Second day in Moscow: the first good thing of the day was finally managing to get all our train tickets! So now we have our itinerary all set until Beijing: Kazan, Tomsk, Irkutsk and lake Baikal will be our stops.
And now back to Moscow. The first stop was the Red Square again to see Lenin's mausoleum, and I really was NOT expecting to actually see his body there perfectly preserved in the coffin. After that we went to GUM, which looks nothing like the more authentic belorussian cousin we visited last spring, and instead hosts all kinds of fancy western shops such as Armani and Louis Vuitton. Then we took a walk in the Arbat district and had lunch in a Georgian restaurant that looked like a house made out of Lego. The food was good but a bit overpriced. After lunch we went to my favourite place so far, the park of the fallen statues, where some statues that had been removed from the squares of Moscow have been collected. They also put some new modern statues, including a crazy one of a boat navigated by a man with horns and contaning bunnies, two of which were clearly Kate and Leo from Titanic. I swear I'm not jocking. So this mixture of Stalins and Lenins, bunnies and swings was very unusual, a bit crazy and a bit romantic. And I'm not the only one who thinks so, given that a newly married couple chose it for their post-wedding pic nic. They were russian hippies (both the couple and their guests) with dread locks, riding bikes and throwing flowers. We tried to take pictures, but they were too fast.