You know, I really liked Moscow. My sister and I have this verrrrrry distant relative "Leonid" who is fairly important in the ministry of culture, so he put us up at his place, and he also showed us around the town (my sister was living in St. Petersburg at the time.) We only had a few days there, but during that time we managed to cram in a ton of stuff to do. For starters, we went to the Kremlin (well, DUH.) We saw all the cliched gorgeous temples and monastaries and so forth. (In retrospect, the Grand Palace in Bangkok reminds me very very much of the Kremlin.) There were huge lines trying to get in to see Lenin's tomb, so we skipped that. Otherwise, Red Square was surprisingly empty and placid. The fabled Gum department store has apparently been more or less transformed into a gigantic western-style mall, complete with all the exact same stores you'd expect to see anywhere. In other words - no, there is no place in the world that hasn't got its very own Benneton. Yeeeeeesh. Aside from these things, we visited many museums and galleries with Leonid, and explored a monastary or two on our own. We also spent a lot of time just visiting at home with Leonid and a couple of his friends, who made us feel very welcome, even if they were disappointed that we didn't really like the "champagne" they offered us. (This stuff was vile, it was basically what you'd get if you made a sparkling wine out of that Manischevitz passover wine - gak.) Leonid also took us to the premiere of a movie that a friend of his had made, called "BOP" in Russian, and called "The Thief" in English. It was fairly awful, in my opinion - sufficiently predicaable that it didn't really matter it was all in English. (A year later, the subtitled version was nominated for (but didn't win) an Academy Award, go figure.) The best part of the evening was that we were invited to the cast party, which was incredibly cool. We hung out with the stars and other Moscow upper-crust in a snazzy nightclub all night. Not at all what I expected to find in Russia. After a couple days in Moscow, we headed on to my sister's home in St. Petersburg. And this is where my culture-shock really began to take hold. More to follow...