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only airborne but gets up where the outside air is cool you just don't get cool again. It was pretty gruesome in the hotter regions like Tash- kent and Samarkand.
The flight to Moscow was uneventful as such but as we approached the city I noticed something different. The city just begins, bang! I mean here are fields and right outside them are apartment houses, etc. There is no gradual thinning out of the city through suburbs into country. That was strange till I had a better understanding of things. While there are a lot of private cars they are nothing like the traffic we have here, so that most people are dependent on buses and commuter trains to get to work. This being the case they can't live very far from the end of the line. Also, since the state owns all the land, there are not many private homes like we have, most of the popula- tion live in apartment houses of which there are thousands. Of course, already built houses are occupied but they aren't plentiful. One can save up money, make a rental arangement on a piece of land and then contract with a building organization and build one's own house, but this is not common in the larger cities of European Russia.
We arrived about 1 p.m. and by the time we had made connections with Intourist, been put into a taxi and sent off to our hotel and check- ed in, it was the middle of the afternoon. Not to waste any precius time, we arranged for a guide to take us on a walking tour of the Kremlin which wasn't too far away. We got in and went through the "Treasury," so-called, where all the riches of the czars are kept, including all the myriad of expensive and unusual gifts that were given to them by other royalty. It is a pretty indescribable place with all kinds of things in it and most of them worth a small (or large) fortune. Royalty doesn't mess around with trifles. Especially is this so in Russia. The country is geograpically big and this seems to be part of the Russian mentality, too. They just don't do anything small or moderate. Everything is big, elaborate, terrific, super tremendous pick your own adjectives but have them all imply bigness. We walked around the Kremlin walks and squares a bit but although we were able to see the several cathe- drals from the outside it was past closing time so we couldn't enter. In line with what I said above, they have a bell there that for sheer size makes the Liberty Bell look like something they'd ring to get school started. Also a big bertha cannon that was built more to impress than to be dangerous but the cannon balls approached three feet in diameter. Quite a pop gun and it doubtless had its psychological effect on the enemy.
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