Thread: Visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg

My wife & I will be visiting in June 2004. Is red square open? Can you visit Lenin's tomb? What is a good lager beer?

Braumeister

When I was in Moscow a few months ago, Red Square and Lenin's Mausoleum were open sporadically, in accordance with no kind of schedule. My fellow travelers and I simply stopped in every day to check until one morning we stopped by and it was open.

Sorry, I don't drink beer.

Red Square was open in Jan and Feb before the Metro was bombed, don't know about now. The Kremlin was closed all Jan, nobody knew why (very typical). Lenin's tomb is only open a few mornings in the week (Red Square is closed when the tomb is open) and you have to line up early outside Red Square near the State History Museum.
Baltika has a large selection of beers that are good, also Czech beers are very good. The best place to have a beer is in the park outdoor cafes or sitting on the benches overlooking the Moscow River near Gorky Park.

Sorry, I don't drink beer.

Not even Czech or Belgian beer? I can understand you not drinking the American crap, but...

Originally Posted by joysof

Sorry, I don't drink beer.

Not even Czech or Belgian beer? I can understand you not drinking the American cr@p, but...

Czech beer is very good, but the lambic beer from Belgium is a little to sour for my taste. When in a foreign country, I like to drink what the locals drink. But I don't care for the "light" beers.

I also brew my own beer from scratch.

P.S. There are some good American beers, but most are from the micro breweries. Samuel Adams is a good American beer.

Braumeister

How can you line up to get into red square ? i saw on CNN like 4 days after the bombing, some reporter reporting from red sqaure, and it looks like people were just walking right in off of the street. I have never been there, and don't know the geography but, it seems to me like, when red square is open, it should be pretty easy to just walk right in ???

Also, what kind of security measures do they take in preventing a bomber from just walking right up to saint basil's and just taking out a chunk of it ?

Originally Posted by Dogboy182

How can you line up to get into red square ? i saw on CNN like 4 days after the bombing, some reporter reporting from red sqaure, and it looks like people were just walking right in off of the street. I have never been there, and don't know the geography but, it seems to me like, when red square is open, it should be pretty easy to just walk right in ???

Also, what kind of security measures do they take in preventing a bomber from just walking right up to saint basil's and just taking out a chunk of it ?

They have a gate around the whole thing when its closed (has been for the whole summer i think?), with usually a couple cop cars parked around the perimeter. Go ahead, jump over and get beat.

oh, well i don't think i'll try that. even when it's closed, can you still see good veiws of the cathedral and stuff ? or is it like a high fence ?

P.S. There are some good American beers, but most are from the micro breweries. Samuel Adams is a good American beer.

I'll look for it. Would you acknowledge that the mainstream American market is flooded with dewy mediocrity? Off-topic, I suppose.

Can I really not write the word 'crap' without @ appearing in its midst? Since when was MasterRussian a subsidiary of Clear Channel? Where I come from, you can use this word on morning television.

Learnt this wondrous arcane rite from the Grand Master himself: write a self-cancelling tag between the expletive of your choosing and *whispers* Roberto's your parents relative *shifty eyes*

Originally Posted by Braumeister

My wife & I will be visiting in June 2004. Is red square open? Can you visit Lenin's tomb? What is a good lager beer?

Braumeister

Russian beer industry was practically ruined during Soviet Union, and we used to have only 3 or 4 brands of beer (or just 1, in smaller towns). Now most of beer plants have been purchased by foreign companies who rebuild the procuction lines and introduced their own technologies, so now we have decent beer once again.

If you can read Russian labels, try "Старый мельник". If you want to be on the safe side, buy Czech Budweiser. (People who drank both American and Czech Bud say that these are two absolutely different beers ). I don't know about American one, but Czech Budweiser is great.

Another decent beer is Efes (locally produced Dutch brand).

If you buy some Russian beer make sure that you buy "light" (lager) beer, not a "dark" (porter-type) one, since most manufacturers procuce several types of beer under same name, so you have to read description on the lable.

Originally Posted by joysof

P.S. There are some good American beers, but most are from the micro breweries. Samuel Adams is a good American beer.

I'll look for it. Would you acknowledge that the mainstream American market is flooded with dewy mediocrity? Off-topic, I suppose.

Can I really not write the word 'cr@p' without @ appearing in its midst? Since when was MasterRussian a subsidiary of Clear Channel? Where I come from, you can use this word on morning television.

Most American people are happy drinking the main beers like Bud light, Millers or Busch. My wife likes the light beer because of less calories.
Myself, I like a more robust beer, that is why I make my own. I can make legally 200 gallons per year.

Originally Posted by joysof

Can I really not write the word 'cr@p' without @ appearing in its midst? Since when was MasterRussian a subsidiary of Clear Channel? Where I come from, you can use this word on morning television.

Yeah, that '@' in 'crap' looks soo crappy.

Luddite that I am (self-cancelling tag?!), I'll just have to avoid even mild obscenities from now on.

to 'translations' : you said that the Russian beer industry was destroyed during the ссср .. was beer a popular drink in Russia before then?

I quite like stariy melnik as well .. it's kind of a bog standard beer. Various Baltika numbers are OK too, and Klinskoye and Sibirskii Korona or whatever it's called. But Braumeister, you seem to be a connoisseur .. I don't know any really special local beers, although I'm sure they exist. If I want to treat myself, I usually drink Stella Artois
BTW on Czech Budweiser, I think it was a totally different company, and some American company kind of 'stole' the name or something. I read about it once. Certainly, Czech Budweiser is much more of a 'real' beer than the American one. I also particularly like Czech Staropramen, which you can sometimes get here.