Picture Post 2!

Here are some pictures of the famed Novodevichy convent (famous at least because it’s where the nun yelled at me):




And here are some pictures of the legitimately-famous-but-completely-underwhelming Moscow Kremlin. Cannons commemorating the victory over Napoleon:


A view of the steeple with the star on it (it’s famous here, but I can’t remember whether it is in the US):


And the tsar’s cannon, which is HUGE:


And, for fun, here’s a picture of the trolleybus we rode for an hour or more. Moscow is laid out as a series of nested rings, and one of these – the Garden Ring (which has no gardens, by the way) is now a major thoroughfare. One very hot day in early August, four of us decided that taking a trolleybus around the Garden Ring would be a good way to see the city. It wasn’t. It was just hot and slow. We did get to see a few of Stalin’s Seven Sisters (huge Gothic skyscrapers built in the ‘50’s – some of the most menacing-looking buildings I’ve ever seen, which I guess is suitable for something Stalin thought up), but overall it wasn’t worth it, and we jumped ship two-thirds of the way around the Ring. One of the Seven Sisters is in the background of this picture: