On my family's last full day in Russia, we started by visiting the Kremlin. The weather, which for the whole trip up to then had been absolutely perfect, looked to be threatening to turn rainy. This, coupled with the inevitable too-much-togetherness that marks the last days of family vacations, led to a bit of tension, but the rain held off, and we ended up getting along fine. The Kremlin is a fairly large territory and has several very old cathedrals mixed in with the tsarist palaces and Soviet-era buildings. Also, pretty much everyone visiting was foreign, which greatly annoyed some Russian ladies standing behind us in line (unaware that I could understand everything they were saying, they complained about the foreign tourists and wondered why Russians had to put up with foreigners in their own city).

After the Kremlin, we went to the New Tretyakov Gallery, which is a large museum of modern art. The museum has a very good collection of Russian avant-garde works, and we practically had the place to ourselves--quite a contrast to the jam-packed Hermitage in St. Petersburg. For our last dinner, we went to a very good Ukrainian restaurant very close to where we stayed. Ukrainian food is very similar to Russian food, although Ukraine is the birthplace of salo (salted lard--it's quite good), and so we toasted to the end of a great trip with Russian vodka chased with Ukrainian salo.

Inside the Kremlin

The world's largest cannon 

One of the Kremlin's churches  

This isn't the view most people think of when they hear "Kremlin" 

In the New Tretyakov  

Huge bell in the Kremlin. Like the Liberty Bell, it cracked during forging and has never been rung  

 Another Kremlin Church 

 The gates to Gorky Park