Thursday, December 31, 2009

Map of Moscow

PC and I are in Moscow. We're standing in a long upstairs gallery in a museum and can look out of the windows across the city and all its profusion of 18th-century marble monuments and buildings. We consult a small tourist map. We are only staying in Moscow for one day and two nights, so have little time to see all the things we want to see, and I especially don't want to miss Red Square. The map shows a wide boulevard running along the straight bottom edge of a huge semi-circular lake called Napoleon's Semi-Circle. Red Square is shown on the map to the south-east of the lake. It is surprisingly small (and marked as a solid red square on the otherwise black and white map). I think the map must be wrong. We hurry down the boulevard past the lake and look down towards what should be Red Square, according to the map. I'm still sceptical and ask PC whether he can see any onion domes. He says he can't. Well that's definitely not Red Square then, I say.

MFl