We set out under a white sky that drizzled indecisively most of the day.

The Russians really value their authors. The gentleman above wrote a thick book on World War II. The horse heads you can barely see in the background are set in the bank of a hill and, when the water is running, appear to be laboriously fording a river. Downstream brass “pages” of the author’s notebook float away in clumps. The sculpture here is quite creative—something we’d continue to notice later in the day.

But first, we visited the biggest church in Moscow:

Stalin, you might be curious to know, dynamited this church to build a swimming pool. Granted, his original intention was to build the world’s tallest building, but seeing as the cathedral was on a riverbank, the foundation for this new building promptly flooded. Even Stalin couldn’t ignore the fact that they’d picked perhaps the worst possible site for a skyscraper—oops—and so in an effort to turn lemons into lemonade they built the world’s largest swimming pool instead. (Now that’s comedy.) This enormous public pool was open all year round, and the heat that kept it swimmable in the winter also gave the whole thing a permanent shroud of steam. This shroud was apparently so thick and impenetrable that it was used to conceal more than one murder. Hey kids! If you find any bodies be sure to tell the lifeguards.

Luckily, the church’s destroyers carefully documented it before they blew it up. So they rebuilt the cathedral in the 90’s just about exactly as it was before. No photos allowed inside, so you’ll just have to come here to witness the spectacle of the interior.

Moving on, we headed off to the former Southern-most tip of Moscow: the high-falutin’ convent where the Czars sent the wives they didn’t want anymore. Incidentally, the subway station on the way was lined with white marble from the original detonated church.

Next to the convent was a lake:

And next to the lake was the cemetery. The cemetery was like nothing I could have expected. Lush, green, and tightly packed, this is where all the famous, rich, and well-connected put their bones. As Andrew explained, with the lack of religious iconography they had to come up with some other way to make their headstones special. The results are…well, see for yourself:

But the pièce de résistance has to be:

We finished up the cemetery with a visit to the graves of Chekhov and Stanislavski. The original actors from the Moscow Art Theatre were all buried in the same section, and have the seagull insignia marking their stones.

All for now. We have to get started on day 3.