Moscow - Sergiev Posad

I was a bit surprised to see how devout and religious Moscow could be, considering they weren't really allowed to be religious for 80 some years. This monastery that we went to felt the most sacred, I guess you could say, out of any of the places we went. This time it was just me and seth. AG was in Germany for a few days while we were there so we watched cannon and went to some places on our own while he was at school. Since AG wasn't there and since we didn't have a tour guide, I didn't really know much about the place. Also we couldn't really figure out which churches we could go into and which ones we couldn't. We saw some people going into one of the churches and when we tried to go in the doors were locked. We kind of waited around and another big group went in so we just followed them. Once we were inside we realized it was a tour group, so I think only tour groups can go in, it isn't a working church. We kind of just acted like we were part of the group and took a look around. That's what we do, we take risks. We're risk takers.

These were the arches you come in through, every inch painted (like many things in russia) and it was very pretty.



These are some details, this dude on the left is St. Sergius, who this place is based on. I don't know much about him except that he was way righteous and devout.



















This fountain contains holy water, some believe it has healing powers.



I wish this picture had turned out better. It was a bright day so the sky is blown out and I couldn't really fix it. I couldn't believe this woman was letting these pigeons sit on her head and fly around her! It was really kind of amazing.