(The third instalment in a series of travelogues, based on a trip to Europe in Spring 1990. The first two were on and Poland and Czechoslovakia. Comments, questions, abuse, etc are welcome at paulbakker@hotmail.com)
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The Aeroflot jet whined noisily as we made the final descent into Moscow airport. I felt sick: 22 hours in an Ilyushin 62 with no music, movies, or sleep. The pilots seemed to have a perverse habit of turning the engines off & on in mid-flight, leading to undulating descents and ascents that play havoc with your inner ear. Ouch.
From the air, the area around Moscow looked very green and even wild. Thousands of ramshackle Dacha's (summer houses) could be seen from the jet. It was all just as I expected. I was feeling pretty exhilarated as we taxied into the orange and grey terminal of Shevteshenko airport. I've wanted to visit Russia for a long time, and in preparation for this trip I had done lots of reading. I learnt Russian pleasantries from a phrasebook, memorized the Cyrillic alphabet, and read Dostoyevski and Tolstoy novels to get a feel for the place and the people. And of course I carried Lonely Planet's 'Eastern Europe on a Shoestring', an excellent guide book.
Actually Russia was just a stopover for myself and Betty (not her real name) on our way to a rented-car trip around Europe. We would only be spending 3 days in Moscow (the maximum allowed) at $US160 a night, but I relished this part of the trip as much as any other. We intended to make the most out of the 3 days and this was a good start: we shuffled into the terminal at 6:30 AM.
The airport was quite modern and glassy, with a plush Duty Free shop and lots of chrome and mirrors. Police and guards abounded. We joined the Customs line. The Customs officials seemed very relaxed, and it was more than two hours before we were processed. Betty was getting rather agitated, but I actually derived some kind of perverse pleasure out of it. Welcome to Russia! In Australia, the crowd would have gotten ugly after just 20 minutes of queueing, but here the Russians waiting with us just stared blankly. We had to declare all our money and valuables, to make sure we couldn't do any black-marketeering. I had earlier pressed $US50 inside the lining of my shoes for precisely that purpose.
After customs we were met by an Intourist rep who spoke only Russian. He helped us into a black Volga (a 60's looking sedan) and drove us to Hotel Belgrad, a good 50 minutes away. My initial impression of Moscow was: dusty, brown, dilapidated, chaotic, wide streets, unbelievably big. The city has a population of 9 million, more than half that of the whole of Australia. Although fatigue was starting to set in, the frightening flow of the traffic kept us alert. Little Lada's hurtled dangerously from side to side of the wide boulevardes, ignoring painted lanes and other driver's intentions. As I had read, no cars carried windscreen wiper blades; these hard-to-get items are stored safely in the glovebox and are only fitted when it starts to rain.
The Hotel Belgrad was a large cement shoebox in the classic communist style. The driver helped us with our bags and then took off without badgering us for a tip; a refreshing change from Singapore! We checked into a basic oblong room and fell asleep, out of necessity rather than desire.
[Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz]
Three hours later we reveilled and checked out the map. Belgrad seemed to be within walking distance of the Kremlin. It was hard to tell how far it was, and I was still a wee bit tired, so we left the video camera behind. Outside the hotel we got our bearings, and headed off in the general direction of Red Square. It was a bit difficult to be sure with the street signs totally in Cyrillic, but then again, so was the map! Immediately I sensed we were being followed. Looking in a shop window as we walked, I noticed 3 spotty youths behind us who had been hanging around in front of the hotel. K.G.B? C.I.A? G.A.Y? As we stopped to check the map again, I whispered my suspicions to Betty. She turned to look at them, they hesitated, and then marched right up.
'Are you American?'
'No!' (this didn't seem to faze them)
'You want to change dollars?'
They offered an exchange rate of 12:1, which was double the official rate. I accepted without attempting to bargain. We walked on for a while as I counted out $30 and they counted out the 360 roubles. We exchanged the money under a hastily opened map. Then they were gone. It was a minor thrill, but thereafter we just changed money at official institutions. Everything is cheap at 6:1 anyway.
We walked along the Kalinin Prospekt eastwards towards the centre of town. It's a lifeless, large scale, wind-swept boulevard that was designed, in a centralized-planning-committee kind of way, to be Moscow's main shopping street. There were indeed lots of shops and lots of people inside them. We ventured into a supermarket and saw hordes of women milling around, looking for something to buy. I took a photo of a pile of rancid sausages. A couple of queues formed, but we couldn't work out what for. We saw lots of Russian fur hats for sale (it was Spring) and fake leather Lenin caps.
We pressed on and were soon approaching Red Square (actually, it's kind of dark grey). If you approach from the west, you walk up a slight incline and can see the kaleidoscopic onion bulbs of St Basil's pop up over the horizon one by one. To see something this famous in real life always gives a shock of deja-vu, and the effect was doubled by the beauty of the church. Ivan the Terrible had it built in the 16th Century. According to legend, when it was completed he asked the architects if they thought they were capable of an even greater masterpiece. Anticipating a new commission, they answered yes, and he promptly ripped their eyes out. Never shortchange a Czar.
The principal sights of Moscow are organized compactly around Red Square - you can capture them all in the one photo! The Kremlin stands to one side, a large walled fortress ('kremlin' = 'fortress') filled with ancient churches and government buildings. In front of the Kremlin stands Lenin's Mausoleum, a low red-marble building with two guards ever watchful out the front. Across from that is 'the world's largest department store' (GUM), and then at the far end St Basil's Church. The square is almost always crawling with tourists, but about 95% of these are Soviets.
On the day we visited, Lenin was out and the tomb was closed. The guards were nevertheless still there, so we joined the crowd to watch the changing of the guard. The new guards emerge exactly in time to the chimes of the bell tower and then break unto a sprightly goosestep. This is one of the few visible rem(a)inders of the Soviet-German alliance of 1939 (besides the Baltic Republics, that is). The old and new guards swap positions in an impressive now-you-see-it-now-you-don't routine that takes about 5 seconds. It would even put the Germans to shame.
We then walked down to Hotel Rossiya, a concrete monolith that skulks behind St. Basil's. It's a good place to get an aerial shot of Red Square. Downstairs they have a Beriozka (foreign currency) shop. Only foreigners (and bigwigs) are permitted entry; the guards' usual criterion is how well you are dressed. The shop was well stocked with German and American goods I only know of from adverts: Hershey Bars, Twinkies, Budweiser beer. Souvenirs were very pricey.
Next up was a visit to GUM, the department store. Actually it was a 3x3xN matrix of little shops, where N -> infinity. It was very busy and most things weren't worth buying. You could pay in roubles, which made everything ridiculously cheap for us. Betty bought one of those recursive wooden Matrioshka dolls for about $7. They can cost up to 50 bucks in the West.
By this time fatigue was setting in nicely. We both had, for some reason, very sore feet and legs after the long flight (I forgot to make 'fists with my feet' on the carpet at the airport). We made our way to the far side of Red Square and tried to get a taxi. Things looked grim. At the taxi rank was a large crowd of Muscovites, who were craning their collective necks in every direction, searching for elusive cabs. Every now and then one would appear and cruise slowly by, as would-be patrons rushed out from the kerb and (presumably) shouted out their destination. The cab driver usually shrugged or shook his head, and often ended up driving away without picking anyone up!
We both groaned. A man with a thick moustache approached us and asked us if we wahnted a taksi. He pointed at the crowd and smirked, and then motioned to his taxi parked by the kerb. $US4 it would cost us... I grumbled for a few seconds but then gave in. That's outrageously expensive for Moscow (as I found out later) but of course it's nothing to a Westerner, and they know it. On the ride back he spouted his opinions on Gorbachev ('Always talking, no doing') and Boris Yeltsin (he gave a big thumbs up). On the dashboard of his cab he had tiny American and Russian flags intertwined.
Back at the hotel I booked an international call to my brother in Holland. After an hour of waiting it came through; he expressed amazement that I was able to ring out of Russia at all! He had never had any luck doing so on his two trips here. Betty also tried to book a call to Australia, but it just didn't happen.
That night we dined in the hotel restaurant. We had to stand at the door for a full twenty minutes before being allocated a table, even though the restaurant was half full and I had made a booking beforehand. (If you, dear reader, think you have a patient disposition, come to Moscow and give it a real test!). The food was great. We feasted on beer, hard boiled eggs and caviar, tasty thick brown bread, chicken kiev (Betty had 'chicken tabak'), and thick creamy ice cream for dessert. When the bill arrived I almost fell off my chair : 15 rubles ($US 2.50) total. Halfway through the meal some new arrivals were seated at our table, as is the custom in Eastern Europe. They turned out to be two aimiable Britons who had just completed the Trans-Siberian and were heading on to Leningrad that night. A band played some raucous folk music in the restaurant, and the Russian patrons clapped and sang along. 'twas a top evening. We retired early.
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| The hotel price included a buffet breakfast. Strange cold meats were laid out before us, as well as hard brown bread, boiled eggs, porridge, and 'kvass', a drink best described as 'liquid bread'. Betty decided to pass, and just sat there pining for her fruit juice and cornflakes. I tucked into the delicious old-fashioned porridge and slightly green eggs. The kvass was ok, but a bit strong for that hour of the morning. I was to radically revise my opinion of it before the day was out....
We went down to the lobby to arrange a free bus tour and a walking tour of the Kremlin. They like to hit tourists hard here: $US 16 each for the Kremlin, payable in hard currency please. But who's going to quibble once they've come this far? We befriended an Argentinian and an Australian tourist who booked on the same tour. The hotel arranged a taxi for us and we went off to the pickup point together. Because the taxi was called by the hotel, the driver had to accept the official fare from us: 3 roubles ($US 0. |
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