Friday, March 15, 2013

Miniature train Russian Style (Grand Maket)

While the initial entrance to the miniature train lay-out has a lot of cloak room attendants, "gift shop" and people with metal detector wands. ( Question of the entire trip to Russia, why with the metal detectors in places were you would find metal? Are gun shooting/knife stabbings at children's museums that common?) 
While I thought this was an odd looking punishment of a school child, it turns out it was just a dummy. Why was the dummy faced this way, because I guess the punishment at Grand Maket is pretty hardcore. By the way the Grand Maket, had a lot of video cameras every where all the time. Which brings me to my next photo. 


This is the initial video monitors in the main room for the layout. The left side says west, the right side says west. The middle is Ural mountain region(?), focusing on the areas near Latvia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan. 

The reason why it is dark, because periodically the "sun" would rise from the east to the west. Eventually, it would set from the west to the east. 

It looks very dark, but it was pretty bright, this region was the north eastern side of Russia. 

Here is some of the detail, they are enjoying a pleasant day at the dirt mines? 

Sheep and cars, a very common scene in rural Russia. 

While listening to the paddle that gives an English tour, You can appreciate the fine detail in the thousands of sunflowers. Now why the sunflowers? Because the Russian people consume large, large amounts of sunflower oil. At some meals, they would pour the oil on their food like one would at a pat of butter. 

Sheep, sunflowers, and farming equipment. Is that a John Deere I see. I don't know because as I was trying to listen to my English "tour guide" I would be interrupted by school children, or my child. Gosh, can't you just go on a tour/vacation without being interrupted by your family? 

So here is Loki and Grandpa Sergey. As you can see the lights above are "layered" with different colored lights, blue/orange/red/yellow. These are to create the look of sunsets/sunrises. As you can see, the area is huge. 

Here is Lake Baikal,  о́зеро Байка́л, the lake is the largest deepest fresh water lake in Russia, possibly the world. So to equate it to something in Oregon, it's like Crater Lake. It is located up towards Siberia. Though the display is cut off, you can see it's very large. I don't know very much about Lake Baikal. But I do have more pictures of the train lay out to share. Including school youth with those gawd awful hair cuts I keep trying to explain to people. (Including matching parent child hair cuts!). While These photos were taken around the 13th of February,  I still have more photos to share!