Pretty Square

(Shameless display of my knowledge of Russian) The Red Square (Krasnaya Ploschad) was actually named the Pretty Square; Krasnaya only relatively recently took on the meaning "red".

Ok, anyway...

I've been here before, but three years ago I was so helplessly clueless about everything. It's tough to imagine the Politiburo standing atop the Kremlin wall, returning the salute of hundreds of units of Soviet military might parading on Pretty Square.



We went inside the ultra-mega-super-mall G.U.M. (complete with three floors of three sunlit, arched corridors and price tags that would shake any average Russian in their fur-lined boots).

But the best part by far was when I found the balls to ask some Russian cadets visiting the Red Square to be in pictures with us. In Russian. Yeah. They were ecstatic, even left addresses for us to send them the pictures. This is how international relations are really kept.