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.