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"A Semester in Russia, Part 2" by Yancey Slide
----- GwD: The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime ***** Issue #78 -----
----- release date: 05-25-00 ***** ISSN 1523-1585 -----
[Yancey Slide, Head of GwD Undercover Operations, spent the spring semester of
2000 in St. Petersburg, Russia "studying." This is Part 2 of the declassified
version of his account of the trip. Part 1 is gwd78.txt. Part 3 will be
released as soon as it has been cleared by the GwD Council.]
...CONTINUED FROM gwd77.txt
March 2
We saw Mozart's Requiem tonight. It was, in a word, absolutely incredible.
That's two words, but one wouldn't cut it. The orchestra was the Mariinsky
house orchestra, one of the finest in the world, and the choir was
unmatched. The entire experience was beautiful beyond compare; the Mariinsky
is one of the most beautiful theaters anywhere in the world, and the
performance lived up to the backdrop. Afterwards, we went to the Idiot for
coffee and camaraderie, and talked until the wee hours. Walking home from
the metro, the sky suddenly exploded into a snow flurry, and everything was
white and peaceful in the space of a minute. By the time I got home I was
covered in snow and my beard was icing over. It was glorious. The entire
evening was a perfect example of the best the country has to offer.
March 4
Spent the day at Pavlovsk, one of the palaces around the city. It's about an
hour and a half away from St. Pete by bus, and very pretty countryside. The
palace was, well, just like all of the palaces, I guess. They start to blend
in after a while; big and pretty and yellow. Lots of the imperial-age
buildings are yellow, for no apparent reason. The grounds the palace sits
on, though, were spectacular. It's a few acres of meticulously tended
parkland, mostly forested with a few clearings and a handful of springs and
streams and bridges. There are a few clusters of statuary scattered across
the grounds, including one circle of the Greek pantheon that really
impressed me. Small arched bridges and private chapels just past fields with
tiny, frozen waterfalls made some of the best scenic backgrounds I've ever
seen, and a recent snowfall was the perfect touch.
March 8
Leaving on a night train, don't know when I'll be back again. Well,
actually, I'll be back after spring break. After a few days in Moscow, we'll
be flying to Hurghada, Egypt. I can't wait. Spent the night between
Petersburg and Moscow, an entirely and disappointingly uneventful trip. I
love the train stations. The interior halls are enormous caverns, bigger
than airplane hangers and lined with little shops and kiosks with huge busts
of Lenin in the center. Better than it sounds. The trains were much better
than the ones to and from Tallinn: not too hot, and no border checks to wake
us up in the middle of the night.
March 9
Got into Moscow fairly early, and we went to our hotel (Hotel Belgrade) for
breakfast. It was, I think, the worst food I've ever eaten. Truly abysmal.
Unfit for human consumption. Bleagh. The rooms were pleasant, but we made a
careful note to never, ever return to the cafeteria before we set out for
Red Square.
Overall, I'm definitely glad that I spent the semester in Petersburg, but I
certainly liked Red Square. It's a rectangular cobbled city square, lined by
St. Basil's cathedral, a museum opposite, GUM (an enormous shopping mall) on
one side and Lenin's tomb on the other. Lenin's tomb was open, so we had to
go through three layers of security - one to get into the square itself, one
to get into the tomb, and a final check inside the tomb from some very
attentive guards. There was less security at Sobchack's funeral, even with
all of the dignitaries attending. The mausoleum is actually fairly tasteful,
on the outside at least. The building is marble, I think, mostly black with
red trim and a huge sans serif "LENIN" above the door. There are stairs on
the outside leading to the roof; Red Square is lined with review stands and
benches for the old parades and holiday marches, and apparently the big
shots would attend on top of the crypt.
Inside, visitors go through a couple of short hallways, and then around and
in front of the big man himself. Our tour guide called him "Plastic
Fantastic Lenin," and it fits, except I think he looks more like Styrofoam.
He looks pretty artificial, regardless. He lies in state on a bier of
filigreed iron and crushed velvet, flanked by two iron spears with heads
worked into a hammer and sickle. It's impressive, but a little tacky. A lot
tacky. Definitely an interesting experience, though. We all disagreed on it;
some people thought it was respectful, some didn't, some thought he looked
peaceful and natural, and some thought, like me, that he looks like he was
stuffed like the birds in Psycho. We all agreed on one thing, though: it
would be really cool if he were animatronic and waved at tourists. Or chased
them.
On a serious note, there's a serious debate over what to do with him.
Removing him wouldn't be unprecedented, since Stalin was yanked from the
selfsame crypt after deStalinization, but there's just not that much anti-
Lenin sentiment around. It's hard to know what to do with the guy, I guess,
especially since he's such a tourist draw.
Afterwards, we went right behind the mausoleum where there is a small state
graveyard for heroes of the Soviet Union. Big Bill Haywood is there, which
was weird, and so is Yuri Gagarin. I was very excited to see his resting
place, but a little frustrated. He only has a small plaque to mark his grave
(which he may not even occupy, according to our guide), while Derzhinsky has
a marble bust and a prominent spot with the leaders of the USSR. Only
premiers and state figures who died in office are buried there, so Krushchev
is absent but Stalin has a big plot and, of course, big wreaths and floral
displays even in the dead of winter. It was disturbing to say the least.
The rest of the square is wonderful, though. Basil's is smaller than I
expected, but just as beautiful. The snow was fairly heavy, and I got some
great pictures of the cathedrals and museums through the fall. GUM was just
like any shopping mall, really, except one store had a display of an
enormous model of St. Basil's worked entirely in the medium of Legos,
complete with little Lego men sweeping snow from the cupolas. I was truly
moved. We also saw the statue of Marshall Zhukov, the general who chased the
Nazis out of Russia, and some other minor landmarks. After the excursions,
we went back to the hotel for a much-deserved nap and a quick nosh at
McDonald's, which was less interesting than one might expect. Dan, who
apparently is something of a fast food gourmand, was thrilled that the hot
apple pies in Russia are fried, and not baked. Personally, I thought they
tasted disgusting regardless, but hey, McDonald's is McDonald's the world
round.
We rode the metros for a while, saw some of the city (the old Soviet Foreign
Affairs building was spectacular. A huge, gothic skyscraper stamped with
hammers and sickles and spiked with ornate towers and annexes designed, in
Dallas' words, to tell people "This is not a place where your problems will
be solved. Go away.") and finally wound up in the TGI Friday's outside Red
Square for dinner. Nothing really remarkable about it, other than the fact
that we ate there every day that we were in Moscow. Not terribly native of
us, but it was good and relatively cheap and there were no beets or smetana-
intensive dishes anywhere on the menu.
March 10
Toured the Kremlin and the Armory today. The Kremlin tour was mostly a few
cathedrals and landmarks. The only really spectacular sight was the first
cathedral, which was covered on the inside with iconographic art. Literally
not a single inch of space was left blank, and the patchwork effect was as
interesting as it was beautiful. The Armory was a little more distinctive in
terms of history, though. It's a state museum that, despite its name, isn't
entirely devoted to military things. The first big exhibit was of courtly
dress in the tsarist period, and was built around a huge glass case showing
model after model wearing enormous embroidered and intricate dresses and
men's jackets that must have weighed a ton. One of Catherine's dresses had a
train four or five meters long. There were also displays of old arms and
armor, from swords and shields to muskets and mortars. The most interesting
exhibits were the diplomatic gifts, though. These are small but hideously
expensive works of art and cultural significance whose only purpose was to
be given to the ambassadors of foreign countries to show how powerful and
magnanimous the giver was. They still do it today, but with less style. The
British gave Russia a gold and marble lion three or four feet tall that must
have cost a sizable fortune, but are clearly outdistanced by Finland, which
gave one of the tsars a golden model of a castle the size of a writing desk
engraved with each individual brick and loophole. Conspicuous consumption,
indeed.
After the Armory we had free time again, and we wandered the city for a
while until we felt the need to eat. We found a good Chinese place, but as
we were about to order Dallas noticed that the numbers we had thought were
the portions measured in grams were actually the prices measured in rubles,
and way to expensive for our blood. So we beat a hasty and totally
undignified retreat to TGI Fridays, where the same waitress from the day
before took our orders and condescended to us in English. Afterwards, we
wandered over to look at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and wound up
throwing snowballs at each other for half an hour on the outskirts of Red
Square. It was a good sendoff to Russia for a while.
March 11
We were up early for our much-awaited pilgrimage towards the sun. Eight
there were, but only six sallied into the snow that day - Dan, Molly, Justin
(sans beard), Virginia, Michelle and myself all bundled up for the last time
in a while for the (supposedly) short trip to the airport. Megan was leaving
a few days after us; she hadn't come to Moscow since she was entertaining
her boyfriend in Petersburg and Claire, Justin's girlfriend, was flying from
her studies in Italy to meet us there.
We lugged our bags from the airport a block to the perehod (an underground
street crossing), another block to the metro, and through the "crotch
blaster" gates (Instead of turnstiles, the Moscow metro uses posts with
sensors in them - if you pass the sensors without slipping in a valid card,
barriers that seem timed and sized perfectly for slamming into some poor
bastard's crotch come shooting out. It's funny when it happens to someone
else.) down the escalator onto the trains and back out again and to another
line and back out again and up a few flights of stairs at Airport station.
We were tired and a little cranky by this point, but we had hours and we'd
been assured that it was only a few blocks to the airport from the Airport
metro station. Well, it was more than a few blocks, it was nearly a dozen.
We finally stumbled up to an "Aero Vokzal" ("Air Station") and were ready to
celebrate and/or collapse when Justin noticed that it wasn't even an
airport. I'm not sure what it was, since it definitely had something to do
with air travel, but we had to hire a couple of taxis from there to get us
to the real airport. There's nothing worse than a cab driver who knows
you're stuck. They wanted fifty dollars a cab to get us to the airport; by
contrast, I can get from my apartment on the island across town to Smolney
for about forty rubles, which is a little under two dollars. We haggled them
down to twenty-five a cab, but they wouldn't go lower and we didn't have
much of a choice. Megan told us later that if we'd gone to the right metro
stop, we could have taken a marshrutka for fifteen rubles a piece, a little
over fifty cents. Bleagh.
When we finally got to the real airport, we were almost late but not quite.
We got our tickets from the travel agent's representative, then settled in
for the long, long, long wait. The train stations were so well run and
efficient and clean and pleasant and spacious and convenient that I guess I
expected the airports to be a little less, well, insane. The Russian service
industry thrives on a kind of subtle yet monomaniacal misanthropy, and
Aeroflot is no exception. We waited in line for the first security check,
only to sail through the actual check by simply saying, "I have no money."
We waited in line for passport stamps (Although Justin entertained everyone
in line by having a truly bizarre argument in Russian with a five year old
in front of us. "You are a pair of pants!" "No, you are a soccer field!"
"Me? No, you are a horse!") We waited for the second security check. We did
a lot of waiting.
Once we finally got through it all, however, the inner airport was quite
nice. We picked up a few things at the duty free shop, including an enormous
three or four liter bottle of vodka that Justin dubbed "Captain Boris." (We
never finished the captain, since we didn't really drink that week -
somebody on the housekeeping staff at the hotel got a really nice tip.) The
airplane itself was another nice surprise. Aeroflot international flights
are definitely up to international standards. It was a little cramped, but
no more so than an American flight, and there was a definite lack of fire,
chaos, disease, or barnyard stock onboard in spite of all the stories I'd
heard. The flight was uneventful, but when we landed, all of the Russians
broke into applause. I guess it's a Russian thing.
Hurghada was wonderful from the very first moments. When we stepped off of
the plane, it was warm outside, but with a very pleasant cool breeze. They
loaded us onto a bus for a fifty-meter ride to the terminal, where we joined
a crowd of approximately every other person on Earth in a room the size of a
small lecture hall. A man from "QT Tours" met us, showed us where to stand
in line, and walked us through the rest of the normal airport stuff. QT
Tours is a subset of Vann Tours, which is a subset of Partners Arkos, the
company we got our tickets from. Or maybe they're subcontractors, I dunno.
All I do know is that it's odd for a company that specializes in giving
tours to Russians to call itself "QT Tours," since the letter "Q" doesn't
appear in the Cyrillic alphabet and Russians have kind of a hard time with
it. The larger group we were with was mostly Russians, business and mafia
types. Very few Americans or British ever come to Hurghada, since Western
carriers don't fly there. Many Germans and Russians, so we couldn't forget
our language studies even on vacation. Having an American passport was a
plus, though, since it got us waved through Customs without even a second
glance. They never even bothered to ask us if we had anything to declare.
When we finally finished in the airport, it was dark and downright chilly
outside. We walked to some busses that were supposed to take us to the
hotel, and had to fend off the most avaricious would-be porters I've ever
seen in my life. I was walking towards the rear, not really paying
attention, when I noticed that my bag was suddenly a hell of a lot lighter.
When I looked up, another guy was carrying one of the handles. He wasn't
trying to take it, really, just taking some of the load off. Still, living
in Russia makes one a little leery of strangers, so I pulled the bag back.
He rattled something off in Arabic, and actually started to try to pull the
bag away from me. When he realized that I spoke Russian (I use Russian with
strangers whenever possible, since I don't like standing out as an
American), he told me that it was his job to carry bags "without pay." I
didn't really believe him, but it took me a few minutes of tug-of-war to get
my bag back. It's just as well, since "without pay" is apparently Egyptian
confidence man cant for "without pay until we get there, at which point I
will shout abuse at you until you give me at least five dollars." That's
what happened to Michelle, but she's tough. She just shouted back until the
poor sod left her alone. Picked the wrong girl to pick on, I guess.
I did get taken for a ride, though. When we got to the busses and loaded our
bags, a man I thought was the driver walked up with a huge wad of money in
his hand and said, "Dengui pazhaluista," or "Money please" while pointing to
a ten dollar bill. I figured it was the fee for the bus - actually, he told
me it was the fee for the bus - so I paid up. I noticed Dan yelling at me,
but couldn't hear what he was saying, and the clever bastard just pointed at
him and then again at the money, telling me that I was supposed to pay for
Dan, too. Since he had paid for visas I owed him anyway, but fortunately he
stopped me before I gave that bastard more than another five. Of course he
had been shouting that the busses were free; I'd like to think that rather
than being stupid and getting robbed I paid fifteen dollars for a priceless
lesson, but I'll be damned if I can think of what that is. Don't give money
to strangers, I guess.
I can't say it worried me much - we were in Egypt, and that was all that
mattered. Egypt.
[The original of this document can be found at http://chaos.greeny.org/~yance/]
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copyright (c) MM Yancey Slide/GwD Publications :BRING THE NOIZE:
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