Page 97 - Eastern Europe
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 Downtown
Providing Fascinating Travel Experiences
  Dizzying immensity
Archaic and contemporary, innovative and decadent, Asian and European... Russia endorses all adjectives. It is above all... Huge! From Moscow to Erlian, from Saint Petersburg to Kazan, from the mighty course of the Volga to the eastern borders of Siberia, what excess! And what a variety. Over the course of the trip come across all the names that made us dream when we were children: Astrakhan, Nijni- Novgorod, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator ...
Moscow's daily life
Take the temperature of Moscow which mutates at the speed of light. Every day a gallery, a restaurant, a shop, a night club more! Widen your eyes in front of the "Seven Sisters", these 7 enormous Gothic skyscrap- ers, Empire State Building style, built by Stalin to compete with New York; then caress the seven monasteries which, with their golden domes seem to watch over the city of Moscow. Stroll through the Izmailovo flea market, drink a chocolate at Café Pouchkine, walk around the new district of Vinzavod, where the old gas tanks from the 19th century have been transformed into art galleries, discover Tverskaia, the new Russian "Meatpacking".
St. Petersburg's magic
A city that emerged from the imagination of Tsar Peter the Great, a window open to Europe. Born from nothing, this city has become a myth. Visit the houses, which have become museums, of Dostoyevsky, Gogol or Pushkin. Cross their ghosts over the palaces and cathedrals of this "Venice of the North". Slide in a sleigh on Nevsky Prospect, close your eyes in the Winter Palace to hear the echo of the rolling of the carriages, choose between 342 bridges to cross the Neva, listen to religious songs in the odors of incense of Orthodox churches, spend days at the Hermitage museum admiring Egyptian mummies and Picasso paintings.
Olympic Games
Visit Sochi, a Black Sea seaside resort where snow falls and palm trees grow. Have a drink at the Platforma, a nightclub set up on a platform 330 feet from the shore and watch the pretty mermaids dance with wheat hair. Travel in all directions
Discover Nizhny-Novogorod, a former merchant site founded in 1221 by the troops of Genghis Khan; always further east, breathe in the scents of the Orient as you push towards the city of Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan populated by minarets and markets that look like souks. Let yourself be rocked by the chaos of the Trans-Siberian railway. 6,200 miles across the steppe and taiga, from the Urals to Amur, passing by the shores of Lake Baikal, the oldest, deepest and most transparent lake in the world!
  Why Russia?
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