Back to Moscow by overnight train

Okay, so now I'm gonna tell part of the story out of order. The last topic I wrote about was Moscow. We left MCPKBA, as it's written in Cyrillic, on Sunday for an eight-hour train trip to St. Petersburg. Great time all around. Shall be detailed more at a later time. Last night we headed back from St. Petersburg to Moscow on another eight-hour trip, this one rolling out of St. Petersburg at half past ten.

It was still sunny, natch, as we made our way through the suburbs and then out very quickly into woods. So many trees. It was an evening of great fun as hung out in the bar car, Annette, Amanda, and I, with an expressive husband and his wife (they're big on PDAs here), four young soldiers (all 21 or 22), a photographer/surfer who looked like Sting, a recently-graduated university student who kept trying to woo Annette, a former career military guy with whom I discussed world events for a long time, and a pair of cute Russian girls in their early twenties. Everyone but me enjoyed quite a bit of vodka and beer as the wheels rolled down the tracks, and none of us made it back to our sleeping compartments until h alf past three, by which time the lady in charge of keeping order in the bar car had shooshed our group a plethora of times.

These overnight trains: we've got second-class tickets, which means you are four in a room, in four bunks, the bottom two of which serve as seats during the non-sleeping portion of the trip. There's a long hallway on one side of the train car which is exactly one Ben wide, meaning I can just make it down said hallway as I scurry about on the train. The doorways at the end of each car are, alas, 0.9 Bens wide, which makes negotiating them a bit more of a breath-holdintg experience.

Amanda and Annette were in the compartment next to mine; I was in with a Russian guy, his wife, and their adorable seven-year-old son. When I came sneaking back into the compartment at half past two, I did my best not to wake them, but I can't vouch for any snoring that may have eminated from my general direction after I fell asleep, which was instantly.

Morning came quick, with blaring Russian pop music at six in the morning. The train pulled into the station a few minutes early, at a smidge before 6:30, and we all walked along the long platform towards the entrance for Varalovsky Station. That is where the three of us have en sitting for the past 3.5 hours, me trying to clean the fuzzy cobwebs from my tired head, Amanda and Annette doing the same but also dealing with the aftereffects of the vodka, still quite feelable four hours later.

So we're here until one. I dozed off a few sentences ago. I can't wait for it to be 1 p.m. so we can get on the next train (58 hours to Novisibirisk!) and go to sleep! Talk to ya soon...

Moscow - Red Square

Red Square - once on par with the White House or the Pentagon as a symbol of world power - is now available for wedding rentals. This I found out, much to my dismay, on my last day in Moscow when I trekked my way over to Red Square and St. Basil's Cathedral to take the obligatory "Ooh! I'm in Moscow!" photos.

So the USSR was communist for all these years, right, and totally anti-capitalist? Well, now you can buy a pair of Nikes at the six-story shopping mall that descends downward into the ground underneath the northernmost tip of the Kremlin and Red Square. Lenin would be rolling in his grave, except he's not in one: his freakishly preserved body (how they did that is a Soviet state secret, but it's kind of worked since he died in the twenties but his body, or at least a very convincing wax approximation of it, is still on display).

There's a Sbarro pizza place outside of the Kremlin, near the McDonalds, but at least Starbucks doesn't appear to have made any inroads here yet. but back to the story: imagine having your wedding in Red Square.

After a long day of walking around the Kremlin (lots of churches and frescoes and Japanese tour groups) and then eating pizza and salad at the aforementioned Sbarro's, I walked down to Red Square at about 8 p.m. The side entrances were all closed, so I went all the way to the southern end, but found that one guarded by a handful of bored teenaged-looking Russian cops and soldiers.

All day long in the Kremlin and while eating pizza we'd seen a wedding of some sort going on in the garden that caps off the top half of the Kremlin grounds; apparently all that was the pre-wedding, as the real thing was going on as I leaned against a railing in the shadow of St. Basil's Cathedral at the south end of Red Squared. I could hear different people going up to the mik, probably to give toasts or congratulations, because everyone cheered whenever someone stopped talking. I leaned against the railing and asked the soldier when the ceremony would be over and if Red Square would re-open at that point, but, not to my surprise, the only English he spoke was "Go Away!" which he told me twice, sterner the second time.

I meandered over to the other side of the square. There was a pathway up onto the hillside and I contemplated taking it in order to at least get a better view of the square than the one I'd been afforded, but my eyesight caught hold of another gun-toting guard strolling the path. I stuck where I was for a while before going over to the group of policemen standing boredly agianst the fence. I didn't know how to say "please consider this a gift on behalf of my appreciation," so I just kind of inched a 100-ruble ($4) note from my pocket so the policeman could see it. I figured that would do the trick -- I heard you can get out of most anything in this country with bribes -- but he didn't respond. Just for a minute, I contemplated making a run for it past the batrriers to where the weding party was chillin', but then remembered that I'd promised my dear mom that I wouldn't cause any international incidents, so I kept quiet and stll. I took some photos, which came out cool because I waited and took one of the multi-colored onion domes every few minutes as the sun went down.

By half past ten, it was obvious that the wedding would be going on all night. The guests had left and come back changed out of their formal wear, and were now dancing to some thumping Russian house music. I wondered if I could sneak in with a group of them, like in a Mentos commercial, but thought better of it and got up to leave.

Comrade, a voice called from behind me.

It was the soldier up on the hill. Maybe he was going to let me in after all. I hoped so. I really wanted to take some better pictures of Red Square.

"You forgot something," I assume he said in Russian, motioning to the low brick wall where I'd been sitting. There lay my videocamera, with which I had taken many cool shots of Red Square, the wedding, and St. Basil's Cathedral, but which had not found its way back to my backpack.

My heart skipped a beat as I ran back to gather my video camera. I thanked the soldier, saluted him, and was on my way back to the apartment while he went back to keeping crazy foreigners out of the wedding of whoevoer was getting married there that evening in Red Square.

Moscow - Circus

Okay, where were we? Moscow, eh? I'd just told you about something or other, and then it was going to be on with a description of the circus I went to, but I ran out of time at the internet cafe the other night and then I couldn't access this site at a place I was at yesterday. But I digress. I'm here in Leningrad, er, St. Petersburg, a city steeped in history and culture but, alas, pounded by rain the past few days. Well, not pounded, really, but enough to be highly annoying for a California boy like me.

So I went to the circus in Moscow the other night. Annette and Amanda, with whom I'm traveling but not really spending much time, went the night after, and they didn't like it much owing to the probable animal abuse that it took to get the animals to perform such amazing tricks and maneuvers. Not that I condone such actions, but I was more impressed with the acrobats anyways. There were bears and monkeys (but no bear driving a motorcycle with a goggled-and-scarfed monkey in the sidecar, as I'd envisioned), but the acrobats were really what was best. For some reason, the acrobats were all dressed in 1920s Coney Island getup, like handlebar mustaches for the men and striped body-covering bathing suits for both sexes. They did all sorts of neato flying-through-the-air tricks that had even cynical, jaded ol' me gasping with delight. They made excellent use of a see-saw to catapult members of the troupe way the heck up into the air, where they'd, for instance, land on the shoulders of someone who was already standing on someone else's shoulders, and the top guy would be holding a seat attached to the top of a long pole, and they'd vault the guy up from the see-saw on the ground up into that seat, probably 35 or 40 feet into the air.

I wish I could show you pictures, but I was harshly scolded by my sections babuskhka, or old grandmotherly lady, for taking photos and videos. In my defense, they hadn't said that I *couldn't* take photo (althouth they might have said so and I'd just missed it what with my lack of Russian skills). There were, however, both a video camera and a regular camera, both behind the circle with the line through it, on the back of my admission ticket.

So yes, the circus was cool. Acrobats. Lions, no tigers, and bears! Oh my! And cute little puppies! Doing adorable cute little puppy tricks with a girl dressed like Little Bo Peep. Let's just not think about how they got the puppies to perform those tricks so well.

* * *

Moscow

Models. Mullets. Mayhem. That's Moscow. Its a city with five times the death rate of third-world country ruled by warlords. Its a city where nobody speaks English, hardly, because they grew up hating us until 16 years ago, and I've got a feeling a lot of them still do. Its a city where they raise their supermodels free-range, allowing them to roam free, to gallop the streets at their leisure, their hair flowing, their fashionable clothes fitting their forms perfectly...well, I'll stop right there with what a great town this is in that aspect.

But the mullets. Let me tell you about the mullets. Oh doozy. Is this a recent thing or did they never go away? Did somebody sneak in a bootleg copy of "The Last Starfighter" and now everyone's all "Business in the front, party in the back"? Because they are *rockin'* the mullets everwhere hear. Stratoyavaska-Stuymayanya Street? They've got 'em. Down in the metro? You betcha. At the Kremlin? Yes sir. And not just the men: now there's LadyMullet for you Russian women who want to feel that little somethin' on the back of their necks.

But there's more to this city than the mullets, the models, and the mayhem. There's lots of Russian people. And they don't really smile. And seriously, none of them speak English. And nothing is in English, which made my first excursion quite an adventure the other day. But I'll get to that in a minute.

I arrived at Sheremedyvo-2 Airport on a Lufthansa flight from Duesseldorf at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Everyone clapped when the plane landed. I forgot to mention in my last post that they did this when we landed in Germany, too. Annette said they did it on her flight to Hamburg, also. Is this a German thing, to clap politely when the plane doesn't burst into a ball of flames on the tarmac?

Nobody was there to meet me at the airport, like I'd told there would be and like I'd been expecting. This was minor cause for worry -- what with me being in RUSSIA and all -- but I stayed calm and about 45 minutes later, this dude comes wandering in to the crowd of people waiting with signs for their arrivals to come out from customs and immigration. I'd been expecting a sign that said "HARRER" on it, but he had one that said "Moscow Rick Apartment."

Moscow Rick is an American guy who lives here in Moscow and owns a bunch of apartments and rents them out cheaper than you can get a hotel room for in this hyper-expensive city. He'd been somewhat flaky with me and my traveling partners, Annette and Amanda, on the months leading up to this trip, so I shouldn't have been surprised when no one was there to greet me as I got off the plane. I found out later that nobody showed up for Annette for like over an hour after her plane landed at one of Moscow's other international airports.

We started towards the city from the airport, which is way out past the suburbs. We passed IKEA. We passed cows in the road. We passed buts of Stalin and Lenin. We passed stalled Communist-era cars of indeterminate make and model. When we got to a traffic jam, we and many other cars passed it on the right, by DRIVING THROUGH A FIELD. All the time with this driver, the radio was blaring Russian pop songs. Not having mastered the language on the flight over, the most I could make out was something like RA RA RASPUTIN over and over again over a 1991 synthy Rick Astley beat that kept getting faster and faster, and my driver kept going faster and faster -- roads be damned! I'll drive through the mud -- as the tempo increased. Eventually, we got to the apartment building, and had to wait outside because the cleaner had left the keys inside. We then had to go find one of Moscow Rick's assistants, then find the housekeeper, then something else, yadda yadda yadda, it turned into like three hours later and I was tired of driving around listening to the Russian pop music. And thirsty, too, but I had not yet exchanged dollars to rubles.

We got in, Annette got there too, and Annette and I checked out our apartment, for which we're paying $150 per night. I don't have the internet cafe time to describe my dissatisfcation with the apartment, but let's leave it at that a) it was decorated by Borat's grandma, which b) doesn't match the pictures on Rick's website, and c) it's dusty and dirty enough that both Annette and I feel congested in the house. But enough about that, because tonight is the last of our five nights there, and then it's off to St. Petersburg tomorrow.

Okay, so the day after I got there, we met up with Amanda and went to get Trans-Siberian Railroad tickets for next week's long journey eastward. We'd been waiting forever to buy these, as you can't buy them in America except through ticket agents who charge you like three times the value, etc...Rick's assistant went with us, but we weren't able to get anything except for the tickets TO St. Petersburg, for some long convulted reason that the assistant kept trying to pass off on us. Really, we suspected, she just didn't want to wait in line or on hold on the telelphone. The tickets to St. Petersburg we could have gotten on our own, fairly easily. Grrrr. Oh yeah, by the way, we started this adventure at like 2 p.m. instead of 10:30 as planned because Moscow Rick said, nonchalantly, that the assistant was hung over from a night of partying and wouldn't be able to help us, even though that had been the plan.

I felt ill and tired (I'd almost thrown up on the car ride to the station) so I went home and went to sleep. The next day, Wednesday, I felt better, but Annette had already left for the day, so I set out on my own and got lost in the subway for many hours on the way to looking for the way to the Kremlin and Red Square. Why was it confusing? Because I had no map -- couldn't find the place where Annette had purchased hers from -- and I invariably kept getting on subways headed in the wrong direction from what I'd wanted after charting my course on maps in the stations or onboard the subways themselves. Oy. Confusing. But good exercise going up and down all those stairs all day! And I did get to see a lot of the different stations, and they are beautiful. Not sure why Stalin took such pride in the metro system, but it was evident, as stations were ornate, with marble floors, arched ceilings, fine Corrinthean columns running from the ceilings to the floors, and cool-looking chandeliers everywhere. Very fancy for a subway. Oh, by the way, once I got to the Kremlin, it was too late to go in for the day, so I came down to this Interent cafe in a shopping mall that is underneath Red Square (how symbolic is it that Nike and Adidas are being sold literally under the seat of power of the former Soviet Union?). We're four stories underground as I type this. It's Saturday at 7 p.m. and I'm gonna head up to Red Square after I'm done here.

Okay, next day. I headed out to a big and tall men's store that Moscow Rick told me about, because I'm having a shoe situation. My sandals that I brought have seen better days, and are good now at nothing so much as inducing blisters. My tennis shoes have also seen their share of miles. They're okay, but I've been having a problem with swelling feet for the past while (taking medicine for it), which means the shoes are tight when I put them on in the morning and then loose not long after that when all of the walking around makes the feet shrink. Sigh. Yes, I need to take better care of myself, like actually follow the doctor's plans when I get back to Riverside. As it is, I've been walking around a lot the past few days with sore feet since the shoes start out tight, as I said, but then become clown shoes, clippity-clopping along with me until I re-tighten them. So I looked into having new sandals sent to where we're gonna be staying in St. Petersburg for the next few days, but nobody seems to ship direclty to Russia, and the USPS can only "maybe" get them there on time -- for $200 shipping, no less. So I'll be kickin' it with these shoes until I get to Beijing in the middle of July, when my mom, who is meeting me there, will hopefully bring me some new, better-fitting sandals. Or maybe all this walking around will cure the swelling condition to begin with (that's what the doctor's have always told me about it -- activity is key) and I'll be okay with the tennis shoes I have. Okay. Enough rambling about this. TMI, Ben. TMI.

Duesseldorf

So usually when I leave los estados unidos I'm headed across the Pacific towards Asia, and the airport departure lounges in which I invariably find myself waiting are reminiscent of a major city's Chinatown or something...but this was not the case as I waited Sunday at the LTU gate at LAX, for LTU is a German airline, and all the people around me reminded me of nothing so much as extras from "The Sound of Music," what with their blond hair, blue eyes, and stern, chiseled features (most of them).

The flight itself was an uneventful ten hours. I was seated all the way in the back and had a seat empty next to me. I snored my way over Vegas, Minnesota, Greenland, and the United Kingdom before touching down in Duesseldorf, home of Dieter from "Sprockets" and the pioneering late-seventies synth-pop band Kraftwerk. Exchanged some euros, didn't gather my luggage (as it had been sent ahead already to Moscow - more on that in a second), and was outside of the airport and on a train to the city center by 10:45, about half an hour after I'd touched down.

So yeah, the luggage. The LTU lady at LAX informed as she was taking my luggage that it would be proceeding directly to Moscow, despite my 25-hour layover in Duesseldorf. I had time to grab a clean pair of underwear (or lederhosen, as those wacky Germans say) before my luggage disappeared. Oh well, I thought, assuring myself that I had everything I'd need -- even an extra shirt -- in my backpack.

Of course, not having the luxury of back-up clothes made for a bit of a challenge for me, who is notorious for being a bit of a messy eater (or el slobbo, as my mom or the Spanish would say). I made it, however, through two meals on the plane -- one of them pasta in a very runny sauce, no less -- without dribbling all over myself. Had they known of this accomplishment, the cutie LTU stewardesses might have given me a medal or some ice cream. No...ice cream bad...mega dribble potential.

So I arrived in central Duesseldorf and it looked just like it had on googlemaps the night before when I'd checked my hotel location at home, only more three-dimensional and more...real. I walked to the Hotel Bavaria, ready to go out and explore Duesseldorf after dropping my stuff off. I checked in, went to my room, and...fell asleep for four hours. Fortunately, at this time of year, this far north, it stays late until 11 at night or so. Like, really light. Like sunglasses until 10:30 and clouds visible in the clear Northern sky until well after midnight. I got up, showered in my lovely 2 foot by 2 foot German shower, which necessiated me standing outside of the shower half the time so as to not inadvertently send the water from comfortable to "scalding."

I went out exploring Duesseldorf. Lots of street cars. Rode all around with the help of a map I found in the hotel room. One of the biggest differences I noticed between Duesseldorf and the good old USA (or at least Riverside, CA) was the numerous works of public art scattered EVERYWHERE around the city: giant whimsical slides, a huge cherry, playing plaster puppies...lots of cool stuff to break up the modern skyscrapers and centuries-old buildings that made up central Duesseldorf. Also, I was able to get all over the city on streetcars. And if that hadn't been enough, I could have taken the subway. And that trip from the airport to downtown had been so quick and efficient on the train...they (like the rest of Europe) have the mass transit thing down to a degree that we in American can only dream of.

Also, they are big into recycling. Every corner had like four pails for paper or tin or plastic or metal -- all nicely decorated and none of them graffitied. The coolest eco thing I saw, though, was that at every traffic circle (and there were many), the perimeter of the circle was covered in recycyled auto tires, which was such a cool use for them! Why don't we do stuff like this?

I ate dinner (sausage! mmmm!) at a restaurant in the old part of town and returned to my hotel by 1 a.m., ready to get up at 7 for the next day's trip to Russia. My night's sleep wasn't that good because the bed was in very poor condition (a condition the Germans call der lumpypillow), but I survived, because I was tired, and I knew the next day would be epic as I made my way behind the Iron Curtain.