Moscow, 4/26
2006.05.03 @ 18:30I’m up until six a.m. packing, IM’ing with my old boss, blogging. But the taxi is coming at 11 so I’m up before ten, downing coffee. I don’t even get a chance to say goodbye to Miriam as she’s already left for class.
Sitting in the back of the cab sucking down the diesel particulate air that is St. Petersburg (not as bad as Mexico City but still stinkums), I’m excited that I actually have a chance to try speaking Russian, sans training wheels. I float through the airport, feeling cosmopolitan, until I have to lug myself, my big backpack, my heavy rolling luggage, and my big box of Lomonosov porcelain up and down flights of stairs. In 3 ½” heels. Russia needs an ADA act, pronto.
There are conflicting signs about where to check in for Moscow, but I’m able to communicate – Gde Moscow?
As we depart Piter, I can’t help but notice how quickly the ground below turns into farmland. There is vast emptiness: no miles of strip malls and criss-crossing highways. Just land. Why not manufacture with little regard for the environment? Look at all this space!
I spend the 90 minutes poring over my Rough Guide and making detailed, step by step plans to get to Dinamo, the restaurant that I plan to eat at tonight.
• Walk down Sadovaya-Sukharevskaya to the Sukharevskaya station
• Take the orange / 6 / Kaluzhsko – Rizhskaya line towards Medvedkovo
• Go one stop & get off at the Prospekt Mira station
• Transfer to the brown / 5 / Koltsevaya line – head west!
• If the next station is Komsomolskaya you have gone the wrong way ☺
• Go 2-3 stops to Belorusskaya station (right after Novlobodovskaya)
• Get off at Belorusskaya and transfer to the green / 2 / Zamoskvorets
• Board train towards Rechnoyvokzal
• Go one stop and get off at Dinamo
• Going to look for gate #10 of Dinamo Stadium
As we descend into Moscow, I see colorful rooftops on residential homes that remind me of McMansions. I think of the cheesy homes that many newly arrived immigrants put together in the States (often in Queens). I wonder why I consider them cheesy. The unhappy voice inside me chastises myself for being so bitchy.
—
I don’t know if it’s the heels or the fact that it’s Moscow, but the men seem nicer at the airport. I’m supposed to meet the driver that I arranged through Moscow Rick ($95 RT) right outside of baggage claim, but he’s nowhere to be found. I’m getting asked if I need a taxi by everyone and I use my best Piter grouchiness and bark out nyet like so many chto?-barking sales clerks. I need to pee. Where’s that driver.
Half an hour later, I really need to pee, my feet hurt, and I’m starting to get scared. What if Moscow Rick has taken my American Express and run for the hills? What if I am stranded in Sheremetevo Terminal One? What if the taxi driver that I select sells me into sex slavery in Istanbul a la Frontline?
Phone. Must find phone. I pore through the Rough Guide for information, get my confidence up, and wobble over with all luggage in tow on 3.5” heels to a friendly looking lady with a blue telephone symbol above her head. Izvinite, yagovoryu po-russki ni ochin khorosho. Vuy govorite po-angliyski? Nyet. Khorosho. But I am able to buy a phone card from her. I hobble out to a telephone and hear a knocking on the doors. Oops. Wrong type. She kindly directs me to the correct set of phones.
I’m trying to use the phone, following its instructions sparsely littered with English words, punching in the numbers, and I get a “Allo?” on the other end. But the other party can’t hear me. I try this several times. A taxi driver comes up and is able to communicate to me that I need to push a certain button after I hear “allo” in order to initiate the call. But now the line is busy. I can’t get in touch with Moscow Rick’s squad of help, and there sure isn’t an internet kiosk around.
It’s now been 45 minutes. My feet really hurt. I seriously need to pee. I desperately want to cry. I feel the beginnings of tears in the back of my throat.
And then I see a kid stroll in with a sign that reads Moscow Rick.
–
My driver looks like Keegan, a kid I grew up with in North Liberty. Both are short, blonde hair, blue eyes, built like a lightweight wrestler. He’s wearing a fitted knit top with Armani Exchange screen-printed on it. When he lifts my pink luggage into the trunk, I can see the fine blonde hairs on his lower back glittering in the sunshine. He drives the newest model of Jetta, and implores me to sit up front with him. I see a stuffed red heart with arms in the backseat, the same one that’s available in the children’s section of Ikea.
He thinks I am Russian at first, or that I can speak Russian, because my name is apparently also a Russian name (a famous Russian singer has this name, he says). We switch to English, which he speaks fairly well. He shares that he has tried four times to get into the U.S., but the Embassy won’t give him a visa. He’s even tried to get into business school at Georgia State (I wonder if he picked Georgia thinking that perhaps there were Georgians there) (He asked me where I went to university and, when he tells me he’s never heard of Yale, I feel myself dying a little inside when he confirms he’s heard of Harvard and I say it’s sort of like Harvard). I tell him that it’s not very nice that we won’t let him in and I tell him that maybe when our moron president is gone, perhaps things will be different.
“You don’t like Boosh?”
“Eew, no, none of my friends like Bush. He’s an idiot. I hate him.” I want to make it really clear how much I loathe the man, do my part for international relations. “You guys seem to have a good president, though.” Minus the Iran thing. But Putin isn’t terrible. He could be worse. Plus I know that Russians sweat Putin, and I’d like to ingratiate myself to my driver, who claimed that my flight got in 45 minutes early but is, after all, in control of whether I arrive at my flat or in a brothel in Istanbul.
“Putin is amazing, he is so good for Russia, we love him. We love him.” His cell phone rings. Actually, I should say, one of his cell phone rings. I imagine him saying, “Yes, I’ve got her, she’s right here, and she looks sturdy, I think we can get a few years out of her. Yes, but she is dark, we can’t use her there. Maybe, yes, she does have some blonde hairs, I think we can work with it.” He hangs up the phone and seems perturbed, then continues an earlier train of thought. “Maybe they aren’t letting me come to the U.S. because I am young and single. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? What is this, think so? Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. Have you heard of a website called Friendster?” God, why I think I can explain the complexities of American dating is beyond me.
He laughs, as if to say, “These crazy Americans.” “I do not know of this Friendster. What do you mean, maybe? Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, okay. Have you had sex with him.” The Russian Keegan is pleased with himself, as if he has figured out a failproof way to get to the bottom of this.
“Yes.” I think of a wobbly-legged entry into my diary and try not to smile too obviously.
“Then he is your boyfriend.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “It’s a little more complicated in the States.”
Both of his phones begin to ring simultaneously. Saved by the bell.
At this point, we’re driving by the stadium where Dinamo is located, and the area looks like a hole. Time to scrap my best-laid plans.
—
The first thing I do after settling into my Soviet flat (bedroom, foyer, bathroom with tub and sink, room with toilet, kitchen; satellite TV and high speed internet; $105 a night from Moscow Rick) is take some self portraits from my balcony, which overlooks Sadovaya-Sukharevskaya Ulitsa. I want some kind of proof that I’ve been here. I’m nervous and excited about trying to navigate this big bad city without really knowing much Russian, and being a solo flyer female. It’s not feeling as small-minded as Piter; I don’t feel like I will get stabbed in the throat for being brownish and I don’t feel like the cops are going to want to get some loot out of me in exchange for the return of my passport.
I change out of my heels and hipster leggings/skirt combo and into jeans and Rod Lavers (now gray from dirty Piter – the whole city was dusty and yet I did not see one Laundromat or dry cleaner) for a little stroll. I hang a left and head east on my road, cross over to the other side using an underground pedestrian walkway (it is an eight lane road after all), and walk down until I hit Courvoisier, a place that Marc recommended (he had rented a flat from Moscow Rick in the same area). Courvoisier is drenched in sunshine and smoky; I order from an entirely Cyrillic menu a sandwich called the Manhatten and congratulate myself on ordering my first meal in Russian! I change plans now that Dinamo is scrapped and decide on Café Pushkin, which my driver had recommended as primo, just after telling me about the clubs and their policy of “face control”.
• Hang right out of flat
• Hang left on Tsvetnoy Bulvar – be on right side of street
• Get on gray line / 9 / Serpukhovsko – Timiryazevskaya towards Bulvar Dmitriya Donskovo
• Go 1 stop to Chekhovskaya
• Head down Strastnoy Bulvar
• Cross Tverskaya Ulitsa
• Turns into Tverskoy Bulvar
• On your left 26A
I grab the English-language Moscow Times in hopes of a Scheherezade listing and leave Courvoisier in search of razors. If I head to Café Pushkin, I’m wearing a skirt and heels and I cannot be rockin’ the cactus leg. I try a Soviet-style Apoteka; I let the woman know in Russian that I don’t speak Russian but do the universal girl-shaving-leg motion. I briefly reflect on my arrest at Kmart in pursuit of razors. They don’t sell them, and when I ask gde? She replies, ne zhnao but then pauses, motions back in the direction I just came from, and says a few words including “Metro”.
I shuffle back and sure enough, there’s a store on top of the Metro. After locking my messenger bag into the store’s self-server lockers, I find some razors, some shaving gel, some nail files for my nails which desperately need love, tweezers for my face fur which also desperately needs love, and I pick up a tube of lotion. I really wanted to make sure I got lotion and not, like, Nair, but none of the brands I knew (Vaseline, for instance) were there, so I couldn’t divine what the word for lotion might be. I smelled the stuff in the tube and it smelled Cocoa Butter-y. There’s a picture of honey on the front and I see moloko. Maybe it’s like honey milk lotion. I began to understand why immigrants are so brand loyal. Once you identify the product you want, why risk it?
—
I get back to my place, search in vain for some porn on Satellite TV, grab a nap, take a nice long hair-removing hot shower, attempt to turn the shower into a banya by rapidly alternating the hot and cold, succeed only in burning then freezing myself, decide they should make a showerhead that does that automatically for you to help with circulation, decide to manufacture that exact product instead of waiting for someone else to do it, and then realize that the lotion is not lotion at all but sticky honey-type stuff that Russian women typically place on themselves at the banya.
My legs are hairless and sticky. I am butt naked in my bedroom and I see a vague reflection on myself in the television, belly pooching out, ass sagging. Oh ANP, I think. You silly goose.
—
But I read my Rough Guide and the Metro closes at 12:30. I can’t get back from Café Pushkin before then, and the Guide’s advised me not to try and hail a private car as a single female. I am looking cute in my little outfit with nowhere to go. Ah, the best-laid plans.
I try for Bookafe, a coffee shop-esque detailed in my Rough Guide. “A luxuriously austere coffee house…” I’m wearing heels, as I can’t wear tennies with my Arden B. jeans without destroying them. En route I check a bulletin board with cultural listings; Rimsky-Korsakov’s playing but not Scheherezade. Damn.
I get to Bookafe. It’s cool in a neon light, polished white surfaces, Eurotrashy way and I am so not in the mood for dealing with Eurotrash. A guy at a laptop wearing a hoodie eyes me. I roll my eyes on the inside. Leave me alone.
Pectopah, pectopah, how I need a pectopah. I walk further down the ring road I’m on but I hear a stray dog barking, establish a visual, and turn right around. Americanka mauled by stray dog; Arden B. jeans left intact. I hang a right on Tsvetnoy Bulvar; a Caucasian man begins to hit on me. MY NAME IS ARTUR. (Arturo in Mexico City; Artur in Moscow?!)
We can’t communicate whatsoever but that doesn’t stop him from trying. HOLIDAY. CITIBANK. NEW YORK. It goes on for an uncomfortably long time; his friends come up and try to get him to stop, reasoning that I’m leaving on Saturday for doma.
I say that I’m trying to eat, I see a Pizza Hut, but they close at 11.
He wants my phone number. His friends are looking. I don’t want him to lose face. I give it to him. Like he’ll be making an international phone call, I think. I write his down. I reiterate that I am hungry, he says – “Anit, Anit.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “NO BUCKS!” Ya zhnao, khorosho, think to self that it’s different in America, men aren’t assumed to pay for everything and waitresses don’t look at you funny if you’re a woman chipping in for your own portion of the meal.
His impatient friend tells him to walk me to the pectopah down the street. Artur walks me there, tells me in English that I am BEAUTIFUL and puts his hands over his heart. I really want him to leave, I am strained by all of the effort to be polite and communicate with hand gestures and repeating ya ne ponimayu, and thankfully, he leaves me in front of the pectopah, right next to Bookafe.
While enjoying my khachapuri and shashlyk Artur’s friend walks in with a buddy. The buddy veers dangerously close to me, reeking of body odor and insinuating his smile upon me. My body language expresses severe annoyance and luckily, he leaves, and I can enjoy watching the Gregorian Chants video on the flat panel while drinking my juice made of vishnya all by my lonesome. I vow to buy cherry juice in bulk upon returning to Brooklyn.
I get back to my flat, and it’s so toasty in there thanks to the heat, I knowingly apply the sticky honey lotion to my legs and decide there is no greater joy than a freshly shaved leg covered by honey lotion smoothly gliding against juicy flannel sheets. I read the Moscow Times, note that it’s legal to put age requirements in job listings in Russia, weep deeply at the heartbreaking interviews with wives of the men who died in Chernobyl (it’s the 20th anniversary), and fall into a deep slumber.