It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Metro to Cry

As a vocal advocate for public transportation who never lived in a town with any decent transit system, I was thrilled to make use of the Moscow metro. I can’t compare the layout to that of any other major city (having never visited one), but I find it incredibly easy to navigate: the criss-crossed, color-coded lines with an all-connecting ring line in the center make it difficult to get lost. On top of that, the stations themselves are beautiful. Most stations feature high-ceilinged halls of marble and display triumphant Soviet-era reliefs and murals.
But the best part is that the metro serves as a window into the soul of the city’s population. Every trip offers a little slice of the local culture and highlights some anthropological insights. For example, the generation gap is palpable; often times I’ll see a couple of old men in ushankas and greatcoats exit at one stop and kids with blue hair and co-opted European designer clothes replace them, cranking their iPods and taking any available seat. Traditionally, seats are almost always ceded to babushkas, which is why I rarely bother sitting down when a free one appears, but modern youth tend to ignore these standards (and the resulting passive-aggressive glares of the geriatrics).
One thing that might shock an American observer on the metro is the prevalence of books. Unlike Americans, Russians read, and they read often. In any given car, at least a quarter of the passengers have paperbacks or newspapers. But don’t take this as a sign that the average Ivan is necessarily more educated than the average Joe; a closer inspection of most readers reveal that the typical fare includes trashy tabloids and awful sci-fi/fantasy novels. For example, I saw one middle-aged man intensely reading an article titled something like “оргазмы в кризисе?” (Orgasms in a Crisis?), and the covers of the novels often feature scenes like cosmonauts with lasers battling moon squids.
During weekdays, standard dour commuters make up most crowds, but with nightfall obviously comes a more interesting set of travelers. A couple of nights ago, we boarded an empty car right before a huge group of drunk and merry kids ran in and occupied most of three benches. They were heading to Proletarskaya (probably to Kruzhka, a bar chain where you can get a tall glass of beer for 50 rubles). One girl yelled that they should take another shot…or two, or three. A couple of guys sitting across from my wall pulled out Soviet pilotkas (envelope caps) and an army trench coat to wear. Then, from my left, an entire row broke out in an awful, drunken rendition of “Katyusha,” an old and popular folk song I had to memorize for class last year. I thought about joining in, but, being sober at the time, I didn’t have the guts. Later, I found out from a couple of friends that that was probably a good idea: a couple of the kids further down openly discussed whether we were Americans, and upon confirming that we were, one of them gave an exaggerated middle finger. Little did he know that they were glaring at him the whole time, and when he looked over, he immediately lost his swagger and put his head in his hands in embarrassment. That kind of playful nationalism is why I find myself less nervous about anti-American backlash here.
Sundays feature by far the most interesting metro crowds. On Sunday mornings, the normally silent cars are filled with people yelling political treatises, inviting others to play games of chance, or hocking old wares to passengers. Also, every Sunday morning that I’ve ridden the metro, a young legless vet has gotten on my car (could it have been the same one every time? Unlikely) and yelled something about being an invalid and needing space/money. The last morning this happened, the man was so terribly drunk that I couldn’t pick up a word he said. As he rolled past, I made the mistake of glancing over and making direct eye contact with him; his gaze was full of desperation and rage, and I, with my study abroad program and my bright green coat, could only look away. It was a depressing experience, but one that highlights an often ignored aspect of Russian foreign policy.
Spending most of my life in Florida, I’ve fully lived the American experience of mechanical isolation, where every traveler exists in the personal universe of his or her car and observation of others is limited to glances across lanes as people pass each other. Now, I wonder how much more I would understand and connect with my fellow countrymen if I had ridden subways my whole life. To be honest, I’m not sure what I’d have found if I had.

Culture(d) Shock

Much has happened since my last entry. One important development is that I decided to focus my writing more on personal stuff than public consumption, which is why this blog is gathering dust. I’ll try to write occasional updates like this one, though.
Yesterday, the program bought us tickets to see a ballet at the Kremlin State Theater. This represented two firsts for me: the first time entering the Kremlin, and the first time seeing a ballet. In fact, my experience with any type of legitimate theater only includes watching a couple of performances at my university. Mind you, this lack of exposure isn’t entirely due to some typical chauvinistic disdain for the performing arts. Despite my pretensions, I’m actually a pretty uncultured person; I barely know my way around the table of anything fancier than an Applebee’s, and I’ve only worn one suit in my life: a tattered three-piece I picked up at the DeLand Goodwill last year.
Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to seeing my first ballet—and at the Kremlin, no less. The entrance was pretty heavily guarded; we needed our tickets to climb the stairs to the bridge, and soldiers manned a series of metal detectors. Despite my best efforts to find any and all metal knick-knacks in my coat, the machines went off when I walked through. A soldier told me to produce additional metal objects, and I quickly emptied various items, from a pen to a pocket dictionary to my student pass, from my many pockets. The soldier soon grew tired of my efforts and waved me through with an “Okay, okay.” Apparently, he decided that an actual terrorist wouldn’t be quite so bumbling. While I waited for the rest of the group, I watched the soldier flirt with the female patrons as he searched their bags—“Ha, I found a bomb, go on through!” “What’s in here, you little thief?”
We crossed into the Kremlin over a raised bridge and were eased into the theater, which was next to the entrance. I tried to take in as much of the place as I could before I went inside, but the walls and buildings obstructed my view.
We found our seats about 15 minutes before the ballet started. I gazed at the high ceilings and absent-mindedly wondered if I was sitting in the same theater where the infamous 2002 hostage crisis took place (later research revealed that it wasn’t). For those who aren’t aware of or forgot about it: in 2002, a group of Chechen militants stormed a crowded Moscow theater and took the performers and audience hostage, demanding that Russia halt the ongoing Chechen War. After a few days, Russian special forces dumped a chemical agent into the building and stormed it; the gas subdued the militants and killed over 100 hostages, far more than the Chechens had ever intended to kill. The Russian government declared a major victory, while survivors continue to lobby the state for compensation for the serious disabilities caused by the chemical attack. I tried to imagine who would make me feel less safe in such a situation: a desperate and hungry Caucasian gunman, or the womanizing soldier out at the gate.
Soon enough, the ballet was underway. They performed Figaro, which included the plots of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro (I didn’t know this at the time, as you have to pay for programs in Russia).
I’ve tried to describe my reaction to the performance a few times, but it sounds gushing and gaudy every time. I’ll just say that the spectacle of music and human bodies had me enraptured for the entire three hours. The only thing that kept me from total immersion was a group of obnoxious Russian kids behind me, who talked, giggled and loudly opened candy wrappers for much of the first half. Anytime someone rolls their eyes at the sight of loud, annoying arrogance and accuses the perpetrators of being distinctly American, remind them that being a douche is sadly universal.
After the performance, we headed to the underground mall near Red Square for dinner. The food court featured some interesting looking Russian chains, but I decided I wanted something comfortable, so I headed to the Sbarro.
Sbarro and I have a long-standing love/hate relationship. I’ve never particularly liked their thin and often cold pizza, but their ubiquitous presence in every mall and airport on the planet make them a frequent destination when I’m feeling unadventurous or just plain don’t feel like having anything else. I got a slice of stuffed pizza and a drink for less than I’d expect to pay in the US, but when I got to the counter, I encountered one of the more irritating aspects of Russian consumer culture: the dogged insistence for exact change.
In the West, you can feasibly buy a candy bar with a $100 bill, and if the cashier asks you what you were thinking (or God forbid, refuses to take it), he or she is liable to get fired. In Russia, the bitter folks who run the registers do it with impunity, and one should not be surprised if a cashier refuses to take a 500 ruble note for a 100 ruble purchase. In this case, the young woman in the trademark Sbarro cap didn’t let me pay for a 166 ruble meal with 200 rubles; she made me dig through my wallet and produce 170. I took my food to one of the standing tables (tall tables with no stools) with bitterness in my heart, but luckily, the food wasn’t bad: the slice was stuffed with chicken and broccoli, and was pretty tasty.
In a metro station on my trip home, I saw a group of soccer hooligans run up a broken escalator, singing some anthem; I saw the same thing last Sunday, so I guess that’s when the local football league plays. I couldn’t help but smile at the spectacle, and I decided that I love the culture here far too much to let the occasional annoying quirk get me down…although I still can’t wait until I can just use my debit card again.

This is Easier

My pictures so far are on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=2039892&id=18004091

Tysicha slova

A couple of pictures:



Me in front of Lenin's mausoleum. As is often the case these days, it was closed to the public.



The changing of the guard at the eternal flame, pretty much the Russian equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. These guys just popped out of a random gate and marched past us; I thought they were regular police until they started goosestepping and I noticed they were carrying rifles.

Home is where the produkti is

I write this entry in a far more regulated state of mind than in the first. Jet lag is indeed a bitch, and it’s taken me a half a week to develop a sleep schedule that doesn’t involve me collapsing under my blood stained sheets immediately upon returning to my room.
The weather is colder than in the past couple of days, but still manageable. What I didn’t expect was the near-eternal lack of sunlight here in Russia; we had a special treat of a sunny day yesterday, but apparently, I can’t hope for too much of that in January. Oddly enough, the sun made the drab skyline of my neighborhood look almost beautiful.
MosGU is situated in a neighborhood called Vykhino, on the far south-east corner of the city. As I mentioned in my previous entry, my handlers have told me that it’s not the safest or best of areas, but from an outsider’s perspective, I can’t really tell the difference—the concrete slab apartments look exactly like the ones in other parts of the city I passed on the way here. Moreover, the people on the street tend to dress very well. In fact, the people here (especially the women) tend to dress exceptionally well everywhere they go. As my RA put it, “For Russian women, every day is a fashion show.”
Although, to take this tangent further, I may be getting a false impression of the expensiveness of peoples’ clothes due to the prevalence of fur in Russia. It occurs to me that in the US, decades of anti-fur activism have made real fur hats and coats taboo and exotic; in Russia, practicality clearly trumps such concerns. While standing in a metro in the nice part of town, I saw a rich woman wearing what appeared to be a tiger-fur coat, or at least a very convincing forgery.
But I digress…Vykhino! A neighborhood of broken dreams and new opportunities, transplanted Western trinkets and defiant Russian landmarks. I’ve only explored a bit of the commercial area, but here’s a very brief overview of the neighborhood services:
Right across the street from my gate, next to the bus and matshruka stops, is an old Soviet-style grocery store. They’re called produkti, and in case you’re wondering about the difference between a Soviet-style grocery store and a grocery store that happened to be in an old Soviet building, you can’t actually pick up food and pay for it. Instead, you look behind the counter for what you want, give your order to a clerk (usually an angry babushka, in my experience), get a ticket from the clerk, go to the cashier and pay, get a receipt, then go back to the counter and pick up your food. The process may be archaic, but this particular produkti picked up on at least one trick of Capitalism: being right next to the campus, the store takes advantage of the ubiquitous laziness of college students to jack up their prices.
But not to worry, because a 5-10 minute walk brings you to a Western-style supermarket called Rus Market. This place operates like any store in the US, save for a couple of minor quirks. For example, women with large bags must check them with a guard to prevent mass theft, and you have to tell the cashier how many bags you want and pay for them.
A further walk down the road reveals a small shopping mall. Here, one can find luxuries such as electronics and hair care products, as well as plenty of kitschy stuff. One small store on the second floor almost exclusively sells hookahs and samurai swords.
Of course, only suckers and foreigners do their shopping at these indulgent Western stores; the real action is at the market by the metro station. I haven’t actually been in it yet, but this is apparently where you can get anything from clothes to fruit to cell phones at low and negotiable prices. Buyers beware, though: your savings may be offset by the professional pickpockets roaming the oppressively crowded compound.
Animals are also a permanent feature of Vykhino. While we gathered for our first tour of the block, the RA ducked from a fat pigeon that took flight behind him. He explained that “you may not think that the birds are stupid enough to fly into you, but they are,” and cited personal experience to substantiate his claim. After being shoved on and off of metro platforms by belligerent babushkas with no regard except an angry word or two, I wondered if the pigeons were simply ingrained with the Muscovite character. Stray dogs also wander the sidewalks, but in contradiction to the horror stories I’ve heard about them, the ones here are quite docile. Today, a lab mutt followed us for a few hundred yards, circling us whenever a group of people approached from the opposite direction like a mercenary bodyguard. There are also plenty of domesticated dogs, including one bull mastiff I saw dressed in full Russian style in a doggie track suit.
After a few days here, I feel like Vykhino is a pretty good representation of 21st century Moscow. Russians have argued for centuries between Slavophilia, Russian Exceptionalism and Westernization, and this neighborhood represents the modern consensus: namely, the lack of one. The country seems to be having a hard time expressing its national character while embracing the conveniences of the West. Instead of offering a hybrid of these forces, this neighborhood presents a hodgepodge of contradictory statements and images. As if to confirm this, the most Westernized part of Moscow I’ve seen so far was Red Square, the eternal symbol of Russia, but that’s for another entry.

Airport Transit Blues

I arrived in Moscow yesterday, after the longest and most excruciating trip I’ve ever taken. I flew from Tampa to Chicago to Frankfurt to Moscow, with at least two hours of layover in each city and seven hours over the Atlantic. All told, I spent 22 hours in airports and planes, and since I unfortunately can’t sleep sitting up, my typical nervousness was exacerbated by maddening exhaustion by the time I made my descent into Domodedovo International.

The flight from Tampa to Chicago was uneventful. I cycled constantly between trying to sleep (I got maybe three hours of sleep the previous night) and trying to read Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, which I bought from Barnes and Noble the day before. I received a $50 gift card for Christmas, and I used it to stock up on paperbacks for my stay: two Dostoevskys (The Idiot being the other one) and two Thomas Pynchon novels. I heard that Pynchon required a lot of time and effort, so I figured, what better time to tackle him than during a three month stint on the other side of the world?

O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was very impressive. The biggest airport I’d seen previously was in Newark, so the walls of sleek new planes and massive terminals left me gawking. The other travelers darted nervously between information desks; major snowstorms were coming, and across-the-board delays seemed inevitable. I ignored the panic-mongers and got an authentic Chicago sandwich, complete with rotting lettuce and drenched in Italian dressing. At the armored currency exchange cart, a small Chinese woman gave me an incredulous stare when I asked her for rubles. “RUSSIAN RUBLES?” she exclaimed, as if to say, “Why in God’s name would this college kid be going there?”

With my errands done, I found my gate and watched the hodge-podge of cultures that one encounters at any airport. After a brief time watching businessmen, priests and soldiers of all stripes walk past, I came to a sudden realization. Even though I really don’t like cold weather, I regret living in Florida simply because warmer menswear looks so goddamn classy. Vests, trench coats, caps of all kinds, slick boots, leather gloves…it’s really easy to look like a bad motherfucker when it’s snowing. Of course, I wasn’t looking so hot myself in my second-hand ski parka, but I made plans to relocate to cooler environs after graduating.

Luckily, my flight to Frankfurt missed the dread storm by a couple of hours. I lucked out and got put in the “Economy Plus” section, which was like Economy except with another inch of legroom and a sense of unearned superiority. As the 777 crept across the Atlantic on the map in front of me, my sense of dread over the excursion I was taking grew to uncomfortable levels. People who know me will tell you that I’m usually not the kind of guy who follows through with things. But it was far too late to turn back now.

Frankfurt was more of a pain in the ass than I expected. To get from one gate to another, I went through a total of four passport checks and two security checkpoints, one of which required a full bag search. When I finally arrived at the inner sanctum of the Moscow gate, the nature and challenge of my trip became evident: for the first time, not a single loud American tourist was in sight. As my fellow passengers and I crammed into a bus to get to the runway, I wondered how long I would last in Moscow with my feeble grasp on the Russian language. My aisle mates on the plane were a young Russian woman and her adorable little daughter. The woman said something I couldn’t understand with a friendly inflection as I scooted into my window seat, and I offered a simple spacibo in return.

One thing I can credit for the final leg of my journey was the quality of the Russian airline food: my breakfast consisted of a warm blini stuffed with fruit and smothered in thick butter, as well as bread, meats, cheeses and yogurt. As with any good Russian meal, even pre-packaged airline fare, we received small cups of strong tea when we were done.

The baggage claim at Domodedovo was adorned with English-language signs with helpful hints for tourists. One warned “our Dear Passengers” about the risk involved with “unofficial taxis.” Apparently, the Russians call these “gypsy cabs:” unlicensed folks who use their private cars as cabs for extra cash. They charge much less than their official counterparts, but this of course comes with the risks associated with hopping into a random stranger’s car in Moscow and flashing cash around while speaking in broken Russian.

When I stepped out of customs, I saw why the authorities were so keen to warn foreign passengers about the gypsy cabs: the first thing I saw was a wall of squat, mustached men yelling “taksi!” at everyone who passed. One locked onto me and guaranteed “cheap fare,” and asked if I spoke German when I gave some international signs of refusal. He eventually gave up and scanned the crowd for another foreigner; meanwhile, I found another squat mustached man carrying a sign with my name. He spoke no English, but I gathered that he was waiting on a second student. He directed me to a seat in a dark corner near the bathroom, presumably to keep me out of sight of the cab drivers, and went back to the gate to wait.

After about a half an hour, the mustachio returned with our fellow passenger, a recent college graduate set to start a business internship. She had already lived in Russia, so I let her do all the talking with the driver. In the car, we talked a bit about what we were doing in Moscow while the driver bounced around to the pop techno beats on the radio.

The streets of the Russian capital reminded me of a trip I took to Kansas City, Missouri last year for a college press convention. All the features of a modern city were present, but the buildings betrayed their considerable age. I wondered what it must be like for people like our driver, who must have grown up in these same Khrushchev-era apartments, but who now share the streets with Ikea stores and Chevy dealerships.

The campus of Moscow University for the Humanities (MosGU) consisted of several tall buildings surrounded by fence and guarded at all entrances (I later found out that the school is not in the best of neighborhoods, so I was glad for the security). I was met at my dorm building by a Texan who served as something like an RA. We took a tiny elevator to the 9^th floor, where a locked section door concealed the block of rooms where I and about 15 other Americans would be spending the next three months. When I arrived, though, only two other students were around. The RA gave a quick tour, which included teaching me how to finagle my key to unlock the door (it took some practice to get right). He proceeded to pick up my bedding; the top cover had either a massive blood stain or a massive shit stain, but he assured me that these were much nicer than the bedding provided last year.

After 22 hours of stressful travel on three hours of sleep, I was grateful just to have a mattress. The next day and a half would be spent nursing a serious case of jet lag. I wouldn’t have to worry about my overwhelming sense of terror until Monday.