My First of the Big Three

Most people think that Stephen is a fairly normal person - I'm here to inform you that he's absolutely not.  Stephen has a minor obsession with looking at the embalmed corpses of dead Communist leaders.  (No, seriously, apparently Communist leaders routinely get embalmed so people can file past and look at their corpses, for the greater good.  Bizarre, I know.)  He's previously seen Lenin in Moscow and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and he's excited about this trip as it will allow him to complete the trinity by seeing Mao in Beijing.  But today, we were in Moscow, and he was excited that his Mum and I would get to see our first of the Big Three Dead Communist Leaders, Lenin.

I'm getting pretty good at reading the Cyrillic alphabet, so I can inform you that that reads "Lenin".  It's the entrance to his tomb, where his dead body sits in a suit on a bed of red velvet, looking so strange that you wonder if it's really plastic or not.  The security to get in is incredibly tight - you have to hand your bag in, go through a metal detector, and then pass about 15 armed military guards who stand in the middle of the path and stare at you.  So no photos.


But hey, I saw a dead guy.  And Stephen's getting more excited about Mao.  That's all that counts, right? :P