Tales of Alex in Germany: Moscow in May

Retreating to the victors
Holiday weekend #2 of May was spent in MOSCOW!!!!! I flew out to visit Zeke, a friend of mine from Pomona, on May 9th, which was very appropriate since it is a national holiday in Russia celebrating their victory over Germany at the end of WWII. I headed there with no idea what to expect and low-level anxiety instilled in me by my mom’s concerns and my friend’s here in Germany telling me to be safe and joking that I should probably buy some mace before going. What I found was a big city, which is in many aspects just like any other big city in the world. I got to thinking of Moscow as the New York or Berlin of Russia. Here’s a day-by-day recap of my trip:

Friday
I had to pull an all-nighter to get there because my flight left Germany at 6:30 am from a city that is a 2 hour train ride away from me, so I left my apartment at 11:40 pm the night before to make all my connections. Zeke was waiting for me at Vnukovo airport when I arrived and we headed right into town (after 2 hours of waiting on the train before it started moving, that is) to his apartment. He lives in what he claims is a pretty typical looking high-rise for middle-class Russians who live just outside Moscow’s city center. I found his apartment incredible. It totally reminded me of the Eastern German apartment depicted in the movie Goodbye Lenin, except his wallpaper patterns were much more ornate. Basically, he lives in a Soviet grandma’s apartment.

Zeke in front of his Russian high rise.

Wonderful wallpaper and phone-fiend Zeke.

Afterwards we went out to start my tour of Moscow. For the holiday, the entire center of the city had been turned into a large pedestrian district, and we had to pass through countless security checkpoints every time we entered and exited the area. There were police everywhere as well as tons of extra uniformed men—army and veterans celebrating the Victory Day. After spending the afternoon walking around town and seeing some of the major sites (Red Square, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Lenin's Mausoleum, the GUM department store, and State Historical Museum) we went out for our first round of Russian vodka shots (and my first round ever with formerly sober-sally Zeke).

Victory celebrations!

Russian police controls were everywhere on May 9th.

Moscow city center streets turned into pedestrian thoroughfares for the holiday.

The Historical Museum view from outside Red Square.

Exterior of the gigantic GUM Department Store.

Interior of GUM.

We are so excited that I'm in Moscow!

Red Square view. Left to right: St. Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's Mausoleum, Kremlin fortress wall and towers.

The stunning St. Basil's Cathedral.

Zeke. Me. Russia. Vodka shots.

Saturday
The next day we hung out with Zeke’s lovely friend Ksenja. After walking around Kitai Gorod, a fun neighborhood where we tracked down graffiti by the street artist group 310, who Zeke recently wrote an article about for the hip culture magazine where he works, we began our day with a pizza picnic in a small grassy square (I want to call it a park, but the Russians corrected me and said that by Moscow standards it is really just a large square of grass). Then we walked around Alexander Gardens, which are right outside the Kremlin. We found about 10 workers meticulously picking all the dandelions off of this large grassy lawn, asked them why they were doing it, and after learning that grass is supposed to be green, we decided to help them complete their job and take some flowers with us. We spent the rest of the sunny afternoon at the Pushkin Museum enjoying some classic paintings. After a late afternoon nap and some long, deep discussions about life and existential theory, we took a midnight walk to Zeke’s local 24-hour supermarket, and then called it a night.

Hobby of Russian women: have pictures taken of themselves posing in front of blooming flowers.

Desecrated dandelions in trash bag.

Zeke, me, Ksenja and our rescued flowers.

View of the Kremlin's main entrance.

Sunday
We now reach Sunday in this recounted tale of my trip to Moscow, and at this point I was still slightly frantic about the fact that I was completely helpless without Zeke since Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet felt totally out of my reach. By the end of my 5 day stay I could read aloud some words, but in general I would have a lot of work to do if I ever wanted to learn Russian. After spending so much time maneuvering around a foreign country where I am proud of my language skills, it made me feel debilitated, dependent, and simply foreign to be so clueless about the language.

Despite the fact that I had to spend the first couple of days having Zeke lead me by the arm around Moscow, we had a lovely few days. We started Sunday at the New Maiden’s Convent and the Novodevichy Cemetery. The weather was lovely, and wandering around talking about Russian culture and history was memorable. Hot topic: Russian Federation charging foreigners more for entrance fees than Russian citizens and writing information signs with different prices listed in English and Russian to be deceptively unclear, which highlight how unfair the policy can be. At the cemetery we definitely saw the entire laundry list of great Russian artists’, scientists’, and politicians’ gravestones; however we only recognized a few like Nikita Khrushchev’s and a very new memorial for Boris Yeltsin.

May in Moscow means blooming tulips and flower fields everywhere--lovely!

New Maiden's Convent.

Boris Yeltsin's new memorial and grave.

Nikita Khrushchev's grave.

Afterwards Zeke took me to this cool contemporary art complex, Winzavod, where a bunch of old warehouse space had been converted into multiple art galleries. In that way it kind of reminded me of Bergamot Station in LA. Most of the art we saw was pretty cool. A highlight was definitely a compilation of graphic art comic strips, which were from artists all over Europe. And, the most interesting/weird thing we saw was a video/installation piece that was slightly pornographic and showed a man somehow birthing a head of a woman while surrounded by many other Barbie-like, computer-generated female figures. We had a highly-advanced, intellectual interpretation of the piece that one can only make after a prestigious liberal arts undergraduate education: skeptical glances at one another.

Murals at Winzavod.

After paying our respects to the dead and being art critics we decided to get some time in as sport spectators. We went to a basketball game, which was the finals of the Russian Student Men’s Basketball League…making this game the Russian equivalent of the Final Four we decided. The game was free. Only one half of the stadium seating was open. The athleticism was fairly low-tier. The experience…memorable. Opening laser show, speech by a renowned Russian politician, dancers with a routine (and new costume) for every time out, and a horrible band for the opening and halftime show. Then Zeke’s lovely roommate, Yana, and her boyfriend Tim, took us out for some Siberian soulfood!

Tim, Zeke, and Yana in front of Arbat, a famous and touristy street in Moscow.

Zeke and me sipping borshch.

Monday & Tuesday
I spent the last couple of days in Moscow mostly on my own doing the touristy things that I could manage without Zeke. By now I could easily maneuver the Metro and knew how to say, “thank you” in Russian. First I got to see where Zeke works. What a snazzy newspaper room at Moscow Times. He’s a real journalist! Very cool (even if he is over it by now.) Then: the Kremlin! Walking around and seeing everything in the Cathedral Square was very cool (Assumption Cathedral, Cathedral of the Archangel, Annunciation Cathedral, Ivan the Great Bell Tower, Tsar Cannon, Tsar Bell, and Church of the Deposition of the Virgin's Robe). I still need to learn more about Russian Orthodoxy, but the interior of the churches are very different then any other church I have been in. Because of the heavy emphasis on iconoclasts the entire church is covered in detailed frescoes. These old, important, ceremonial churches didn’t have any pews, and the altar wasn’t as prominent as in many Catholic cathedrals. Have I mentioned how incredible the weather was during my stay? I totally lucked out! Moscow actually struck me as a very green city, but Zeke assured me that most of the green had budded just in the past couple of weeks. I spent the majority of my last day in Moscow looking at Russian paintings dating from the 15th century up to 20th century in the Tretyakov Gallery. When I met Zeke after work we went to a steak dinner at a restaurant that he was writing a review on, which meant the bill was covered by Moscow Times. What a treat!

Kremlin from the outside.

View while entering the Kremlin.

Cathedral Square, the Assumption Cathedral, and tourists

Cathedral, cathedral, cathedral.

Another Kremlin shot.

Biggest bell in the world!

Cathedral domes.

This large statue of Peter the Great has an immense presence in certain views of the city's skyline.

Russian dolls for sale!

One of Moscow's Seven Sister buildings.

General Observations
I’m still trying to figure out how Moscow compares to other places I’ve visited in the world. I know that I don’t have nearly the same understanding of the city or the country as Zeke, but I’ll try and still share some of my general impressions and observations here for those of you who are interested:

- Moscow Metro is worth seeing! The stations are beautiful and grand (a tour book I borrowed from Zeke described them as Soviet-era palaces for the masses). The metro is also really deep underground (about a 3 min. escalator ride at most stations). Trains come about every 45 seconds, so we never worried and ran for a train. The trains are the loudest things ever, and I’m sure extended public transportation in Moscow leads to serious hearing loss.

I don't think this pic. captures how grand the Moscow metro stations are, but maybe it starts to.

Crowded, long elevator in the Moscow metro.

- The city is full of people and cars! Big city!

- Women dress to the nines. Not that Zeke or I found their style incredibly fashionable, but that just shows you how there are different ideas of style throughout the world. Most women walk around in 3-4” heels. No joke. They looked like hooker shoes to me, but they are clearly a must-have in Moscow. I felt incredibly frumpy with hiking boots and a fleece despite the fact that I didn’t see anyone who was fashionable enough to make me turn my head and gawk.

- There are lots of police officers all over town, but the fact that most of them are men younger than me certainly diminished the potential intimidation of their presence.

- I had expected to see the large discrepancy between the wealthy and the poor while in Moscow because I had heard how visible it is there. Although I certainly realized how expensive Moscow is, especially everything in the city center, I did not see any of the poverty, which I had anticipated to stand in contrast to the wealth. Either Zeke protected my eyes, or the urban slums are actually more like suburban slums in Moscow.

- I found the demographics surprisingly homogeneous. After a week in Moscow, my small city in Germany even felt diverse! When I asked Zeke about crime rates in Moscow, he said he didn’t really know, but he was aware that there are often hate crimes committed in Moscow against those who aren’t ethnically Russian.

- We ate a bunch of blinis, which are like crepes. I tried borshch twice. The Georgian food that a mother of a co-worker of Zeke’s sells bi-weekly at his office was probably the best food I ate while there. Overall, I wasn’t very turned on by the food offerings.

- They sell a surprising number of German products in Russia.

Those are all the observations I can remember to recount now, but I’ll add to the list later when I think of more. Overall, the best part of the trip was reconnecting with Zeke, reminiscing about Pomona, and talking about potential future plans. Seeing Moscow and learning about this city was like a whole lot of icing on top of the cake! Two final pictures for you: