For our visit to Moscow, another couchsurfing.com member has agreed to host us. We call her from the metro station in the early evening, as requested, but when it comes time to walk over I discover that the apartment address doesn’t include a street name and I can’t understand the name over the phone nor find it on our sub-standard Moscow map.
“I think it will be easiest if I come to meet you,” says Polina. We wait outside the Dobrininskaya metro station and try to look as I described ourselves to her: “I have blonde hair. Pierre is tall. We have many big bags.” We’re fairy conspicuous and Polina find us easily. The walk to the apartment feels long in the dark, and as we walk past and between and behind various apartment blocks, I’m very glad we didn’t try to find our way here by ourselves.
We set up our things in the guest room/office and Polina makes us some tea and feeds us bread with homemade strawberry jam. We visit awhile and get a general idea of how they like to organize visitors, including whether they arrange times for arriving and departing or have an extra set of keys.
“Help yourself to Internet,” Polina says. “You can arrange with my mother about keys.”
Her mother, Natalia, arrives home shortly after. She a bit of a nigh owl, she says, and hopes the sound of the tv in the living room won’t bother us.
“It’s ok,” I say, “we travel a lot and we always have an eye mask and ear plugs.” Her English is pretty good, but just in case the words aren’t familiar I use my hands to illustrate covering my eyes and plugging my ears. She laughs, thinks it’s a great idea. She turns and runs to get us our own set of keys so we can come and go as we like, as if by laughing together Pierre and I have passed some kind of test. We spend our first evening in Moscow watching Natalia’s favourite show on tv: South Park episodes dubbed into Russia. “At first I watch, I think terrible,” she says of the first time she saw the show. “But then, funny. Very funny.” Pierre and I watch and laugh at the voices chosen for the characters and at the visually funny bits. Natalia laughs almost non-stop through the episode.
The course of our stay in Moscow fits a certain pattern. We try to leave the kitchen free in the mornings to that we don’t interrupt our hosts while they get ready for their day. Around 9:30 am we go out for breakfast, get dressed, leave and don’t return until around 8 or 9 in the evening. Our hosts spoil us with home-dried herbal teas, homemade jams and borscht and fresh watermelon and wild apples. We eat a lot.
Downtown, most days we end up in or around Red Square, often for no particular reason. We just like it there. We discover the free toilets and the reasonably (for Moscow) priced cafeteria in the GUM shopping center on the north-east side of the square. To the south east is the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral with its famous onion domes.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” says Pierre the first time he sees it. “It really is…petite.”
Compared to other hulking cathedrals we’ve seen, as well as compared to the other buildings on Red Square, the cathedral looks like a miniature replica. The beautiful outside is matched by its interior, where the 5 or 6 tiny altars range from crazily ornate (St. Basil’s) to more subdued but still lots of detail (all the others).
At the northwest end of the square is the State Historical Museum, one of the best conceived and organized museums we’ve ever seen. Built in the 1800s, it was designed so that each room (the architecture, murals, colours) reflects the time of the artifacts held in the room. Each of the exhibits are well thought out and seem pretty comprehensive but they aren’t overwhelming, holding just enough detail to be interesting but not so much that we simply turn our minds off and just walk through.
Pierre can’t take photos inside nor read the signs (all in Russian) so we’re able to move through the museum at a good pace. Even so, by the end of our tour we’ve spent several hours and a lot of our energy on the museum. I add it to my list of things to go back and see someday.
To the south of the square is the Kremlin, which is not so much a building as a set of buildings behind a high wall. My memories of my last visit to the Kremlin are vague, but I don’t remember it being too expensive because if it had been, I just wouldn’t have gone. This time, prices have shot up: 15$CAN to see the grounds and cathedrals, and an extra 30$ to see the Armoury which holds all the jewels and wealth of the old tsars: thrones, crowns, gifts, weapons and such. The exhibit sounds amazing, but falls outside of our price range for museums. Instead, we stick to seeing the Kremlin grounds, were we walk past the old cathedrals and state buildings, and a few outdoor monuments like the never-used, cracked Tsar Bell which stands about 15 or more feet high.
On the grounds of the Kremlin, painted lines indicate exactly where people can walk. When tourists step out of the lines, the guards blow on their whistles until they walk back to where they belong.
We make sure to make time to visit the VDNK, which we affectionately call “Soviet Land” but which is actually an old exhibition ground that was built in the 30s and 50s, back when everyone was still very gung ho about communism. The architecture around the place is amazing with rocket statues, ornate socialist fountains where curvy, muscular, gilded statues of field workers hold sheaves of wheat and look majestic. There are the requisite Lenin statue and old-school soviet buildings, with lots of detailing like socialist mosaics, and hammer and sickles.
Pierre loves it. We have a picnic near the fountain and walk around. The last time I was here, the place was almost abandoned, but now it’s a lively place, with amusement park games, food stalls, and lots of roller bladers taking advantage of the wide spaces to do jumps and spins. Some of them are so good that we wonder if they spend the winters being actual figure skaters.
Back out in the rest of Moscow, we visit a few markets filled with the usually kitschy merchandise – nesting matrioshka dolls, fur hats, propaganda posters, painted boxes.
I love visiting cemetaries in other countries so we take time to see the Novodevichy Cemetary. I find that Russian cemeteries usually include an image or photo on the gravestones, sometimes fused onto enamel, and other times carved into marble or etched into granite. It is a very face-filled place and I find it a much more affecting experience to be faced with the image of someone who died rather than just their name, birth and death.
There are a few mass monuments to “heroes of the Soviet Union” who died in catastrophes in factories or in airplane and Zeppelin accidents.
While we are in Moscow, a prominent Russian dies after managing to live through the worst of Russia and making it well into his 90s. This man, Sergei Mikhalkov, is famous for writing children’s poems that are loved by several generations of Russians, and also for (re)writing the country’s national anthem a record three times: once for Stalin, once after Stalin’s death, and once after the fall of communism.
My Russian teacher later tells me an interesting story about this man. He was what she refers to as “a friend to power” and so the rest of the intelligentsia were very leery about being near him and watched what they said to him. He thrived during a time when most others were persecuted and ostracized, and enjoyed the trappings of favour – houses, vacations, and so on. Once communism fell, my teacher said, there was a period of time where people were asked to publically apologize/confess for things that went on during communism. At one point, the writer’s union had set up something like this. This man was the only person who came. On tv, he publically apologized for benefitting from so many others’ misfortune and from a lack of action on his part.
His freshly dug grave is located at a prominent crossroads of the cemetery – there are rows of wreaths and adults wipe tears from their faces as they stop for a moment to pay their respects.
While travelling around the city, we spend a lot of time in the Moscow subway system and get to see a few of its famously ornate subway stations. When the original lines of the metro system were built back in the 30s and 40s, building things that suitably glorified Soviet history and the Soviet people was a priority. Some of the stations have chandeliers hanging from the ceilings, others are covered in tens of mosaics, and statues of workers, soldiers, farmers, and more.
After a few days in Moscow, it’s time for us to register our passports to meet the visa requirements, so we spend one night in a hotel. We decide to consider it a belated anniversary gift to ourselves. We stay at a Holiday Inn because it’s convenient, relatively inexpensive and they’ll register our visa for free as part of our stay. (other places want to charge us about 30$ CAN each on top of the room price). We weren’t expecting much from a Holiday Inn and are very surprised to find that the room is one of the nicest we’ve ever stayed in, and comes with a free breakfast buffet that more than makes up for the Moscow hotel prices. Pierre notes down what he eats and converts it into typical Moscow restaurant prices (v.high) to enjoy the brief feeling like he’s beating the system.
- porridge (yogurt, walnuts, raisins, maple syrup)
- omelet w/all extras
- salmon (a lot)
- herring (a little)
- 4 baguette slices
- Grilled tomato au gratin (1/2)
- Blue/swiss cheese
- ½ pear
- Bowl of dried/preserved fruit w/ walnuts, fruit salad
- 2 cups coffee
- 3 glasses of juice
After so many months of travelling and paying out money, anytime we feel like we’re earning back some of our money is pretty noteworthy. As comfy as it is, we’re happy to return to the cozy, homey atmosphere at Polina and Natalia’s that night.
On our last days, we catch an excellent presentation of the Romeo and Juliet ballet at one of the minor theatres. We also drop by the Arbat where I try to show Pierre the lovely, tiled Wall of Peace where years ago you could see the hand painted tiles with anti-war messages from individuals and groups like Grandmothers for Peace. We’re disappointed to see that it’s now covered with uninspired graffiti (Dimitry was here) and we wander around listening to the street performers and watching the other visitors walk past. We visit Red Square a few more times and I spend a few hours in a local bookstore relaxing before we say goodbye to our friends and head off to catch the 22:10 sleeper train to St. Petersburg.
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