Day Seven...Relective, Fast, and Furious!

I started today off by visiting Christ the Savior Cathedral for the morning service with a couple other folks on the trip. The church is just gorgeous! Interestingly enough, it is only about 10 years old. The original was torn down by Stalin (because the Communist had outlawed churches so who really cared anyway) and they were going to build a massive monument/build in its place that, at the time, was going to be the tallest building in the world. That never happened so it ended up being a really large open air pool until the early 1990’s after the fall of the USSR. They rebuilt the church as close as they could to the originally using sourses from all over the world. I thought the exterior was beautiful…then I walked inside! The Icons that cover the walls are a little different than what I am use to seeing in Orthodox Churches but stunning none the less. Then there was all the different marbles set in wonderful patterns on the walls and floors… Words can’t do it justice by a long shot. Unfortunately cameras are not allowed in the church so you’ll just have to suffer with this exterior shot.

The music was also simply stunning. I have several different ROC services on CD’s that I often listen to but hearing it in real life in an authentic setting…priceless. I’ve sung my fair share of ROCM and this just warmed my heart. You can’t help but think that there is a Creator after having listened to that.

We spent the afternoon on a bus tour of famous sites in the city. The first stop…Christ the Savior Cathedral! Go figure…well, it allowed me to get some pictures that I hadn’t been able to capture in the morning so it was all good. Oh, I forgot to mention that there is an awesome museum of historic ROC relics, icons, and other stuff that I hope I can get a chance to go back and look at…and it’s all under the church! Ok, well technically the museum is under the plaza that surrounds the church. Under the sanctuary there is a smaller sanctuary with more traditional looking icons on the wall.

We stopped at a couple of other places but I think my favorite of the tour was Victory Park. It was opened in 1997 for the 50th Anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) and as an honor to the 30,000,000 Russians that lost their lives. We only had a couple of minutes there so I’m hoping the designers can go back some time because I could probably spend a couple of hours walking around the park taking pictures.

We ended the evening with a performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Lencom Theatre. To be truthful, I wasn’t that impressed with the performance. The only actor that I thought did a spectacular job was the guy who played Billy. His consistency and mannerisms were spot on throughout the performance. They also either used a very different adaption, made a ton of cuts, just simply changed parts of the story, or some combination of the three because there were some elemental keys to the storyline that they left out that really hurt the overall impact of the show. The set, however, was pretty cool; walls of white “tiles” with vents hanging in the air…very sanitarium like. The cool thing was that the tiles were actually made out of a white opaque plastic so there were times when some of them were backlit to change colors, and I’m so stealing that idea for some show in the future.

This is just a funny little photograph of some flowers that I took with the Moscow State University in the back ground.