Moscow

Ah, so. This weekend didn't look like it was going to be very interesting, so I went to Moscow with three other students from the program: Tyler, Jenny, and Larissa. For your convenience:

Dramatis personae:

Americans

Larissa--from Washington, more or less; her life sounds crazy.

Jenny--from Nebraska; also studies Spanish, and just graduated.

Tyler--from Wisconsin; actually a math major.

Ryan--that's me.

Russians

Misha--Tyler's host brother; student of Semitic languages at the Moscow Federal something something Humanities.

Masha--Misha's girlfriend (Misha is a boy's name, Masha is a girl's name); a language student at the same university.

Marina--friend of Misha's (and Masha's); also a student at the university.

Iulia--friend of Misha's (and Masha's and Marina's); yet another student.

Sam--pensioner and part-time street artist, of sorts. His real name does actually resemble Sam.

So. The train left Friday at 1:12 from the Moscow train station in SPB (getting us out of most of a day of classes), and arrived in Moscow at the Leningrad train station at 9:05 (train times are accurate more or less to the minute). We traveled platskart (that is, cheaply) on the way there, and were pleased to discover that this meant we had an open four-person compartment, with convertible bunks/benches. We brought food, ate food, slept, and read. Conclusion: it might just be childhood bias, but I really like train travel. Compared to plane or car travel, anyway; we'll talk about boats later.

Misha and Masha met us at the train station and took us to their university to meet Marina and Iulia. We went to eat at a restaurant called Moo-Moo (transliteration correct: it was decorated with cows), and got to practice our Russian some more. All of the Russians had at least some English, and they all study languages in a way that reveals what I do for the hobby it is. Misha (Misha is a boy's name, Masha is a girl's name), if I remember correctly, said that he has so far studied English, Latin, Greek, German, Arabic, and a little bit of Hebrew. He knew at least the first three of those relatively well at some point. Anyway, they were about as excited to talk to us as we were to them--possibly more so; American students are considerably rarer in Moscow. A good time was had by all.

After they kicked us out of the restaurant (they were closing), they took us by Red Square. As you probably don't have any reason to know, the "red" in Red Square has nothing to do with bricks or communism; the Russian word for red (krasniy) used to mean "beautiful" as well as "red." And so the square is accurately named; we came in by the State Historical Museum, and going clockwise the sides of the Square (actually rectangular) is occupied by GUM (the former State Universal Store, now a vast expensive mall), St. Basil's Cathedral (you've seen pictures, perhaps?) and the Kremlin. The GUM is a nice enough building, but they light it up with white Christmas lights at night (the sun actually sets in Moscow!), so it looks a little gaudy next to St. Basil's and the Kremlin. The State Historical Museum is a pretty handsome structure, too.

So, St. Basil's and the Kremlin. I think I'll only say for St. Basil's that, like anything with substance, it's much better in person. It was the Kremlin that really impressed me, though. It's big, of course--it encloses 68 acres and has 20 towers, I think, and goes all the way down to the River Moskva, and the walls are pretty tall--but I also said that the Hermitage, for example, was big. (Vast, I think, was the word). The Kremlin's a little bit different than that, though--for one thing there's nothign to distract you from how big it is. It's a lot plainer than any of the palaces--red brick, crenellations, relatively modest towers. For another thing--I don't know. Mostly my thought was that if I were a Mongol prince, I'd have left the Muskovites alone.

(Of course, that isn't the same Kremlin the Mongols dealt with; the current one was designed by Italians at the end of the 15th C. That's not important). At the foot of the Kremlin wall in Red Square is the tomb of Lenin, which is actually a pretty modest structure. Apparently it started as a wooden structure, and was replaced by something more permanent when popular demand for visitations failed to subside. We didn't get to go see it, though; it's only open from 10 to 1. In fact, we didn't end up going inside anything in Red Square. One day in Moscow isn't really enough, I'm afraid.

What else did we see? We went by the All-Russia Exhibition Center, which consists of a number of pavilions (er, 16), arranged around a large open space and fountain (decorated with sixteen statues). Sixteen, of course, is the number of former Soviet republics; the exhibition center is a communist tribute to the common people of the member republics, and the pavilions used to house art from each of them. The buildings are quite nice, but they're mostly used as shopping centers now. Oh well.

We also walked down Arbat, which is a street dedicated to souvenir shops and expensive restaurants--a very deliberate tourist trap. We ate at another Moo-Moo there, and again stayed until closing. Some good did come of the trip to Arbat--on the way out of the Moo-Moo I was accosted by a pensioner who heard me speaking English and decided to tell me the life story of an artist whose statue we had just passed. His name was Sam, more or less, and he likes to supplement his pension by talking about local history, telling jokes, and repeating aphorisms. He said he studied English in high school, then later bought a radio to listen to British and American propaganda (you pay tax dollars, he said, and I listen); now he practices his English on tourists. He's a terrible chatterer--no real information screening at all--so his value is probably greater as a curiosity than an actual entertainer. And he kept us entertained for about half an hour as it was.

We spent the rest of the night doing things like playing cards, charades, and Russian truth or dare (no truth; only dares). As an aside on Russian education: at one point while we were playing charades, Masha (Misha is a boy's name, Masha is a girl's name) went to great lengths to act out "Pushkin" and the title of a poem, so that the other Russians would be able to get "charming" from the other things she'd been doing--he uses the word in the third line, you see.

Unbelievable.

Speaking of unbelievable: we've been talking about things like Russian culture and stereotypes for a few weeks in class now, and one of the stereotypes involves hospitality--something like the classic business about going hungry to feed your guests. Well, even assuming that Misha and Masha and Marina and Iulia are all well above average in this regard--it's true. Our only connection to any of them came from the fact that Tyler has lived with Misha's family for the past month, and Misha wasn't even there half of that time. The rest had just met us. And what did they do for us?

Misha and Masha, as I mentioned, met us at the train station. They introduced us to their friends, went to dinner with us, and showed us around town for a while. Then we went to Marina's apartment (and remember, we had just met her), where they fed us, entertained us, and put us up for the night (which meant sleeping on the floor for most of them). The next morning they fed us again, and Misha and Masha proceeded to show us around all of the next day, possibly begging off obligations at the university to do so. Then all four of them had dinner with us again, fed us again once we got back to the apartment (allowing us to buy food only because we pointed out that we were only spending the US Government's money), and entertained us again literally all night. Then, in the morning, Misha and Masha took us back to the train station, and then even went so far as to keep us company until the train left.

Er. Unfortunately, no one realized it was time for the train to leave until it started moving. Misha and Masha were in the compartment with us at the time; apparently the conductor is supposed to say something so that people like them--you know, people without tickets, who don't want to leave with the train--know to get off. This didn't happen. And, as I'm sure you realize, trains tend to take a while to get going, so that a person acting quickly could conceivably jump onto or off of the train from or to the platform, before it really got moving. This also did not happen, as the conductor refused to open the door at approximately fifteen seconds after the train started moving. So Misha and Masha were stuck on the train until the first scheduled stop two hours later, then stuck on a bus for two hours back--and them with obligations at the university in only three hours' time. We all felt terrible about that; the only good thing I can say about it is that the conductor didn't force them to pay for not having tickets after all. They were unbelievably kind to us, and they really didn't deserve that.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is this: the rest of Moscow was very impressive, but I doubt I'll remember any part this trip--the whole thing, to Russia--more than the hospitality we saw from Misha and Masha and Iulia and Marina.

As to the rest: kupye, which we took back, is better than platskart in the sense that the compartment has a door and the benches are padded, but worse in the sense that the window doesn't open and it gets incredibly hot. Larissa bought the last Harry Potter book for the way back (for $60!), and somehow managed to stay awake to read it--but the rest of us slept, like reasonable people. We got back at about 4:52, and I went to sleep again about, oh, five hours later. A trip like that's pretty tiring, as it turns out; as much as I enjoyed it, I don't think I could do it every weekend.

Once every other week for six months might be fine, though, or once a month for about the next decade.