Sunday, June 10
This optional excursion to the famous Moscow Circus was the last official adventure of the cruise – and we signed up. Not only do we love circuses, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see one of the best in the world. We boarded our buses at 5:30 in the afternoon for the 7pm performance. This is Sunday, so the traffic isn’t quite as challenging as it has been over the past couple days. There are no pictures on this post because no photos are allowed of the performance.
The circus is performed in its own building – perfect. Not a huge building, but very plush. They started right on time at 7pm.
Outside in the exterior lobby are the typical popcorn, vendors selling circus stuff. But what we hadn’t see – booths where the public can come to have a professional photograph taken with some of the animals. First, we saw kids posing with 2 cute white puppies – adorable. Then in the next booth, parents and kids posing with what appeared to be the parents of the white puppies – also very fluffy and photogenic – cute as well.
Then over on the side – what’s that? It’s a very large tiger lying on a platform and people go sit right next to him to have their photos taken, Excuse me? Whoa, hadn’t seen that before. He’s quite large – and even though there is a trainer right there with him, he still is a tiger – no muzzle, just a collar with a lead. The handler is keeping the tiger on task by pulling at the cat’s mouth with his fingers. Yes, he still had 10 fingers!
Several minutes later, on the other side of the lobby, we came upon another booth with a cheetah – a young male, very affectionate with his handler (rolling on his back, nuzzling, etc), but also VERY LARGE. It was amazing to see these parents settle down next to these large cats with there 2 year olds sitting right there. Obviously, the trainer has to step back so he’s not in the picture – and you can imagine how fast these animals can move. Ah well!
We had great seats and could see the whole ring quite well. The acts were wonderful. We were completely enthralled – and what made it even more fun is that we went with a couple – and she had never been to a circus before. Imagine – seeing this one, one of the best in the world! She is spoiled for all parking lot circuses from now on!
The acts: Trained bears with collars doing acrobatics. A couple that worked with dogs – and the dogs really looked like they were having a ball! Big standard poodles – black and white ones – and then smaller poodles too.
Trapeze artists were good. A fun balancing act. A couple of magician acts that were so-so.
But the piece de resistance was when they came out at the end and started to assemble a cage around the ring – and we knew we’d be seeing some of those big cats! It was LION TIME!
So the lion guy comes out – and then into the ring come 9 lions – they are all male. He has them do some acrobatics – up off the ground on 6 foot pedestals all at once, leap-frogging over each other to change positions – then all in a line, he has them sit up and paw the air and snarl – all in unison. That was something! And then he put his head in one of the lion’s mouths – all the way! This lion tamer has his entire head inside the jaws of the lion for about 30 seconds! You tired of your job? JB and I saw Siegfried and Roy a couple times and they were good, but this guy was even better. But it gets better…
He moves all the pedestals out of the way so he has clear working area in the center of the ring and has them all down in the middle lined up facing him. Then he has them turn like a wagon wheel, rotating around the middle like a pinwheel – with the ones in the center moving slower and the ones on the outside going faster. Like a very fancy wheel-of-horses act. Incredibly impressive.
Then, he has them lie down one-by-one, next to each other – so they are all lined up like sphinxes – then they all lie over on their left sides – and he lies down on top of them. And he’s sort of rolling around with them – and scratching them – all very comfortable. It was pretty intense! This guy was nuts!
It was a wonderful circus! We waited outside for our bus to pick us up (it wasn’t raining – hooray!) – and headed back to the ship for a late night dinner – our last meal on the cruise.
We finally got into bed about 11:30pm – and caught a couple hours of sleep before our wakeup call at 2am. We had to have our bags outside our cabin at 2:30 – in preparation for our 3am bus ride to the airport, ready to say goodbye to Russia.