Afternoon at Luzhniki

We spent Saturday afternoon at the snow palace at Luzhniki Olympic Complex, the site of the 1980 Summer Olympics. I was pretty impressed with the ice buildings and amusements for the kids; it made up for our disappointment at Sokolniki.

There was a huge snow fortress complete with a cannon.

There were also icy sledding slides in two sizes.  The taller ones were quite steep, and Jeremy and I had to ride down with the kids.  I will confess that, even riding on my bum (as opposed to on a sled), we went a bit faster than I would have liked.  The kids, however, wanted to keep going.  Guess this is payback for my insistence that my father ride the Thunder Mountain Railroad with me at Disney World 25 years ago.

OK, it doesn't look that big, but trust me, it seems a lot scarier from the top.

The big hit, though, was the ice pits full of plastic balls.  Natasha saw them and exclaimed that she wanted to "купаться" (bathe) in the balls.

In case you were wondering, this is how you get babies out of a huge bowl-shaped ice pit:

Sorry for the dark photos.  I realized after uploading that I had had my camera on the wrong setting the entire time.  Oh well.  You get the idea.