Izmaylovo

One of our first excursions into Moscow was to the Izmaylovo market.  The market, located in the area that was set aside in the 16th century by the Romanovs as a playground, is now THE place in Moscow for souvenirs, trinkets, memorabilia, crap, and not-crap.  If you don't see what you want in this market, then you're looking for the wrong things.  

When you come up out of the Metro station, you're greeted by this:  

 

  I think that one of these blog pages will eventually be a "Statues of the Moscow Metro" page.  There's a veritable cornucopia of material.  I'm not sure what this one is all about, but many of the statues seem to involve rifles of one sort or another.  Rifles, engineering tools, and farm animals.  And wheat.  I'll have to look into the themes a bit more.  

Regardless, the market.  The first thing we did at the market was get some shashlik.  Shashlik is shishkabob, basically.  You got your lamb, your pork, your chicken, and your salmon.  No beef.  Don't know why.  The shashlik'll run you about ten bucks and, for about a buck extra, you can throw in a piece of flatbread, a few veggies, and some barbecue sauce.  Addy would live off the stuff if he were allowed to.  It was not a bad way to start the day.

The rest of the market is one stall after another, mostly grouped by categories of what they're selling, but not really.  There is a rug area, with rugs from all over the Caucusus.  Many of the -stans send their rugs up to the market to be sold.  We will be going back for those at some point, but we kind of avoided the place this time around.  They're pretty; it was a bit overwhelming. 

Rugs hanging in front of fancy buildings

Pretty rugs hanging from the rafters

Other areas include military stuff, artwork, crystal, books, posters, hats, framing, ever-ubiquitous cheap crap from China, and, interspersed throughout, a seemingly infinite number of matryushka dolls.  You got your traditional matryushka dolls, and you got your slightly non-traditional matryushka dolls:

You got your authentic Christmas ornaments, and your maybe less than authentic Christmas ornaments:

You got your collection of WWII propaganda magnets:

And what I really liked about this collection of magnets was that they were kind enough to include the American "We Can Do It" magnet.  Equal opportunity propaganda!

 What I thought to be the piece de resistance of the whole market was the WWII chess set pitting the Russians with Stalin against Hitler and his Nazis.  You have to look closely, but Hitler even has a little mustache.  On a side note, I wonder if anyone who ever played chess with the black pieces would really want to win.  That would be awkward. 

 On the way out of the market, I discovered this little spot:

The sign on the right is kind of hard to read, but it says, "Unique Charty (sic) / Bear Show of Eduard Rybakov / UNIQUE in the WORLD of the ACTOR-TRAINER of BEARS / WORKING With THEM WITHOUT MUZZLES!!!"  I'm of two minds: 1-How cool would it have been to see that show? 2-How depressing would it have been to see that show?  I'm sure it would have been a really scary combination of authentic and sketchy. 

So that was Izmaylovo, only not really.  The few pictures here really don't do justice to the place.  So you'll have to come see it for yourselves!  We'll definitely go back, and many of you can expect Izmailovo Christmas presents.  We'll also start decorating our house with authentic and, I'm sure, less than authentic Russian trinkets.  As we discovered at Izmaylovo, even the unauthentic stuff has its own brand of authenticity.