A Great Place To Get Lost In

A few nights ago I had a date with my ex here in Moscow, Nadya.

She had a couple of hours free, and we hadn't seen each other in over a month, so we agreed to meet.

In Moscow, that's easier said than done.

She told me to meet her at the Arbatskaya Metro station. That's down near the Kremlin.

YOU just try to find somebody in this mess.

But when you're dealing with the Moscow Metro, you have to factor in some variables. (1) Sometimes there are two stations with the same name, and (2) Just about every Metro station has more than one entrance and more than one exit.

Factor in a daily patronage of 10 million or so, and you have a formula for....well, not meeting.

In fairness to me, I was dubious about this arrangement. If I'm going to meet someone in Moscow, I prefer to take the guesswork out of it and meet them in a definite place whose location I know. Hence, I suggested that we meet on Kuznetski Most, specifically at a cafe called Kamchatka, which is right across the street from Цум (pronounced "Tsum") one of Moscow's largest and most well-known department stores.

But Nadya felt that meeting me there would be too time-consuming; she only had a couple of hours and Arbatskaya was closer to where she was working.

So she said, "Meet me at the Arbatskaya Metro. The one on the dark blue line." (There is another Arbatskaya Metro on the light blue line.) Well, okay. I know the difference between light blue and dark blue, and I can read a map, so I duly got myself to the dark blue Arbatskaya station, around 7:30 in the evening, as per our arrangement.

Then I had to negotiate the labyrinth of passageways that gets you to the sign reading Выход в город, "Exit to the city."

Well, if you give me any kind of choice of directions, I'll always go the wrong way. That's a given. Next thing I knew I was standing just outside the Kremlin wall, on a large square, with the ticket office for the Kremlin museums in front of me. No sign of Nadya anywhere. I got out my cellphone, but there was no point in trying to call her. Nadya is the most technology-challenged person I know. Worse than me even. She has a cellphone, but never carries it and refuses to use it. She also has a notebook computer, but again, never uses it. Never even powers it up. It just sits in her apartment collecting dust. If I want to get in touch with her, I have to call her old-fashioned land-line, and I knew she wasn't home. She was somewhere on the streets of Moscow, looking for me. But since she refuses to carry her cellphone, she could not call me up on mine and ask the $4 question "Where are you?"

Well, we never found each other. I walked around for about 30 minutes, then went back to my apartment. A couple of nights later, on the telephone, Nadya claimed testily that she had waited 45 minutes for me, then she, too, went home.

The lonely crowd. City of 12 million strangers. At least two of them lost. Unable to find each other. At least I had the excuse of being a relative newcomer; Nadya has lived here all her life.

Turn on your cellphone, girl. It's 2013.

And next time, we meet at Kamchatka, like I suggested.



 

You Ain't Lived Until You've Been Messed With By A Four-Year-Old

I've been teaching English to kids in Moscow now for slightly more than a month. My pupils have ranged in age from 18 months to eight years so far. Next week we plan to participate in a summer camp teaching program just south of the city where my students will range in age from 10 to 14.

One of our regular pupils is a little girl named Masha. Masha is four, and a very pretty little thing, which you understand immediately when you meet her mom, Oksana. Oksana is quite lovely, and actually her husband Roman, Masha's dad, is a good-looking chap as well. Masha got lucky in her gene pool. They're also very nice people. I don't know what business Masha's dad is in, but her mother runs an art gallery. My boss Robert and I attended an exhibition at her gallery last week. Robert's wife Irina joined us. We looked at the pictures, mingled, sipped wine and listened to the speechifying, which was lost on me because I don't understand Russian, but that's all right.

Robert has tutorial sessions with Masha four times a week, and he usually brings me along for two of them. I'm the unofficial "arts and crafts" guy among our group of teachers owing to nothing more than the fact that I've done a little bit of painting in my time. Masha and I paint watercolors together. Today we painted a pink castle and made a complete, total mess of it. But when I asked Masha what she wanted to paint, she said "a castle," so a castle it was. And any time you ask Masha what color she wants something to be, she'll always say "pink." So a pink castle it was, and as I say, a mess.

My teaching tools.

So the idea is partly to have me do watercolor painting with Masha and encourage her to discuss her painting in English. The other half of the equation is, I don't speak Russian. Robert does,so Masha knows she can talk to him in Russian, and she does. But the idea is to get her to speak English, so Robert brings me along in the hope that Masha will realize I don't speak Russian and talk to me in English.

So far it hasn't worked very well. Masha has found a compromise: not talking at all. Well, let's just say that getting her to talk English is like trying to coax a cat out of a tree. This is kind of a shame because she actually knows quite a lot, and her brother Kolya, a few years older, speaks English quite well. Robert has been working with both of them for about a year.

Masha and I are getting used to each other. She likes Robert a lot because she has fun with him. They laugh and play and watch videos. I'm the art teacher, and I think until now Masha has regarded me as too serious, and besides, she's four and has a four year-old's attention span. She is going to find painting entertaining for about five minutes, then want to go do something else.

But our lessons are two hours long, and I've been charged with filling up the first half of the lesson. So Masha and I have been devoting a full hour to painting, which doesn't really work too well. After a conference with Robert, I decided to try a different plan of action today. When Masha and I were done making our pink castle mess, instead of asking if she wanted to do another painting, I asked if she wanted to watch a video on her iPad.

I didn't have to ask twice: she LOVES watching videos on her iPad, as do all kids and a dismaying number of adults I've seen lately, including one guy who was in a rowboat in a park with his girlfriend. She was rowing the boat and he was sitting in the stern playing with his iPad. Tell me chivalry isn't dead.

This thing's not a tool,
it's a life saver.

So Masha got her wish. We put the paints and brushes aside and she watched some videos: "Gogo," the little cartoon character who teaches English in a somewhat annoying (if you ask me) British accent; a Disney video about the weather; a couple of phonics programs and a game or two, including one in which Masha has to place each animal she sees in its proper place in the picture. If she puts it in the wrong place, a rabbit pops up and says "Uh-uh." If she puts it in the right place, another rabbit pops up and blows a trumpet.

In one of our early lessons I was painting geometric shapes in watercolor and teaching Masha their names and colors: "yellow square," "pink square," "green square," "purple triangle."

That last turned out to be a tactical error on my part. Masha decided that she really likes the sound of these two English words together: "purple triangle." She likes to say it: "Purple triangle!" In fact she likes to say it SO much that when she starts to get tired, or wants to let me know that she's done painting for the day and wants to watch Gogo, she resorts to the "purple triangle" defense.

I'll point to the yellow sun. "What is it, Masha?"

Well, at least it isn't purple.

"Purple triangle!"

I'll point to the green grass. "What is it, Masha?"

"Purple triangle!" she laughs

I'll point to the blue sky. "Masha, what is it?"

"PURPLE TRIANGLE!" by now she's in hysterics, she thinks this is so funny.

That's when it's time to get Robert back in the room. He knows what Masha likes. They skip rope, they play ball; Masha talks Russian to Robert despite repeated reminders that these lessons are for speaking English.

I guess I'll just stay over here in my corner and paint ... an orange triangle.

Masha likes orange almost as much as she likes pink. She only likes to SAY "purple."

Take The Long Name Home

Here in Moscow, who you are is where you live. The city is so big that when you tell someone where you live, you give them an area rather than an address. No one seems really to know what street they live on, and it wouldn't really matter if they did, because there are so many streets, and the street signs are usually in such an advanced state of disrepair, that a street address wouldn't be recognized anyway. I seem to live on Ул. Черногрязская, "Chernograskaya Street," but I wouldn't bother telling anybody that. It wouldn't mean much.



Home sweet home.

No, Moscow is parsed by its subway system, the famous Moscow Metro. The Metro forms a sort of grid over the city, and since millions of Muscovites -- and ex-pats, and visitors -- use the Metro every day, its map has become a standard frame of reference. Your Metro station defines where you live. "Where's the nearest Metro?" is a routine question here, whether you're talking about getting to someone's apartment, or to an office, a store, a park, a restaurant, a theater, a concert or a crime scene. I teach a class of children every Saturday. It's "Take the purple line to the ring line, get off at Octoberskaya, turn right where you see the big statue of Lenin (which faces Burger King), and go around the corner." It's the way we do things here.

So wouldn't you know it ... "My" Metro station, the one I use to tell people where I live, would have to be the one that's the biggest mouthful? Yeah. "My" Metro station has the longest name of any station in the city. And I had to memorize it, with my piss-poor Russian, no less.

I live about ten minutes' walk from the Metro station which is located on the street which commemorates the 1905 revolution in Russia. Yes, I know everyone identifies 1917 with the Russian revolution, but a dozen years earlier there was a dress-rehearsal for it which, if you want to know the details, go to Wikipedia. I studied 20th-century Russian history when I was a college student and I still don't understand the details of the 1905 revolution. But the Soviets thought it was a big enough deal to put up a statue and name a street after it. Both are still there, the statue and the street. And now, in addition, there's me.

Okay. So "My" Metro station is Ул. 1905 Года. In English that's "Year 1905 Street." Doesn't sound too bad, does it?


Try it in Russian.

Cleaning up the neighborhood statue, which by the way
helps you find the Metro station: "Which side of the statue do
you want to come in on?"

The problem is the "gnarliness" of counting in Russian. Most Russian numbers between ten ("desat') and one hundred ("sto") are polysyllabic. "Eighteen," for example, is "vosemnadsat." English:two syllables; Russian: four. "Fifty-four" is pyatdesat'-chetiri. English: three syllables; Russian: six. And from there it just piles up. To say "Nineteen-o-five" sounds simple enough. But in Russian "Nineteen-o-five" is t'isicha devatsot pyat. The Russian word for "street" is ulitsa, and the word for year is god (pronounced "gode.") Now, once you have tacked on the word endings which the Russian language's case system requires to account for concepts such as "of" and "for," the Metro station's official name is Ultisa t'isicha devatsot pyatovo goda. That's fourteen syllables, folks, longer than a line in a sonnet. Try saying it a few times. Believe me, it takes practice.

And you have to learn it. Because everyone on earth counts in their first language. That's a law of nature. If you want to find out what someone's first language is, ask them to add up a column of numbers. Asked to do simple arithmetic, a person will always revert to the language in which he or she is most comfortable. I'll give you an illustration: years ago my Russian friend Anya came to visit me at my then-home in Germany. It was my birthday, and she was putting candles on my birthday cake. I listened as she counted under her breath: "Raz, dva, tri, chet'iri, pyat, shest, sem..." and so on. She speaks excellent English, but when it was time to count, she did it in Russian, her native tongue or "L1," as we call it in the teaching-English-as-a-second-language business.

My point is, there's no point in saying "Nineteen-o-five" to most Russians. Unless their English is very good, they'll look at you like you just got off the interplanetary space bus from the Planet Mongo.

So I've had to learn how to say Ulitsati'sichadevatsotpyatovogoda, and make it come trippingly off the tongue, like Shakespeare.

It's actually not that hard. Just don't try it after two or three shots of vodka. 

What A Drag It Is Getting Old

Okay, for everyone out there under the age of 50, this blog posting takes its title from an old song by the Rolling Stones, Mother's Little Helper (1966.)

Sigh...Yeah, I was young once.

In an earlier posting I described what it was like to return to Moscow after an absence of many years. It was 20 years ago this week that I saw Moscow for the first time, 15 years since I was last here. Much has changed in the intervening years, both with Moscow and with me. Gazing upon Red Square for the first time in 15 years, about four weeks ago, I wrote, "Memory is a lonely place."

Indeed it is. The 1993 version of Moscow isn't here anymore, nor, as I noted, is the 1993 version of me. At 37 I still had a lingering touch of the romantic in me, was still capable of tasting "the wine of astonishment." At 57 I'm afraid I've become jaded to almost everything. And cynicism may be a lot of laughs, but it isn't much fun. I kind of miss 37 year-old me. You know the old Frank Sinatra song, I Wish I Were In Love Again? I know that song's sentiment very well. Now.

And before I get to my real subject, let me toss a bone to all of you conspiracy buffs out there: I suspect that there is a "stealth" takeover of Moscow going on ... by the Japanese.

Evidence: the once-merely-occasional request that you remove your shoes upon entering a Russian apartment is now universal. When I was working at the U.S. embassy here 20 years ago, you only removed your shoes upon entering someone's home during the winter. That made perfect sense, seeing as how winters here are a matter of ubiquitous snow and slush, and who wants that stuff tracked all over their carpets? Russian friends whom I would invite for dinner would often bring their carpet slippers along, shuck their snow boots at the door and slip into their slippers for their visit, a custom I found both homey and charming.

But now everyone expects you to do it, and year-round, not just in winter. When I go to teach a student, I always have to remove my shoes upon entering their home. Even in spring. I don't mind especially, but I usually forget to bring my own carpet slippers, and when my hosts offer me a pair, they're always too small.

Now, the universal removing-of-shoes upon entering a home is a custom most of us associate with Japan. Why is it now also a universal custom in Moscow? Could it be that those sneaky Japanese are "Nipponizing" the poor Russians?

And that's not all my evidence. When I was here in 1993-94, you seldom if ever saw such a thing as a Japanese restaurant on the streets of Moscow. Now they're everywhere. It seems like everywhere I turn these days, I see a sign that says,"японский ресторан" -- "Japanese restaurant."

If my conspiracy theory is correct, it truly IS a stealth operation, because I have yet to see a Japanese person here. They're invisible. Koreans, yes: two of the children to whom I teach English are Korean. But I haven't seen any Korean restaurants here; the main evidence of Asian cuisine in Moscow comes from Japan.

Wonder why???

All right, now that I've gotten that out of the way, back to my main subject, which is how drastically things have changed around this town in the past two decades.

I grew up during the Cold War, when we were programmed to think of the Russians as The Communist Enemy, and they were programmed to think exactly the same of us: The Capitalist Enemy. But as I look around the streets, the Metro trains and the buses of Moscow today, it occurs to me that now you probably wouldn't find a single Russian citizen under the age of 30 who even remembers the Communists.

Let's pretend you're a Russian man or woman born in 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet premier (and also the year I turned 30.) This would mean that during the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when eastern Europe jettisoned Soviet-style socialism, you were only four. When the Soviet Union shut down and went out of business in 1991, you were six. When Communist dimwit Gennady Zyuganov ran for president of Russia in 1996, promising to bring back the USSR and glorious Soviet Power (he lost the election), you were eleven. And when Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, you were still only 15.

So here it is 2013. You're 28 now, and you have no memory of commissars, the KGB, Komsomol, the GULAG, Radio Moscow, Lenin's image everywhere, mile-long lines to buy toilet paper, western radio prohibited, only two newspapers for sale anywhere, (both of them government-controlled) or any of the rest of that fun stuff. Just about the only vestige of Soviet pomp and circumstance that still remains is the annual May 9 parade in Red Square, with its promenade of missiles and tanks. But its intent now is to celebrate the national victory over Hitler in 1945, not so much to strut the spectacle of Soviet power, which isn't there any more because the Soviets aren't there any more.

From the point of view of an American who was raised to regard Soviet Socialism as the most evil thing on the planet, I suppose this is a good thing. In 1993 we feared a communist revanche and we took guys like Zyuganov seriously. The only people in Russia dreaming of a communist revanche any more are those with loose sphincters, bad eyesight and failing memories. Soviet nostalgia was a very real thing during the Wild West days of the Boris Yeltsin period, with the implosion of the USSR still fresh in everyone's memory and economic chaos rife throughout the land. But that's history now. I doubt that you would find very many 30-year-old Russians lining up to vote for a boob like Zyuganov, whose promise was to restore the glorious Brezhnev years, which even Russians used to refer to as "the period of stagnation."

Which brings me to my REAL point. I do kind of feel sorry for elderly Russians who would like to see Brezhnev pulled out of the grave and placed back on his throne. Because in a way I do understand how they feel. In one of his "Lake Wobegon" monologues years ago, Garrison Keillor noted the similar phenomenon of elderly Minnesotans who migrated from Norway in their youth and remember Norway as heaven because "Norway was where they were young and healthy. Minnesota is where they're sick and old." The USSR was where many elderly Russians were young and healthy; Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation is where they're sick and old. And sometimes poor -- the Soviet collapse of 1991 wiped out many people's pensions.

But I feel my own version of this. And it is a drag, looking around at what I see and thinking the thoughts I cannot avoid. Specifically this: my ex-girlfriend here in Moscow, Nadya, told me many years ago how young Russians in her youth routinely learned the art of kissing on the Metro escalators. Nadya herself did her share of it when she was a kid, (some of it with my old pal Sasha, whom I have not been able to smoke out of hiding in a full month here.) Naturally, after Nadya told me that story, I took note of the youngsters I would see smooching all over the place here in the city: on the Metro, in the parks, sometimes on street corners. Swapping spit on the Metro is a time-honored Muscovite tradition; it hearkens back to the days when apartments were scarce here, people lived with their parents as long as they do in America now, and young people had no place to go for privacy. So they got frisky in public. Ah, youth.

But it makes me sad for highly personal reasons to look around 2013 Moscow, see the public canoodling still going on and think that most melancholy of thoughts, that when I first arrived here twenty springs ago, many, perhaps most of these young lovers I see kissing on the Metro were not yet born.

Not yet born, think of it.

Memory is a lonely place.

What a drag it is getting old.  

Moscow Is For The Birds

I like watching the pigeons here in Moscow. And it's a good thing, because they are as ubiquitous around here as pictures of Lenin used to be.

...It's their town..

I like watching pigeons walk around. It's like watching amateurs in a play. They walk, you know, pigeon-toed, which is why we don't call it "hummingbird-toed." They bob their heads when they walk, and change direction with no purpose. You wonder what they're looking at.

But you know what they're looking for. Bread crumbs. And there is seldom any shortage of these, because a lot of people in this city seem to share my liking for pigeons, even as they deride the poor birds with their familiar opprobrium: "Oh, they're just flying rats." How often have I heard that one? And it's a damned canard if you ask me. Rats give most people, including myself, the creeps. They run fast and they're sneaky. They hide. They surprise you with their sudden presence, appearing out of nowhere and then dashing back into hiding.

You have to admit that pigeons are not sneaky. Quite the contrary.  They're as bold as brass. Most birds are skittish and fly away at the approach of humans or other animals. Pigeons just keep on walking around right in front of you, as if to say, "This is MY sidewalk. I'll let you use it for now, but don't get any ideas." Rats? In that respect they're more like cats.

And this is surely because, while pigeons are not rats, they are bums. Shameless. They know which side their breadcrumbs are buttered on. People toss breadcrumbs to the pigeons all the time, and the pigeons expect it. We have real bread here, you know, the kind that doesn't have a shelf-life of 3.4 years. The local bread runs the gamut from freshly-baked white to my favorite, the dark brown Ukrainian stuff that's so solid, if you threw a loaf of it at somebody you might hurt them. Very tough to get a knife through, but it's worth the effort. Once you manage to get a slice of this stuff, then you moosh a little smoked fish on it with a fork, or maybe some pate and a couple of pickled mushrooms, and believe me, that's eatin'.

But because most of the bread here isn't loaded with preservatives, it gets stale quickly, which is good for the pigeons because once bread gets stale people don't usually want to eat it. So they feed it to the pigeons. Pigeons aren't choosy. I have seen them snacking on sidewalk bread crusts and then washing the meal down with water from a nearby rain puddle.

Pigeons are remarkably democratic, by which I mean they're not snobs when it comes to choosing what they'll shit on. Statues, sidewalks, cars, you...they don't care. A couple of Sundays ago I was strolling through an extremely high-end shopping mall down near the city center. Parked in front of one of the tony shops there was a bright red Ferrari. Ferraris can be seen here, usually bright red and sometimes tearing along the streets down near the Moscow River as if the rich guy at the wheel were trying qualify for the Grand Prix of Monaco. Actually, the rich guy at the wheel is unconcerned about the consequences of speeding along in his red Ferrari, because the rich guys here are SO rich that if they get nailed for speeding, the few thousand rubles' fine is chump change to them. They just pay the cop and drive on.

Anyway, you can probably guess what's coming. I paused to inspect this awesome piece of machinery; I seldom get that close to a red Ferrari -- I just watch them whoosh past. It was a thing of beauty all right...except for the dab of pigeon shit on the passenger-side door.

You also occasionally see Lamborghinis here, as well as Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and whatnot. Beemers and Mercedes (Mercedeses?) are so common they aren't worth mentioning. The "prestige" vehicle in Moscow, twenty years ago when I first arrived here, was the Jeep Cherokee. I haven't asked if those vehicles still maintain anything of their old cache, but I am certain of this: the pigeons don't care.

There is another kid of bird here in Moscow of which I'm much less fond. I suspect these birds are a species of crow, and they are obnoxious. They're gray, not black as you might think of crows, and they're larger than most crows, although this last may be merely an illusion based on their obnoxiousness. When I was here in the 1990s we called them "Mili birds," and no, I don't know where they got that appelation.

These guys, on the other hand, are just garden-variety pests.

These crows -- mili birds, if you will -- have a peculiarly loud, abrasive CAW that they tend to enjoy exercising usually when you're trying to sleep. You know, like at dawn. They haunt the parks; I would imagine that many a weekend tryst in the park by young muscovite lovers has been marred by the squawks of these aerial pests.

And the thing about mili birds is, they're year-round. Just as the pigeons are indiscriminate regarding where they defecate, these crows are impervious to the Russian winter. They do not fly south when it turns cold. They hang around and go right on squawking. All winter long. We used to get so exasperated with these damn birds that we'd talk about getting a shotgun and doing a few of them in just to make them shut up. It wouldn't have worked, of course; their surviving lodge brothers would merely caw all the louder. During a discussion of these disagreeable birds, a colleague of mine made a disgusting comment about "mili bird pie."

Yeah, right. In other words, eating crow. And they'd be just the ones to make you do it, too. But not me. I'll just get up and close the window (cursing, probably.) As long as there's plenty of that good Ukrainian brown bread around town, I don't plan to get that hungry. You can bet the pigeons don't either.





 

Locked Out In Moscow

This is a place you don't want to be: locked out in Moscow.

Not unless you have somewhere else to go. And last Friday, I really didn't.

And it's spring. Can you imagine what might have resulted if this had happened in January?

Okay, for the time being, no more about the weather in Moscow. It's spring, it's warm, you know that. I've spent my last three blog postings talking about it.

Lucky girl. I didn't even have a bench.

Well...I'm sharing a two-room flat with a young couple. The guy is an American, and his name is Dan Mitchell. He's not really a man, but more of a fat, whining, miserable old woman. Dan Mitchell. He's from Florida, and he is very, very fat. He eats too much, and he reads nothing but comic books. Why this big, fat, ignorant slob is teaching English is beyond me. How he found a girlfriend of any kind, much less Russian, is also beyond me. But he lives with his Russian girlfriend, and for the moment, I'm sleeping on their sofa. I think we're going to be moving to a larger place later, where I can have my own room. For the moment I'm sleeping on the sofa. It's okay. It's comfortable. It's actually more comfortable than the sofa at my sister's place back in California. It's just a sofa, not a spring-loaded hide-a-bed, so I'm not sleeping with metal bars against my back. It's okay. Really.

My problem with this apartment is not its small size, nor is it the fact that I'm sleeping in the sitting room and the three of us are sharing a kitchen the size of two broom closets back-to-back.

No. My problem is the front door.

That damned front door.

I really envy our next-door neighbor in this building. He just got a few front door, with new locks. Lucky stiff. Because the problem with the door on our apartment is the locks. They're old, they're grumpy and sometimes they won't open. When I arrived here last month, my new boss, Robert, brought me here himself and then ... I sat on my luggage in the stairwell for a good 25 minutes while he struggled to get the door open. My roommate had had a new key made, and the lock didn't like that key. Robert did finally get the door open, but it was a taste of things to come.

Which brings us to last Friday. my roommate had classes to teach and he also had to take Alissa to the airport -- she went to London for a few days. So he was gone for a long time -- all day and most of the night. And that's where I got into trouble.

Around midafternoon I went to the local produkti -- the Russian version of a convenience store -- to buy a couple of things. When I returned to the apartment, the lock on the door would not open. It would not respond to my key, in fact I couldn't even get the key all the way inserted. I tried and tried, shook the door, rattled the key...no dice. This key was not going in and this door was not going to open. Nyet.

Locked out. What to do? I had no idea when my roommate would return.

Well ... I decided to "go downtown," meaning down to Kuznetski Most, right around the corner from the Bolshoi Theater, where there are lots of cafes, shops, restaurants and such. I thought I would just kill some time until Dan returned. You know, sit in a cafe. It's been done.

There's a little place down there called Kamchatka. It's right across the street from цум, the big department store. I like this cafe because of its location and also because there's a toilet downstairs which they don't care if you use, even if you're not a customer. But I was a customer on Friday; I bought a glass of beer and sat down outside.

Presently a young Russian guy came along and seated himself at my table, all of the others being full. His name turned out to be "Slava," and he spoke pretty good English. We started chatting, drank some more beer, and a little later his wife Elena, who works over at цум, joined us. Elena speaks no English, but Slava didn't mind playing interpreter, and we all got along fine. In fact I have some new friends -- last Sunday we all got together and spent the afternoon in a park.

So I sat there with Slava and Elena for a while, then excused myself to come back to the apartment and either (a) Finally get that door open, or (b) wait for Dan to come back.

In truth neither eventuality was forthcoming. The door still would not open, and there was no sign of my roommate. I had a newspaper with me, a copy of the English-language Moscow Times. But I had neither my glasses, nor my cellphone, nor my watch. All were locked in the apartment. I can't read without my glasses, I can't call for help without a cellphone and I can't tell time without a watch.

In other words I was, as my older sister would say, "Eff'ed." (Carla won't say "fuck" unless she's mad at me, and I've warned her about it.)

Well...this is the kind of situation for which they created vodka. If you're going to have to sleep on the ground, or the stoop, using your shoes as a pillow, booze is your friend, and I don't want to hear any moralizing about it.

I went back to the produkti and bought a small bottle of Staraya Marka. I then proceeded to sit on the damned stoop and slowly consume most of it.

The next thing I knew it was 3:30 a.m. and here came my roommate (at last).

"I'm locked out," I said, boozily.

Dan got the door open. Yeah, his key works. Thank God for small favors.

I spent most of the next day sleeping. On the sofa, not the stoop.

But you know, for some reason....I just don't trust that door.










 

Falling Down and Other Fun Stuff

I suspected as much.

I went to Google Translate this morning to see if the Russian language has an equivalent to the English word "yield." Google Translate gave me "выход," which even a dummy like myself recognizes from the Moscow Metro.

It means "Exit."

If Google Translate is to be believed, Russians don't "yield," they just "exit."

This group has nothing on the Moscow Metro crowd
during rush hour.

I'll sign on with that one.

There is one operative principle here in Moscow: "Me first! Get out of my way!" Every time I walk out on to the street and see the bumper-to-bumper honking madness out there, I'm glad that I have finally attained my life's goal of living in a city where I don't have to own a car.

When I first came to Moscow in 1993, I brought a car with me. It was a 1985 Dodge Aries that I had bought in Africa from another American. I didn't want to bring it with me; I'd planned to sell it before leaving Abidjan, where I had been working, and come to Moscow auto-free. But a deal to sell the car in Abidjan fell through, and I had no choice but to have it shipped to Russia. I worked for the U.S. State Department at the time, so this was no problem: the U.S. government paid for the shipping.

But there was no way I was going to drive that thing in Moscow. Forget it. My mother didn't raise no suicides. The damn car sat in the garage at the U.S. embassy for a few months until I finally was able to sell it. For the time that I lived here back then, it was the Metro or taxicabs for me. No driving. Not in Moscow.

But even in the Metro you're not entirely safe.

I should have remembered this. But there is so much I have forgotten in the years since I was last here. Many of the few words of Russian that I used to know have escaped me. I did, however, retain a memory of being on the Moscow Metro during rush hour and finding it so crowded that I could practically lift my feet off the floor and just let the crowd carry me through the station.

So it was that much stupider, what I allowed to happen to me last Monday.

A colleague, (with whom I'm bunking at the moment) and I were on our way back from teaching a kindergarten English class. Neither of us drives, so naturally we were on the Metro. We had to get from the Blue Line to the Purple Line, which meant making a change of trains midway. (One of the first Russian words you learn as a Moscow Metro patron is the word for "transfer." In English it sounds like "perry-hoad.")

It was about 5:00 p.m., the worst time to be on the Metro. Moscow has roughly 12 million residents, and at 5 p.m on any given day, 11 million of them are on the Metro.

I'll take the cattle stampede, thank you. They're more polite.

So my roommate and I were doing the "perry-hoad" bit, trying to make our way from one train platform to the next. I had my backpack on. It was hot in there. A million bodies generate a lot of heat. And most of them were all around us.

I turned my head to say something to my roommate. Mistake. Some Russian guy who was in a BIG hurry went shoving past me on my left. I didn't see him coming because I was looking the other way, and I literally tripped over this jerk. Tripped over him. My feet went bye-bye and I went down, backpack and all. Next thing I knew I was lying on the station floor.

Feeling stupid for allowing this to happen to myself, (after all, I am not a completely inexperienced Moscow Metro rider) I just lay there for a moment, looking up at the stampede, my chin on my hand. My thought was, "I think I'll just lie here until the first snowfall comes and covers me up."

In fact, I had slightly twisted my ankle. My roommate offered to help me up. A policeman noticed me not getting up right away and came over to see if something was wrong. No, nothing was seriously wrong: it was just me feeling stupid for letting myself get knocked down like that. I got up after a few moments, dusted myself off and limped on.

"You should have remembered that," my roommate said.

"I know, I know."

As for the Russian jerk I tripped over, he didn't even look back. He was in too big a hurry.

At that hour of the day in Moscow, everybody is.

The Heat In Moscow? Well, yeah...

As a Sunday-afternoon poet when the spirit is on me, I've been interested in poetry all my life, and consequently have read a lot of it. With my lifelong interest in Russia, it goes without saying that I have read a great deal of Russian poetry (in translation, of course) and have become familiar with some of Russia's famous poets.

Muscovites doing the old jump-in-the-fountain bit.

Many years ago, oh, when I was in college I guess, a copy of a book called From Desire To Desire by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko fell into my hands. (I have no idea what its title in Russian was.) The poems were mainly about love, every poet's favorite subject, but one that leaped out at me in particular was a poem entitled The Heat In Rome. Evidently Yevtushenko found himself in Rome during the summer. (I've always wanted to visit Rome, but NOT during the summer.)

In this poem, Yevtushenko rhapsodizes about how miserable Rome is in summertime, the heat and humidity of the city eventually prompting him to imagine a mass striptease, with everyone jumping naked into the Po River. Yevtushenko was born in a spot called Zima Junction, in Siberia. "Zima" means "winter" in Russian, and I can just imagine, with his background, how violently Yevgeny Yevtushenko's constitution must have reacted to "the heat in Rome."

I know how he feels. Only I'm not in Rome. I'm in Moscow.

Moscow? Yes. There is a widely-held perception in the west that the former Soviet Union is cold all the time. When I arrived in Kiev, Ukraine three weeks ago on my way to Moscow, my friends on Facebook were all asking me if it was cold there. In point of fact, it was not. It's springtime, and even the former USSR can get quite warm in spring. In summer it's worse. Really. Read your Tolstoy. There are scenes in both War & Peace and The Cossacks where the soldiers are plagued by heat and mosquitoes. It happens here, believe me, despite the fact that most Americans can not envision Moscow as anything but buried in snow. In all honesty, Moscow is buried in snow for nearly six months of the year. But for the rest of the year ... well, just make sure you have some shorts, some T-shirts and some sunscreen available. You might need them. Moscow has very long days in the late spring and early summer, and when you're looking at 20 hours of sunlight, you just might be looking at 20 hours of sun.

It was has been uncomfortably warm in Moscow this week. I know, I'm here. The heat isn't unbearable by itself -- it's not 90 degrees (yet.) The problem is, it's sultry. Moscow's humidity isn't as bad as that of New Orleans, Birmingham, AL, or Washington, D.C. but it's higher than that of, say, San Diego, where I come from.

Yesterday I had to get out to the suburbs to have a tutorial session with one of my children here. (I teach English.) On the Metro, I noticed myself doing the same thing with my Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap that I used to do with it when I lived in southeastern China, where it's even hotter and more humid than it is here: taking it off and wiping the sweat off my head with it. I stopped on the way to my young pupil's apartment to slam down a bottle Schweppes' Bitter Lemon, asked my pupil's mother for a glass of water when I reached the apartment, refilled my water glass during our lesson, and then stopped on the way home for more water.

It's warm here. Guys are going around in shorts; gals in their lightest summer dresses (or their tightest jeans.)  T-shirts and sandals are in evidence everywhere.

Trying to cool off, Moscow style. 

 

Now, I know I shouldn't complain. Because in about five months we're going to be looking at the opposite situation: COLD, everyone bundled up, cursing the snow and the slush. That's the Moscow familiar to my compatriots back home from television and movies. And yes, it's real. I have lived through a Moscow winter once before, and expect that my next one will be worse, because as mentioned on this page before, I'm living here now as an ex-pat American, subject to all of the same inconveniences as the locals. Before, I worked for (and lived at) the American embassy, where the comfort levels were much higher.

 

But I have this one thing going for me. Like young Yevtushenko's, (he's 79 now and living in Oklahoma, where it also gets both hot and cold) my genes are attuned to cold weather. My ancestors on my father's side were French Canadian, and hot weather has always driven me crazy. My dad once accused me of being "part Eskimo," so strong was my objection to being in hot places. And yes, I have often stated that my least favorite human activity is sweating.

 

But I'm doing my share of it now, believe it or not, right here in the shadow of the Kremlin.  

 

And it's not even summer yet.

 



 

Rites of Spring

Or..."The Coronation of Spring," or, I don't know,  "Коронация весной," but in any case, Russian spring, which is like almost no other spring that I've ever seen.

Russian spring is legendary. It comes on with a crash. Winter lasts six months here in Russia. The first snow usually falls in October, the last at some time in April.

Moscow in May...Just a nice, bright day

But when it's spring, you know it.

And it's spring.

The sun shines nearly 18 hours a day, high in the sky. At 5:30 a.m. it's broad daylight. At 9:00 p.m. it's still broad daylight. This will get even better later on. I know, I've been here in the spring and summer before. It takes on an unreal quality, this Moscow equinoctal-solsticial light. Many years ago when I worked at the American embassy here in Moscow, I remember leaving my office at midnight in July, and there was still twilight lingering.

I was in Yaroslavl years ago, one early June night with my Russian friend Nadya. Yaroslavl is about 200 miles northeast of Moscow, on the Volga River. We stayed with relatives of hers that night. After supper, around 10:30 p.m., we all went for a walk along the river. 10:30 p.m. and it was still afternoon.

Everyone began petering out shortly after midnight. It was more-or-less dark by one a.m. I fell asleep.

But I awoke 90 minutes later. It was 2:30 a.m. and the sky was already blue again.

Now, I have not seen St. Petersburg's legendary White Nights, those few days before, during and after the summer solstice when it doesn't get dark at all. Around midnight, they say, the sun dips below the horizon, then comes back up again. 24 hours of daylight.

I'm going to see it this time around. It's a promise I've made to myself.

Spring rituals in Moscow. I went out to the store the other day, and on my way spied a guy who had obviously fallen off his bicycle and was being questioned by a couple of cops. "Drunken cyclist hits tree," I thought. Why not? Public drunkenness is the Russian version of baseball.

But nobody's riding bikes in the winter. Not here. You can't. Come spring, bikes are in evidence everywhere. Just this afternoon I was walking back to the Metro after visiting a cafe down near Kuznetski Most. I encountered a girl with a big, balloon-tired Schwinn. Such bicycles are regaining popularity after decades of road-and-mountain-bike supremacy: people want comfort again (and my generation is getting older; we NEED comfort again if we're going to cycle.)

I asked her where she got the bike. Oh, she bought it in Moscow, but neither of us had a pen or pencil so she couldn't write down the place. She merely advised me to go online and Google "Buy a bicycle in Moscow."

I bought a bicycle in China last year. It was stolen in China, even though I had it locked. Before I buy a bicycle here, I'm going to make damn sure I have a safe place to keep it.

Who knows but that some of these guys might have been
among the crowd we watched race past as we sailed up
the Moscow River on a tour boat?

Speaking of bicycles, my boss here in Moscow, Robert Dingwall, took me along with his family on a boat ride along the Moscow River last Friday. Although I have lived in Moscow before, it was the first time I'd ever done the boat-tour thing. As we cruised along enjoying the scenery from the river, which included Red Square, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and who knows how many other Muscovian visual delights, we also saw...a bicycle race. Yep, a fast-moving peloton was racing up and down along the banks of the river. You had to look fast or you'd miss it.  Even the stragglers were moving along at a pretty good clip.

Today was very warm here, by Moscow standards. All last weekend we saw nothing but gray skies, chill and drizzle. But Moscow in the spring will surprise you: after a string of dismal days, all of a sudden the sun will come out and it's dreamland...everything looks like it's in technicolor. I could not stay indoors on such a fine day. I got on the Metro and went back down to Kuznetski Most, one of my favorite Moscow neighborhoods. It's a short walk from K.M. to Red Square, but Red Square was closed today. Tomorrow, May 9, is Russia's biggest holiday: Victory Day. It was on May 9, 1945 that Germany surrendered to the Allies and World War II came to an end. Russia celebrates every May 9 with a huge parade on Red Square. No doubt that's why no one was being allowed down there this afternoon--they were getting ready for the big parade tomorrow.

No matter. I know what Red Square looks like. So I sauntered back up to Kuznetski Most, shucking my denim jacket because it was too warm for it, sat down in a cafe, had a cold beer and thought, damn, isn't it wonderful to experience another Russian spring? At my age, no less.

My age. Who cares? Spring is rejuvenating, as anyone who lives this far north will tell you. Na z'dorovye!

More to come...

 

Return Of The Prodigal Son

MOSCOW--If you go to the website of The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper that's been publishing in Russia's capital now for slightly more than 20 years, you will see a link which will take you to a list of stories that the newspaper has covered in the past two decades.


May, 2013. Moscow is building a skyline. I think it looks
like Rosslyn, Virginia, but that's just me.

Here is a story that the Moscow Times will NOT be covering: the 23rd of this month will mark exactly 20 years since I, Kelley Dupuis, set foot in Moscow for the first time.

May 23, 1993. It was a Sunday. It was a different Russia, different from before, and certainly different from now. And I was a different Kelley. I was here at that time as a minor employee of the American embassy. I was under its, and the U.S. State Department's protection. Not now. I'm here as a private citizen, an English teacher. Just another happy ex-pat. Ever since I first read Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast when I was 16, I've wanted to be an ex-pat. This is my big chance. Hemingway had post-World War I Paris. I have post-Cold War Moscow. Both versions of it.

The two versions of Moscow that I have seen, not to mention the two versions of myself, are as different as Hemingway's Paris and that of  La belle Epoque.

I was 37 on that spring day in '93 when I first touched down at Sheremetovo airport. The Soviet Union had been dead and gone for less than two years. Boris Yeltsin was president of the newly-liberated Russian Federation. Moscow's economy was imploding. Conventional stores were empty; the streets were lined with kiosks where everything was for sale. People were selling vouchers in the Metro stations. Hell, people were selling everything that wasn't bolted down. At the flea market at Ismailovo Park, you could buy anything from hot church icons to a used MiG. Beggars were much more in evidence than they are today.

Moscow in 1993 was like Dodge City. Anything could be bought, oligarchs-to-be were just piling up their fortunes, and stories of gangland hits, some of them in broad daylight, were not uncommon.

God, what an exciting time it was to be here. 

Not that the "exciting" part of the equation has changed. Moscow is still what it is, one of the world's biggest, most bustling capitals. There's always something going on somewhere. No question, Moscow is still an exciting city.


This is the Moscow I remember. October, 1993: President Boris
  Yeltsin and the parliament fired each other, and Russia
came close to civil war. I was here when this happened.

But 20 years is a lifetime to some people, and when I returned to Moscow just over a week ago, I experienced the emotion people are referring to when they quote American novelist Thomas Wolfe as saying "You can't go home again." Culture shock? No, I've lived here before and knew something of what to expect. I made return visits to the city in the late 1990s, but perspective had not settled in yet -- it was still pretty much the Moscow I remembered.

Not any more. It's the frozen-in-time nature of memory that makes coming home difficult. Nothing is quite as you remember it, and ... the friends you remember are older. Some of them are gone. You're older. Moscow, which was here long before me and will be here long after I'm gone, is also older. But, as cities, unlike people, are able to do, it has also become younger. To me, in some ways and places, almost unrecognizable. I'm staying with a colleague whose flat is near the Улица 1905 Года (Year 1905 Street) Metro station. It's a neighborhood of shops and stores. Across the highway is a large cemetery, into which crowds were streaming yesterday, Russian Easter. But aside from the signs and store displays in Russian, as I walk around this neighborhood I feel as though I might be in many another European city. Where is the distinct, unmistakable Moscow that made such a deep dent in me twenty years ago?

It's still there, but I had to go down to the city center to find real traces of it. Last Thursday was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm, radiant as only a spring day this far north can be. For old times' sake I got on the Metro and went down to the Kuznetski Most station. I got off there and ... just wandered.  To my relief, I found ample evidence of the Moscow I remembered as I sauntered slowly down to Red Square, which of course teemed with tourists as it will on a beautiful day.

Home again.

But when I entered Red Square again after all these years, I felt a curious mix of emotions. In fact I damn near cried. Memory is, first and foremost, a lonely place.

But everything was there: the State Museum, GUM, everybody taking pictures ... although these days they're as likely to be doing it with iPads as with cameras. Two new additions since my last visit: a guy made up to look like Lenin and a guy made up to look like Stalin, walking around offering to have their photos taken with visitors (You gotta wonder what Lenin and Stalin would have thought of that.)

St. Basil's Cathedral must have recently received one of its regular repainting jobs: its technicolor onion domes fairly glimmered in the afternoon light. I sat down on the grass alongside the Kremlin wall and looked at them for a long time, floating like huge, majestic balloons against the blue sky. "I'm back in Russia," I thought."There was a time when I thought this would never happen again, but somehow it has."

It's true that no matter how many times you return to a place that has meant much to you, the magic of seeing it for the first time is never there again. I have experienced this with many places in the travels of my adult life: Washington, D.C. New York City. Paris. Moscow. Even my own home...yes, when I returned to my home town in California for the first time, at age 32, after spending two years in Europe, there was a special radiance even to Chula Vista that I never again recaptured in all of my many happy returns.

So Moscow, 2013 is a different place to my 57 year-old self than Moscow 1993 was to myself at 37. I'll step around the Heraclitean cliche about stepping into the same river twice and say only that despite the inevitable disappointments that nostalgia is heir to, Moscow, like all great cities, has her own wisdom, a wisdom she shared with me once, and I'm most confident, will again.