Today being Meredith’s last day in Russia, it was mostly spent sightseeing. We started near Red Square, but it was closed, so we just walked around trying to get close to it but getting turned away at every street. We then decided to go to Novodevichy cemetery where lots and lots of famous people are buried.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a famous person’s grave on purpose. It’s a strange thing. Today I saw where Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Bulgakov, Khrushchev, and Yeltsin are buried. I felt like I ought to experience powerful emotions by their gravesides but it felt more like checking them off a list of “Graves on Must See” and ignoring everyone else. Maybe I would have dwelt on how disrespectful that is, but it was getting very cold in the walled-in cemetery.

Wanting to stay warm before dinner, we did some Metro tourism after that. We visited Sparrow Hills, Kievskaya, Belorusskaya, Mayakovskaya, Chekhovskaya, Trubnaya, and Sretenskii Bulvar—a few of my favorite stations. It was fascinating to actually look at these stations attentively rather than just in passing, something I haven’t really taken time to do (though I keep planning to) since my first trip to Moscow in the summer of 2005.

We had a farewell dinner at a Georgian restaurant then saw Meredith off.

Photos from Novodevichy