Every year we hear stories from friends that during the New Year holidays at the traditional festival "Journey to Christmas" there are just crowds of people, you can't push your way through, there are queues everywhere, you can't participate in anything and you can't eat anything, we prefer to go to the festival on the last day before it closes. A mandatory rule: go to the festival in the evening to see Moscow in lights, and then "Journey to Christmas" coincided with the festival "Christmas Light", which means those walking along the streets of the city were promised some additional light installations.
This time we traditionally thought that by January 15th everyone had already had enough walking, and even risked going to the center by car.
This was in vain, we spent almost an hour circling the center looking for parking, which we eventually found only in the area of Gogolevsky Boulevard, so the planned route starting on Tverskoy Boulevard was broken. And we went to Arbat.
Having found nothing interesting on Old Arbat except souvenir kiosks and a glowing arch with New Year's balls, we moved to New Arbat. Although initially we had not planned to visit this area at all.
But in the end we liked her.
Along Arbat, cartoon figures of bears and penguins line up between decorated Christmas trees.
There were some sports grounds where you could go snowboarding or curling.
Next to the figures were kiosks with books and postcards, hung with old photographs of New Year's celebrations in Soviet times, or old postcards, or frames from New Year's cartoons.
Here we also rode on giant swings. I saw the same ones on Mayakovskaya, but I never got around to trying them out. Really, it's great.
We took a photo next to a beautiful Christmas tree.
This polar bear took a photo of us. By the way, there's a free carousel nearby.
From Arbat we moved to Revolution Square.
This year, souvenir kiosks with all sorts of New Year's paraphernalia and food are presented in transparent glasses decorated with garlands. To be honest, I didn't like this version of Christmas kiosks at all. It was much more beautiful last year, when they were wooden houses decorated with spruce branches, toys, figurines and lights, and they were decorated in different ways and looked simply fabulous. It seems that they decided to save money and not bother with decorations.
But I think the festival lost a lot because of this.
We move towards Red Square past the ice stage with a show that a crowd of people were watching for money (they introduced an entrance fee for the show this year) and a large ice slide. I don’t know if it’s a paid one, but there was a long queue, so we ignored it, although Nastya, of course, really wanted to go on the slide. But we were told that it was a small queue: “You should have seen what happened here yesterday.”
We go out to Red Square:
The most beautiful thing here is the GUM department store glowing with lights and the decorated Christmas trees lined up along it with benches on which everyone took photos.
Unfortunately, there was a technical break at the rink at that time. And we wanted to see how busy it was.
Of course, it is beautiful to skate here. I must say that we were not very lucky with the weather that day. Wet snow and rain were falling from the sky, which meant we were at risk of getting wet very quickly. Judging by the weather, the rink had to be cleaned often that day. But the very presence of snow created a Christmas atmosphere. When I see my friends post photos of the festival without snow, it looks somehow not festive.
After the skating rink, the GUM Fair houses begin.
I don't know what was going on here during the holidays, but even now there were wild crowds of people. They wanted to buy a Hungarian kürtös-kalach for their child, or waffles with tea, or sausages, but everywhere from the kiosks there was a line waiting for orders.
The two-story carousel at the fair, like last year, did not please with its prices.
In general, everything here is very beautiful, no worse than last New Year, but we left Red Square with nothing. We didn’t ride anything, we didn’t buy anything. While we were walking through the fair, I managed to look at the price of ordinary woolen socks for my youngest child. And the price of 500 rubles put me in a slight shock. Somehow the prices at such fairs are not for the masses!
Source: travel.ru