The MegaMarket of Neverending Tat
Trip Start
Aug 11, 2006
1
12
27
Trip End
Nov 19, 2006
Moscow, Russia
Friday, October 6, 2006
It turned out to be a really strange place. As you get out of the metro, looking down the hill, you just this, well.... thing. Towers, and turrets, and buildings being thrown up. Turns out its a fake Kremlin for the tourists. Although the Moscow Kremlin is obviously the most famous, 'Kremlin' is just the Russian word for the town fort. Kind of like the town walls. So, a lot of old Russian cities have one. They were still finishing this one off, but it's mostly done. There's wooden buildings, stone churches, towers, tiny little museums and some shops, but it was absolutely deserted! I think they may have been trying for a traditional Russian Disneyland or something, but it was just creepy, sitting there all empty, watching over the market.
The market has two parts - the tourist market at the front, and the normal one at the back. The tourist market basically sells tat and rips off tourists. Haggle haggle! I got a scarf really cheap - it's blue and a bit swirly, and really soft. The woman said it was made in Russia, but I'm not so sure. I wasn't really paying attention though and got a bit ripped off buying a matroshka, but it was still cheap. The tourist part of the market is in these 'traditional' wooden huts, with elevated walkways all over the place. Quite pretty, but most of it was shut today, so I ventured out into the normal bit in a huge aircraft hangar type place. This was the biggest market I've EVER seen - they had everything you'd ever want, and then a bit more. Spiky boots? Garish tshirts? leather coats? Get them here! The food section was a bit weird. I think it's mostly Chinese traders, so didn't recognise most of the vegetables, but the weird bit was all the meat. There were these little birds only half plucked, and fish swimming in tanks. You decided which one, then the guy grabbed it, chopped it's head off and wrapped it up for you. They had buckets and buckets of nasty shell fish wriggling their legs up in the air as well, eww! Fresh at least! It was a bit overwhelming, such chaos crammed into really narrow aisles, so I gave up pretty quick.
After that I to the VDNKh, which was pretty cool. In Soviet times it was built to show off fantastically how ace they all were. At first, it looks like a big park leading to a big big building with a spire on top and a big Lenin statue. This is just one bit though - behind it, the park carries on. The Soviets built a pavilion for each of the countries and republics within the USSR (about 70 of them I think) so they could fill it with stuff about that place. There's a cool fountain/statue called the "Friendship of the Peoples Fountain". Lots of girls holding corn and pretty water. Corn features quite heavily at this place - even the streetlights are made to look like corn! These days, the pavilions are filled with shops, museums, art galleries, things like that, but mainly shops selling crap you neither want nor need. Today was kind of cool though, there was some sort of "Golden Autumn" festival going on, so there were market stands selling produce, gardening stuff, and massive heavy farming equipment. Just what you nip down the shops for! At the far end of the park, there's a couple or aeroflot planes and an old space rocket on display, and round these were rows and rows of tractors, combine harvesters, and lots of things I had no idea what to call!
So, today has been a rather strange adventure!
On another note, I sccidentally deleted all of my photos yesterday - I was going to upload them all last night as well!! Such an idiot - I pressed delete all instead of delete one. No real loss, as I can get a lot of photos from friends, but I have lost some ones that I'm a bit upset about. The ones of St Petersburg from the Cathedral collanade, and the parks at Pavlosk and Tampere, they're all gone. At least now I've figured how to protect them so I don't do it again!
