Heather Worley Living in St. Petersburg, Russia
Hi everyone -
This is a long one. Hope you all enjoy!
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My train ride to Moscow was quite comfortable. I really enjoy trains -
it's like an airplane, but quieter, with a better view out the windows and more
legroom. And there aren't any issues with cabin pressure. They're
also really cheap in Russia - my ticket there was about $8, and my return ticket
was only about $20 (it was an overnighter with a bunk).
I got into Moscow Thursday night around 8:00 and went straight to the house
of Tatiana Ivanovna and Vladimir Vasilievich, the sister and brother-in-law
of my host mom, Natalya. My first impression of Moscow was the metro system
- it's huge. A schematic of St. Petersburg's metro resembles an asterisk;
Moscow's is more like a spider web. Compare four lines to ten with a ring.
The ring is really great, though - St. Petersburg needs one. The problem
is that building anything in SPB is expensive, and especially something that
is underground, because they have to go under all the rivers and canals and
swamps.
The first thing that happened when I got there was that Tatiana fed me, of course,
but thank goodness just some tea. Warning to future visitors: if you stay
at someone's house or go as a guest, they will attempt to feed you until you
pop, and regardless of how much you eat, they will say you barely touched it.
"What, are you trying to lose weight? You're so thin already!"
Don't fall for it! It's just good manners here. While I was drinking
tea, I chatted a bit with her son Kirill. He's the same age I am, and
he's really into music. He told me graduated with a broadcasting degree
(I think), but he really wants to be a musician. So we talked about
music, and he asked questions about America, and what I think about Iraq.
Then Tatiana told him I was tired and not to harass me with questions.
Friday I got kind of a late start. I'd though I would need to wait until
10:00 or so if I wanted daylight, but at nine when I woke up the sun was already
shining in through my window! I didn't realize how much difference the
distance would make, but Moscow is far enough south that the sun rises about
an hour earlier and sets an hour later than in SPB, and it's also not quite
so overcast. So anyway, I ate breakfast, Kirill helped me out with directions
around the city, and I set off for the Kremlin. Inside the Kremlin I wandered
around Sobornaya Ploschad' (Cathedral Square), which has 6 or 7 cathedrals on
it. I only went into two of them, Archangelskii Sobor, where some of the
really old tsars are buried (1500-1600's), and Rizpolozheniya Church, which
has some old icons and wood carvings on display. (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~powellm/kremlin.html and
kreml.ru)
After that I headed over to Red Square, which was full of tour groups and schoolchildren.
(I think the Russian education system must do a lot more field trips than in
America - you can't go anywhere without running into a tour group.) Unfortunately,
the Lenin Mausoleum is closed on Fridays, so I didn't get to see that, but I
did get to go into St. Basil's, which is that church with the onion domes that
you always see in movies and tour books and stuff. On the second floor,
each one of the little domes has a small chapel under it with an iconostasis.
It's not a working church now (technically it's a museum), but there were still
some ladies crossing themselves before the icons.
After that I walked through the Gosudarstvennyi Universal'nyi Magazin (State
Department Store, usually known as GUM), which is a huge shopping mall that
has existed since Soviet times, not too different from most big shopping malls
in America. It even has a Frederick's of Hollywood. It was
a bit odd to see it after hearing so many references to it in textbooks for
the last five years. After that I went to Okhotnyi Ryad, a three-story
underground mall. I only went because my host mother said I should see
it, and since it wasn't very interesting, I only stayed about five minutes in
all. It was kinda weird to see something that seemed so American (most
of the shops are the same ones we have in American malls, though some are European
chains) in a country where it can be difficult just to find a button that's
the right shape for your coat (that's another story...).
I saw a burrito stand, and what everyone was eating looked to be pretty normal,
so I ordered a veggie burrito, not having had Mexican food since I came here.
It turned out to be green beans and Velveeta cheese. I didn't even know
Russia had fake cheese.
After that I took a short walk down the street to a relatively new Orthodox
chapel called Church of Christ the Savior. My host mom also recommended
I go see this. Inside wasn't much different from most Orthodox chapels
I've been in, except that the paint is brighter and the icons are newer.
But it is pretty and really enormous - it looks bigger from the outside than
from the inside, but it's still just huge. The church is really two separate
buildings that are connected underground, and the smaller building has a museum
with history and paintings and stuff. Vladimir Vasilievich told me there
used to be a swimming pool there, and I wonder if the former building was one
of those churches the Communists confiscated, turned into a public building
(often dance halls, meeting halls, museums, or pools), and then gave back to
the church after the fall. I probably should have read more of the history
stuff to find out. (http://www.moscow-hotels.net/attractions/church-of-christ-the-savior.html)
By that time, the sun was starting to set, so I went across the street to an
annex to the state Pushkin Museum. I got yelled at on the way in because
I wasn't aware that the small knot of people outside was a line - I thought
they were just taking a smoke break. The guard was letting people in only
as other people came out, but there wasn't any sort of sign saying that.
(I encountered this problem a lot in Moscow.) Anyway, the museum houses personal
collections of art donated to the state, including some earlier works by Kandinsky.
It turns out that in addition to the wild-looking stuff he did, he did some
landscapes, too, and there's a portrait of his wife in the collection that is
really fascinating.
After that I headed home to rest my legs. Tatiana made a "small"
dinner for me, I had some limited success in calling people, and then I had
tea with Kirill. We talked about music and that sort of stuff for quite
a while. He told me about a business he's trying to start that involves
composing music on his computer and his band and stuff like that, and then he
drew some more maps for me of downtown Moscow and how to find things.
Saturday morning I met with Kosta, we went to see Patriarch's Pond, which, as
he'd said, would just be frozen over. But I wanted to see it because it's
in Bulgakov's book, The Master and Margarita. After that we had tea in
a cafe, and then I went to the Pushkin Museum (the main one). It has a
lot of Ancient Egyptian art and Greek statuary, but that doesn't interest me
incredibly, so I just went throught the more modern European stuff (Matisse,
Picasso, Miro, Manet, Signac, Van Gogh, etc.) and then left.
I thought I'd try to see Tverskaya Ulitsa, the main drag in Moscow, but on the
way there an ATM ate my card and I spent a good hour waiting to get it back.
The Sberbank employee was more than rude, she was beastly, and acted annoyed
that it had happened, that I only had a stamped copy of my passport (as opposed
to the real deal), that my signatures didn't match exactly, that my name was
so darn funny-looking...I would have tested out some of the words the students
at the Nevsky Institute have taught me, but I didn't want to endanger my position
any more. I had to sign something saying it was my card, they'd given
it to me after it got stuck in the machine, blah blah blah, but since they didn't
have a form letter she had to write the whole thing out by hand. I can
understand this is annoying, but it's their fault their stupid machine doesn't
work right, not mine.
Incidentally, when I got home, Tatiana asked if anyone had offended me that
day. I learned the word "offend" a few months ago, and it's
one of those words that significantly upped my understanding of conversational
speech. Russians use it a lot. Tatiana said she was really surprised
when she was in Germany that everywhere she went, people smiled. "You
order a pastry, and they smile at you!" Her daughter, Olga, was shocked
by Russian manners after she'd been living in Germany for ten years. Russians
have thick skins, it seems, although actually most people are polite, but service
employees are not.
Anyway, by the time I got out of the bank it was kinda dark on Tverskaya Ulitsa,
but I decided to see it anyway. It has a lot of interesting, varied architecture,
big shops, etc. I tried to find an internet cafe, but no one seemed to
know where one is. The most definite answer I got was, "I know there's
one around here somewhere, but exactly where or how to get there, I don't know."
I never found an internet cafe in Moscow. I'm sure 13-year-old boys in
Moscow spend as much of their time on video games as the 13-year-old boys in
SPB do, so there must be a lot of them, and you can't go anywhere here without
tripping over an internet cafe, but who knows.
Saturday night I got back a bit earlier (around 7:00 or so) and after dinner
I packed most of my stuff and then watched TV with Vladimir. Tatiana liked
that I was laughing at the comedy sketches. ("She understands our
humor!") Vladimir showed me a lot of their family pictures.
Their daughter, Olga, as I mentioned, has been living in Germany for the past
ten years, so they showed me pictures of their visits to Germany and Paris,
and, even better, a lot of pictures of Natalya and Tatiana together when they
were younger.
They asked me a lot of questions about America, whether churches in America
are like Orthodox churches, about my school and our exchange program.
Tatiana was really curious about things that seem really mundane to me - like
our heating systems - but which are pretty unusual for Russia. She thought
it was really cool that we can control the heating and air-conditioning ourselves,
and that they're not on a huge, centralized system that the building super turns
on in October and then off again in April. I had a difficult time explaining
central heating and air without giving her the impression that it's like the
Russian system, with radiators.
Sunday I went to Red Square to see the Lenin Mausoleum. I'd expected there
would be a line, but there wasn't, although that didn't prevent the security
guards from putting up all sorts of borders and railings without explaining
what they were there for. (I'm not really sure what the security is for
- Lenin's already dead, so it's not like if someone takes a knife in something
bad will happen.) I made it through the first two security checks, but
at the third they told me my camera wasn't allowed in. If they'd told
us at the first one that it was cameras they were searching for, I could have
saved them and me some time, but no, that's just too easy. So I had to
ask a guard where the check room is, and since I stumbled over the word (it's
really hard to say "khraneniya" when your chin is half-frozen - what
kind of language puts H and R together?), he said, "What, you don't speak
Russian or something?" I think he was flirting with me, because he
was smiling and on the way back in, he asked me if I'd found it okay.
His job must be really boring if he flirts with lost foreign girls...
Anyway, Lenin was there. He's been there a while, so he's starting to
flatten out a bit. Mao's definitely in better shape. Really not
too exciting - I think I was in there less than a minute, but if I hadn't done
it the trip would have felt incomplete. Afterwards I followed a schoolgroup
as they walked along the Kremlin wall behind the mausoleum, where a lot of Soviet
heroes are buried, including Josef Stalin and Yuri Gagarin, among others.
(http://www.moscow-taxi.com/sightseeing/red-square/mausoleum.html)
From there I headed over to the Tretyakov Gallery. I really should have
allowed more time for this. The museum is amazing. It is a huge
collection of art, all by Russian artists, and it's arranged sort of chronologically,
with all of each artist's works grouped together (for the most part).
I really just ran through the museum - an hour and a half into it, I was in
hall 36, and I knew there were over 60, but I was already really tired.
I can only look at art for about two hours, and after it just takes too much
concentration to absorb anything. I never made it past the 19th century,
there was just so much. I think there's supposed to be a lot of modern
and avant-garde stuff there, too, but I never found it - the museum was just
too big. If I go back to Moscow this spring (I'm thinking about a weekend
trip), I'll allow another afternoon or two for the Tretyakov. (http://all-moscow.ru/culture/museum/tretyak/tretyak.en.html)
I returned to the apartment, had a small dinner, watched some TV, chatted with
Tatiana and Vladimir, and then headed for the train station. Tatiana wished
me good luck in finding a husband as I left. The train ride back was comfortable.
I slept almost the whole way. I arrived back in SPB at 5:30 a.m..
One thing that was interesting about Moscow was how evident it is that there's
more money. A lot of the paintings in the museums actually had glass over
them. Very few in SPB do - even works that are recognized world-wide to
be great masterpieces. Moscow also has a lot fewer buildings with chipping
paint. There are a lot more cars, and they're newer and nicer. The
metro system is more convenient and less crowded, so there aren't as many trolleys,
buses and trams slowing down traffic. There's better shopping (if you're
into that). I think, overall, I like SPB better, though. It's smaller,
quieter, and prettier - although I think in terms of littering, etc., Moscow
might actually be cleaner. It's hard to say when a blanket of snow is
covering everything except the roads, which are just slush.
**********
It's good to be back in SPB. It's the closest thing to "home"
available to me right now. But I won't be here for long. I'm leaving
for Spain to see my big little brother (Hi Scott-T!) in just a few short days.
I'll try to send a buenos dias from there...
Till next time -
Heather:)
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Men'she znaesh', luchshe spish'. The less you know, the better you sleep.
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