Bet you never thought it got hot in Moscow!

Can anyone read this sign? Hint: the transliteration would be "Krasnaya Ploshchad"

Yep, folks, that's right. It has been officially hot here: 34 C the other day! I don't know exactly what that works out to in Farenheit, but it's hot (maybe 90-95?).

And what have we been up to in the heat? Lots of things. An adventure downtown to Red Square and the Kremlin, suppers with our friends, and today we officially started language study. Actually, today was just orientation, so we mostly just talked about how the things will go, schedule, etc. It looks like for the first two weeks we have phonetics together, and then we'll split up for our regular lessons. We're already at a little different levels, and so I'll be there in the morning and then B will take the afternoon class shift. We have an hour and a half in between, so we need to live within a 45 minute walk from the classroom in order to give time for me to walk home, take Steven, and send B on her way to class on time. If we do end up taking some of our friends' apartment, it's only a 30-minute walk, so that'll give us a window for error.

Anyway, on to the pictures of our latest wanderings:

On our downtown adventure, we got off the metro (on which I'll post more another day; amazingly efficient!) near the Lyubyanka (sp?), the old headquarters of the KGB. Not a very nice building, and not a very nice history.

However, right down the street - evidence of how much things have changed from the old communist days. From the KGB headquarters to the new capitalist headquarters: Moscow Bentley and Lamborghini, in just a 2 minute walk.

So, here we are at the north end of Red Square, looking south toward St. Basil's Cathedral, with the Kremlin on the right and GUM (the old government department store) on the left.

B models the latest in Western tourist-wear in front of Lenin's tomb and the Kremlin wall.

Here we are in front of the spectacular St. Basil's Cathedral. The colors are even more vibrant in real life. Really something to see, and a really interesting history. You can read all about it on the wikipedia site. Obviously, Steven is not as enthused.

If you're anything like me, you've always wondered how it would look if you took an American shopping mall, and had it redesigned by a 19th century architect in a semi-Gothic (?) style. Here's your answer - the GUM department store/mall.

After that, we wandered down the Novy Arbat. I took this picture because of the eclectic mix of architectural styles. I love how the Orthodox church looks dwarfed by the boxy apartment building, and right across the street (though you can't see it in this pic), there's a brightly lit neon Vegas-esque strip.

Steven's dealing with the heat well, mostly because he's allowed to take off most of his clothing. He obviously hasn't suffered any weight loss since we've gotten here. :)

Anyway, maybe next time we'll post something about how our language study is going. You'll need to brush up on your Cyrillic alphabet, so get to it.