Day One: Friday night.
A buoyant bunch of twenty ACTR students and a few authority figures piled into Muscovsky Vokzal (Moscow Train Station) in St. Petersburg around 10:30 on Friday night. (My Russian-language successes that day and in the previous few days included calling a clerk-girl "devushka" for the first time and bargaining down the price of some flowers.) A lot of us brought food and drink -- not by choice, mind you, but because our homestay mothers had made us. I, for one, got away with only bringing a liter of apple juice. Unopened box. No food -- well, none that she had chosen.
We met by the bust of Peter the Great in the big hall. A huge head on a huge pedestal. (A room or two away from slot machines and kiosks selling everything from toothbrushes to CDs to pirozhki.) I arrived early and saw Marcus, a British/Spanish student on a rather ad hoc study-in-St. Petersburg program, outside. I know him only from this International Telephone / Telegraph Office, from which I write these very words. He was leaving for a Moscow visit, too, but he'd be leaving the country soon after. I wished him well. I'm really glad when I contrast my program with his -- I get more time in St. Petersburg, more actual interaction with Russians (with my lovely homestay), and probably a better social and academic overall experience. Thanks, ACTR! Thanks, Mom and Dad!
Kate (a.k.a. Katya, since "Katya" is a legit Russian-declinable name and "Kate" isn't), John and I were the three non-Russians in a four-person "coupe`." The fourth turned out to be "Misha." Misha did not speak much at all. Katya and John and I had been laughing away, and then he entered, and ... silence. I tried to engage him in conversation, at least to introduce ourselves. As John put it, my attempts fell into a conversational black hole.
Translation of the intro. conversation, during which I was barely containing my laughter, since even I knew that it was funny at the time, follows.
Hello.
Hello.
[Long pause]
We're students from America.
Ah.
[Long pause]
My name is ... [John and Katya follow in suit]
I am named Misha.
[Long pause]
Would you like some juice?
No, thanks.
Eventually, we got some cracks in Misha's facade. He -- I'm sure quite sarcastically -- asked, "And where did you learn to speak Russian so well?" and spoke some in English. He claimed to be a computer programmer, although John and I now flirt with the idea that he's something a bit more underhanded.
We all tried to sleep, although the noise and the White Nights didn't help too much. I think that when Misha said the next morning that my friends and I had prevented him from getting a good night's sleep, he was joking.
Day Two: Saturday.
Early Saturday morning we arrived half-dead in Moscow. We got on a bus, got to the hotel, waited to be processed (during which downtime Lauren and Melissa ate animal crackers and discussed their favorite authors), checked into our rooms (Hot water! And water I can brush my teeth with! "I'm going to brush my teeth four times a day, for the sheer novelty of it."), ate a non-wonderful breakfast of bread and cheese and blini (pancakes) and cheese, and got on a bus to see the sights of Moscow, narrated by a friendly Russian guide.
The guide was nice, but her cadence and vocabulary bored and confused us respectively. (When she started mentioning Kiev and early Russian history and names thereof, a number of us got shivers, recollecting recent Russian history lectures that were even more impenetrable.) And I just felt like such a ... a tourist.
I bought a shirt. After some bargaining, it was $4, rather than $5. It featured a map of the Moscow metro. In Russian, of course.
There are lots of clocks in Moscow. I feel as though there are more clocks in public spaces here than in St. Petersburg. Maybe this jibes with the stereotype of Muscovites as always in a hurry. Forget not that
Moscow : St. Petersburg :: New York : San Francisco
A number of people have bought rather large soft drink bottles -- around a liter or so -- and had an odd phenomenon occur in which:
John thinks it's the unusually long neck of these particular bottles. Any chemists, fluid dynamics experts, or Coke engineers in the house?
The last stop on our bus tour -- the fifth or so time we got out of the bus -- was Krasnaya ploschad. Red Square. The Kremlin, Lenin's tomb, Saint Basil's, the works. How in the world did I get to Russia?! Saint Basil's Cathedral is amazing, bar none, wow, oh my goodness, wow.
Krista, her Russian peer tutor, John and I wandered for a bit. We ended up eating near the Kremlin at -- I debase myself just mentioning the name -- Sbarro's. Yes, the fake-Italian mall-food-court "restaurant." There is one mall, it has been said, with many convenient locations. Well, one of them is off of Red Square. Yeesh. The soundtrack from The Godfather actually played, a bit, while we were eating.
It could have been worse. There was a T.G.I. Friday's in the same complex. And "Friday's" was not translated into "Pyatnitsa," as one might expect. "Slav Bogu, eto Pyatnitsa." No, it was all just transliterated. Darn it. I prefer more elegant representations of economic and cultural hegemony.
That night was dinner in the Chinese restaurant, inside the hotel, where our waitress spoke worse Russian than we did. Reassuring. I was hoping that that would be a sign -- as in the US -- that the food would be good (where the ethnic staff doesn't speak the native language of the country in which the restaurant in located, the food is usually better, no?), but it was merely adequate and overpriced. John and I did, however, have a great conversation -- which continued throughout the weekend -- about the morals and il/legalities of alcohol ab/use, gun control, and other sociopolitical issues.
Day Three: Sunday.
Some stuff, first, that I had forgotten to mention previously.
First: on Friday night, in Moscovsky Vokzal, belying all the very progressive and enlightened thoughts I've been having about race in this 80% white country, I approached a group of Indians -- familiar faces, what? -- and found out that they identified themselves as Russians, which made me feel like a boor for asking where they were from.
Also: it's a bit of a Russian tradition -- in Moscow, at least -- to see the sights, especially Red Square, on your wedding day. So there were lots of brides about. I liked it. I love feeling festive. I even wished one of them good luck.
Moreover: I was near one of the many metro entrances/underground passageways on Saturday afternoon when I said, "What's that violin music?" I peeked in, and ten people on violins and other string instruments were playing. Not badly, either. Lots of people were watching, and I took a picture, and I was happy. The San Francisco subways can just roll over and die; they can't even compete now. There are no chamber orchestras on BART.
At some point this weekend, I realized that I am a lot darker than I used to be. I am pretty sure that before-and-after pictures will show me a milk chocolate in early June and dark chocolate, kind of like Shweta, in mid-August. I should probably use more sunblock.
So. Sunday. I copied down a bunch of stuff from Kate's Lonely Planet guidebook. (Lonely Planet is the Google of guidebooks to the ACTR kids. There's just no contest.) Netcafes, restaurants, places to go. It may have been that morning, or the next one, that I saw, dubbed in Russian, the prom scene episode from Beverly Hills, 90210. And it was dubbed quite well, too. I could have sworn Brenda was saying, "Konyeshna" (of course), to the question of "shall we get our pictures now?" Also, the previous day, on some channel that never again appeared on our TV, I saw a test pattern and listened to "Walk Like an Egyptian" as I surveyed the Moscow skyline from my hotel window. Very apropo.
We breakfasted to no one's delight, really, on some porridge-and-milk that only vaguely resembled my idea of kasha. I like kasha, the way my host mom prepares it. Anyway, we headed out for a tour of the Moscow metro system -- ony five interesting stations out of about eighty. I made conversation with our guide on the way to the first stop, and she complimented me on my Russian! Goodness.
I thought of a Kodak ad that features some comically non-native-language-speaking tourists in, I think, Italy. They ask for directions and eventually get where they need to go so that they can get a picture of themselves at some emotionally significant spot (I'm simplifying the ad). Maybe part of what I dislike about tourism is the way it objectifies the place and the people you are viewing. Ray Bradbury talks about this in some short story of his. I can't recall the name.
There are lots and lots of statues in Moscow. My goodness. It's generally noted that Prince Vladimir rejected Islam for his country because of its alcohol restriction. Maybe it was also because Russians can't stand not making representations of the human form. Also, they need lots of public meeting places. "I'll meet you by the bust of [minor bureaucrat who played politics well]." "Wait, maybe it would be easier to see each other at the statue of [obligingly patriotic agitprop hack]."
I wasn't feeling particularly awed during some of the excursion. Maybe I just ran out of awe too early on in Russia, I thought.
Then I saw Mendeleevskaya. I took quite a few pictures of Mendeleevskaya. I am very happy that there is a major metro station in Moscow named after Mendeleev, and also that the chandeliers are shaped like models of molecules. Crystal-formation-looking things. John groused that they didn't look enough like authentic, scientifically valid molecular formations. Don't look the Bronze Horseman in the mouth, John.
A few of us failed completely to find the cemetery attached to the Novodevichye Convent (the entrance was far away from the convent entrance, and the rest of the people went back the next day to look at famous people's graves). But the convent was very pretty and peaceful. I actually saw a nun, dressed in all black, scurrying along to do...whatever it is that Russian Orthodox nuns do. How different our worlds are!
On the way to a restaurant from the convent, as we gradually gave up on seeking the cemetery, we came upon THE CUTEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. EVER. There is a park next to the convent, with trees and a stream. I saw some little bronze ducks that immediately reminded me of Make Way for Ducklings. And I was right! Ten years ago, Barbara Bush (First Lady B.B.) presented this thingie to the children of the USSR from the kids of the USA, in honor of the classic work by Robert McCloskey. And I sat on the big mommy duck and had my pic taken. And then, as I rested on a bench, I saw a little kid of five or so come over with her gramma, and she played with those ducks for half an hour, and set the bar for any future cuteness display I may ever witness. She "fed" things to the duck, she created interactions between some stuffed animal and the ducks, she just embodied cuteness. Oh, and she used (of course) really simple Russian, so I could understand her. E.g., "There!" Yeah, that was the highlight of my day, and possibly of my entire trip to Russia, in terms of cuteness.
From a good lunch at Guriya, a Georgian restaurant on Komsomolskaya Prospekt:
TO DO: Figure out how I feel about alcohol.
On the way back to the metro, I finally realized that Sprite ads that say, "Don't believe ads," are an example of the Liar's Paradox.
To what extent do advertisements and signs in general assume that the viewer already knows the city? That question kept coming up -- as Caleb Carr wrote, "like the only hummable melody in a difficult, nightmarish opera," or something like that. Well, it wasn't nightmarish. Neither was it "like a splinter in your brain, driving you mad," as in The Matrix. It just kept coming up.
Later that day, I remembered Michael Crichton's Travels, a very good book. I especially remembered the chapter involving the Dyaks and the Something-Kundalkiki Gorge. It's a chapter about missing what's right under your nose.
After the restaurant was Gorky Park, which I just viewed from the outside. Today it hardly seems a place of skulking, of Cold War intrigue. Today it just looks like a circus.
The perehod, or underground passageway, to the other side of the street, was chock-full of people selling paintings. Somehow I liked that better, seeing the walls full of art and viewing them as a consumer, trying to figure out what I liked and what would be worth my coin, rather than gawking touristically from one "masterpiece" to the next and feeling some sort of obligation to like everything.
There was a sculpture garden, and then there was rain, and then back at the hotel, there was dubbed X-Files ("Malder"), and I made some joke about the tsar of wishful thinking. I'll write more about Sunday night in a bit.
Day 3.5: Sunday Night.
The "tsar of wishful thinking" joke was basically a refernce to some 1980s (?) song in which a line from the refrain was "I'm the king of wishful thinking."
I saw, in the sculpture garden (or outside its gate, actually) a statue of several people. One of them was a woman holding a shield, upon which was printed Mir zemle -- World peace. The idealism of that, and of early Communism in general, really hit me. It also seemed connected with my personal/emotional life. This problematic attitude of mine shows up both in politics and in relationships: isn't it possible to just sidestep the bad parts of human nature, with enough planning?
The "advertise on the Moscow Metro" signs in the Metro are rather clever. They insinuate the red "M" logo into unexpected places. Nice.
There are Communists everywhere. Some of them are Young Commies, so they kind of have an excuse -- they weren't around during Stalin's reign. But others are old people who just yearn for order, I guess.
I see too many little tourist-merchandise-vendor stalls and tables wherever I go. This makes me fantasize about two different unexpected vending situations. One is seeing a vendor of standard Russian items (e.g., matroschki dolls, icons, vodka flasks) in some touristy spot in the US. The other actually happened (sort of) today. A random stall in a perehod had incense and Ganesha icons and the like. It took me bizarrely home for a moment. I kind of wanted to pray. (The last time I saw a Ganesha icon was in the Ethnography museum, back in St. Petersburg. There I actually did stop and say a prayer.)
I have explained in my entry, "Lenin, booze, metro, uniforms, guns", that I got my documents checked on Red Square. I described it there. I had all sorts of emotions and thoughts running through me all night.
I saw My First Arabic Graffiti in the metro.
Linda Crew's children's book Children of the River made me cry several times when I read it in high school. I remember it now because of a moment when someone cries because someone else calls her a good person.
I miss home, I thought. And I thought of St. Petersburg as home!
There were stares and possibly judgment on the metro that night. It was a long metro ride home, and halfway through, since I had a seat and John was standing, I got up and successfully urged him to take my seat. He later reported stares from other passengers, although I'd hate to employ post hoc, propter hoc. People stare a lot here anyway.
Is the metro faster, louder, and inhabited by louder and rowdier drunkards here, or is it just me?
The hoo-ha over blue M&Ms strikes me as Boorstin-esque fake news. Argh, I thought, asking what horrible concoction we'd have for breakfast the next day, and thinking I had homework due the day we came back. John and I grabbed a late supper at some cafe near the hotel, where American music from Russian MTV blared from a TV on the counter.
I had weird dreams that night, including a document check at an airport.
Day the Last: Monday & Tuesday Morning.
Reclaiming a word, e.g., "queer," that was used in a derogatory manner previously -- it's kind of like off-label prescription of drugs, no?
I marked down more stuff from Katie's Lonely Planet before breakfasting on a surprisingly edible omlet (and bread and cheese and tea, of course.) Then people set off on their own.
The metro in Moscow has something like ten lines. One of them is a circle -- very useful. They call it the Ring Line. I've taken it so much that I'm the Lord of the Ring Line.
I've seen very few really attractive Russians here. In St. Petersburg or in Moscow.
I think it's hilarious that many of the stations still have Communist names. I mean, everywhere I go I see labels marked "CCCP" (USSR) or the hammer and sickle, or the five-pointed star, or in St. Petersburg "Leningrad," or the like. But when I give or get directions like "Get off at Proletarian Station" or "I'm sure there'll be a cafe near Place of the Revolution," I crack up.
There is lots of book-reading on the metro here, and less newspaper-reading than I recall from St. Petersburg, D.C., or San Francisco. Books take up less room.
"A three-hour tour" in Russian is Tri-chasa exkursiya or some such.
Kate lost her shirt. Literally. On the train on the way here. And lately, someone gave us the slip - literally, the one we needed to get in someplace. Very funny. (Amelia Bedelia, the children's book series, is basically a bunch of case studies on the dangers of idioms.)
I can so easily imagine a Salon story about sex on Red Square. Communism, sex, travel, etc -- it's all Salon. Related: recently I read some Salon teaser that, while only two sentences long, satisfied me such that I felt that I did not have to read the story. What a failure of a teaser! Doesn't the front page have editors to prevent this sort of thing? We wouldn't have done such a thing back in high school at the Tokay Press! Goodness.
I'm remembering a conversation that Alexei and I once had about kitsch and camp. I noted that loving camp and laughing at yourself for living it might be considered evidence of self-loathing.
I took a boat tour on the River Moskva. Alone. It was a pleasantly brisk day. I got to sit alone and breathe river air and look at lots of sights. I even discovered a brand of chips that I like -- Estrella. A European make, I imagine.
Last night -- I remembered -- John and I had decided not to visist the Bely Dom at night, even thoguh I read that it's spectacularly lit up then. We'd already seen it, not knowing what it was, whilst searching for a bokostore on the previous day. See, the White House was the scene of one of Yeltsin's coups. He shot at the building! From a tank! I think. Anyway, that's partly what reminded me of the Crichton Travels chapter on missing what's right under your nose.
I'm sure that there's some continuity between the old Russian tradition of making icons of Christ and the Lenin fetish in Communist art. Lenin as saviour! And over the weekend I mused that perhaps the Lost Seventh Case (the vocative) in the Russian language disappeared because Stalin didn't like it. (You stll hear the vocative in old constructions, often referring to God. "Bozhe moy!" --My God! Curiously enough, in Fonetika before we left for Moscow, we saw in our old Soviet textbooks that only four examples of the "soft g" were given, omitting the fifth, "Bog" -- God.)
I had thought of the Stalin-didn't-like-the-vocative thing whilst on the bus excursion on Saturday. We saw a Bog-awful statue of Peter the Great. It doesn't even have the virtue of being old -- it was commissioned in 1990. What a boondoggle! Some anarchists tried to blow it up recently. My sympathies for anarchism just went up a notch.
I'm sure you can find a picture yourself.
The hotel window opened out, and was big, and had no screen. We were on the 23rd floor. Easy opportunity for death! Katie is too well-adjusted to see how this is different from everyday life -- she said, "Yuo have your life in your hands every moment of every day." Well, yes. But it just makes one pause to think, "It would take so little, right now. If I really wanted to die."
Note that I did not take the opportunity.
John isn't suicidal. As he said on Sunday, "I would not go on a Soviet roller coaster for all the money in your pockets." (We saw one on the way to Gorky Park.) I also saw a Ferris [Bueller] Wheel. Whee!
I've mentioned the weird TV.
I'm reminded in this country of Neal Stephenson's remarks in In the Beginning Was the Command Line on the virtues of transparent failure.
It's overcast today. You wouldn't think it, but perfect boating weather -- for the sole passenger. I liked the lack of a tour guide, the solitude, the sitting.
I've been confusing "ruble" and "rupee" and inordinate amount. Well, it's about the same exchange rate!
I need to tell Lonely Planet and Rough Guide about cafes and such that no longer exist. For example, the netcafe "Chevignon" doesn't exist anymore. I was directed to "Nirvana" (ha ha) a number of blocks away.
I had dinner with Susanne. We met up, discvered that the restaurant where we had planned to eat didn't so much exist, and ate somewhere else, which was more than adequate. We saw/heard a verb that we were pretty sure didn't exist. I made a pun involving the word for "diverse," the word for "vegetables," and Izvestia ads saying "We Have Different Interests." We headed back to the dorm to go back to St. Petersburg.
I volunteered when I heard that someone had to be the only American in a coupe of three Russian strangers. I ended up with a Russian family that was very nice. A man, his wife, and their two children, one of whom was so small that she slept in the mommy's arms. I understood a great deal, and talked in Russian (the dad understood and spoke a wee bit o'English, the older daughter a bit more), and even made them laugh! I learned words for "sour" and "opposite" and got their address. During a mix-up with bedding, I got to say, "I only seem stupid. I'm not, really!"
Oh, and I got to use something from Oral Culture class -- dogs in Russia don't go "woof," but "gaf-gaf-gaf." When telling them my age, I told them that I often confused numbers such as "twelve," "nineteen," and "ninety" (they sound alike in Russian). They laughed at the thought that I might be ninety years old! And then I explained dog years, and said that if I were ninety, I wouldn't speak Russian or English, but only "gaf-gaf."
I thought of hijacking scenarioes when I woke up. But we got back to Piter fine. But then I had to go to class. Argh. Grr.