We stayed at the Olympic Penta Hotel. It was built for the Winter Olympics held in Moscow when Jimmy Carter was president and refused to let our teams participate. The dome shaped building was a movie theatre they told us. We didn’t check it out. There was a fancy restaurant and a gym below the first floor. We didn’t go to them either. We did check the menu, but it was too fancy for our tastes.
The rooms were very nice. The government pays for separate rooms for employees now. Back in the 60’s we had to room together. The air between the curtains and the window glass was as cold as a refrigerator at night, but the curtains kept the cool air from the room. The room had a stocked refrigerator, but we were told that the items in it would be very expensive. The seventh floor was reserved for NASA with some overflow to the eighth floor. There was no smoking on the floor, of course. There was a lobby in the middle of the floor and a small office with computers, fax machines, and phones.
There was a nice bath with tub and shower. The towel rack was heated; probably with warm water. I wasn't sure about gratuities for the maid, so I left one dollar the first day, then two the second. On the third day I left the equivalent of three dollars in rubles, but she didn’t take that. Then I left seven dollars the fourth day, and so on through the tenth. The maid had a really big smile when she came through the lobby on the last day and saw me waiting to leave.
This storage yard was at the end of the hotel and the park was across the street from the yard and the apartment building. We saw people walking their dogs in the snow in the park. Vehicles and pedestrians entered the yard area, but we never found out what was there.
Here are night and day views of the street that runs in front of the apartment. The park in the previous photo is across the street. Note that the sign by the street had been changed during the time between these photos, but that the truck had apparently not been moved.
This is the end view of a very long apartment building behind the hotel. Each apartment has a balcony and some of the residents had enclosed their balconies to provide some additional weatherproofed floor space. Some seemed to be very nicely made of fine wood or aluminum framed glass and others looked like something the Beverly Hillbillies would have put together. (Not on this building, but on other apartments around town.) Some balconies were totally filled with junk such as I have on the back porch of my garage. A friend who is living in Moscow for an extended period of time said that his apartment association was trying to get a uniform style and quality of enclosure for all the apartments in their building.
The route from the hotel to the subway station was past this building and the store. We had to walk down from the hotel then back up onto this elevated street and parking area, then back down to the level where the McDonald’s is. This was another of the Olympic sports venues. (Thought I’d never use that word!)
This is the area behind the apartment. A careful examination of the photo will reveal car storage boxes that fit into a regular parking space. The front of the box pivots over the back half sort of like a clamshell. It provides a simple way to protect cars from the weather.
I think that there was or had been an Olympic sport facility in the upper part of this building near the hotel. There was a luxury department store in the basement and a small grocery store. We had to check our cameras, coats, and bulky items at the entrance to the grocery store and personnel were there to see that we did. The young man checking the items offered to photograph us or be photographed by us, but a severe glance from a supervisor indicated that that was not allowed. The store had scanners at the checkout lines and CRT displays of the purchases and prices. The checkers seemed to be a little grumpy to me as we struggled to work out the exchange rate. It was roughly 6000 rubbles to the dollar. Quickly – how much is a 200,000-ruble purchase in dollars? I found a carton of “Skipper” orange juice there.
This street is nowhere near the hotel, but it is an example of the beautiful broad boulevards in some parts of the city. The oncoming traffic is barely visible through the trees growing in the median. There were two or three lanes each way with side walks. On the right, in addition to the lanes of traffic there was a trolley line, another local street and a sidewalk.
I wish we had had more time to tour the local city streets. This photo was taken from the bus as we were leaving. It shows some street-side vendors and an enclosed balcony. We didn't feel that we should photograph things at the airport – we flew in and out of an old airport, because we were on a small, chartered jet. In the Moscow Journal I’ll tell about the young women with babies in arms begging for food. Not that the folks in Moscow were desperate; they seemed to be doing well. These women were more like the men we used to see here in Houston with signs saying “Will Work for Food.”
|
|
