquisite under the moonlight. Then, World War II Memorial, where they light the fountains with red color to symbolize the blood Russians shed in the War. It is after 1:00 am after we returned to the boat. I didn't take melatonin this night.

Moscow night is not really attractive at all. The street is so empty, just like.......Baltimore. But the Red Square is beautiful!

Day 4 (Tuesday): Another day of tour of Moscow. It's for Kremlin today! We had a guided tour of the Armory Museum and the church square in the Kremlin. In case you don't know, "Kremlin" means ortress' in Russian. There are kremlins in most ancient Russian towns and with squares, bell towers and some churches inside. Yeltsin's office is in Moscow Kremlin too, but that was not a place we can take sightseeing tour today.

I heard they fight in their congress like Taiwanese do. Can we have a tour of that?

We didn't join another "optional tour" to Pushkin Museum, so I and Mom hit the road by ourselves again. We took a stroll back to Red Square again, window shopping in the GUM Department store (largest one in the whole Soviet Union!), taking pictures everywhere, and then walked up the Tverskaya Avenue (the Fifth Avenue of Moscow because its ubiquitous famous boutique shops). We took metro back (again) and did not have too much trouble this time.

The street vendors are everywhere and very pushy to sell their things. Mom said: "It feels just like....China!" The Russian streets are so busy and full of traffics. I feels it's more Asian than European.

Tonight we were treated for a Russian style circus show. And it is made for Russians, not only for foreign tourists (all the jokes are in Russian). But most of the show are without language limit and can be appreciated by people from all around the world. It ended with a performance by cowboys (?) from Khazakstan.

Day 5 (Wednesday): A whole day's excursion to Sergievsky Posad (called Zagorsk at the communist era) to the famous monastery of St. Trinity Sergius Lavra. It should have taken 1 and ?hours each way but it took almost 3 hours for each way. That made our time in Sergievsky Posad less than 2 hours. Basically, there is not much to see in this small town except the Monastery. We had a tour of several churches and cathedrals within it. And we saw a lot of beatifully painted religious icons inside.

Those onion-domed Orthodox churches are really beautiful! The icons inside are delicate and mesmerizing! I said that because I hadn't have known I would see another 4,000 icons later in this trip.....

Back to Moscow. Before we could even take the metro to downtown for a final sightseeing, the boat is leaving. The captain's cocktail party and captain's welcome dinner ensued. Because of the special occasion, we were treated caviar(fish eggs) and vodka in the dinner. Only me and another lady on our table dared to eat caviar, so I can have 3 persons' share of caviar myself.

For the first time in my life, I found I'm a less picky person in food than my mom......

Day 6 (Thursday): After passing several canal locks , we entered Volga River from Moscow Canal and approached our first destination after Moscow, Uglich. But before that, there are a lot of activities on-board (not by the standard of Caribbean cruise): there are lecture series about "Russian Politics", "Russian language lesson, No. 1" (just like teaching A,B,C), "Lecture about how to buy Russian art"....By the way, I attended all of them. We had some interesting things for lunch, very Russian one: beet soup and beef stew in a fancy pot (that pot came out at least six times later in the trip).

Even it's spartan (in Chinese, Young-Chung), I think I like it...

The boat didn't arrive at Uglich until 3:30 pm after it passed more locks. Our walking tour of that town lasted for only about 1 and ?hours. More onion-domed churches and icons of saint people we saw. We returned to the boat after 6:00 pm, the dinner entree are stuffed cabbage and Chicken Kiev (drooling, drooling...)

They don't translate it into "stuffed cabbage" as in the U.S., so I didn't even know what I had ordered until it was on my table. What a nice surprise! But my mother doesn't like Chicken Kiev.....We also bought a Russian dolls from street vendors on our way back.....

Day 7 (Friday): Thank God It's Friday! Though you don't know which day of a week it is in this kind of trip.....

Today we arrived at Kostroma, another of the Golden Ring towns. "Golden Ring" refers to several large and small towns northeast of Moscow. All of them are with historic significance in Russian history and most of them are famous with their beautiful onion-domed churches. Kostroma is the second Golden Ring town we visited in this trip, just after Uglich.

I am still wondering where is the "golden" onion-domed. Most of the churches' domes are in blue, green, red,..... few of them are in golden color.

We had longer stay in this town, from 11:00 am till' 9:00 pm. The city tour only lasted for about 3 and ?hour. In the tour, of course, we saw some of the most famous and beautiful onion-domed churches in Kostroma. Kostroma is the place where the Romanov family (the last dynasty of the imperial Russia) originated, so the Ipatievsky Monastery there has a special museum and exhibition dedicated to this family. All the royal family members were killed after the October Revolution in 1918. The statue of the person giving the order to execute them, Lenin, is still standing tall across the river.

Just like onion-domed churches, the statues of Lenin are everywhere in Russia too. We didn't see that in Moscow. I heard that people in Moscow hate him so much that they have removed all of his statues after the communism collapsed. Hopefully, it will be Mao Zetong's turn very soon....

Of course, we had more souvenir shopping afterwards. Nothing special to buy, though. We have seen a lot amber, nested dolls, and fur hats on sale, but the prices of them are just not reasonable.

What!? You expected the post-communist Russians sell foreigners things with reasonable prices?

After the dinner, the local folk ensemble came to our boat to have some performance. It is okay, not very fancy.

But these dancers hold baskets outside the concert hall, asking for tips.........

The ship left the pier of Kostroma after 9:00 pm. It had been completely dark outside.

Day 8 (Saturday): We arrived Yaroslavl, the largest Golden ring town we visited in this trip. But the time we stayed there is not really long, it was from 7:00 am till' 1:00 pm.

Calling Yaroslavl own' is not really appropriate. It has more than 250,000 population (about the size of Hsin-Chu) and is one of the three most important Golden Ring Cities. We wouldn't visit the other two cities, Suzdal and Vladimir because they are not on the Volga River route and cannot be reached by our boat (sniff....).

continued at the Part II .....

Posted October, 12, 1997