A Month in Review 1.0.0

Dear Readers, I believe that after Christmas I left you hanging.  I left you hanging for a very long time. Reasons are many and varied, but to be short, I'm sorry, and here begins a retelling of the past month of my Russian adventure.

The week after New Years I shall dub "Великая неделя именно Чайковского"or shortly in English, "Tchaikovsky week."  With the remainder of dear R-----'s time in Russia, we remained in Pushchino for a few days, learning how to make the perfect blini, practicing our Russian with various visitors, playing Carcassonne with some of my students, (this game seems to be quite popular here whereas I have never seen it in the States.  On the flip side, nobody knows what Settlers is here) tickling Russian babies, and [only me] getting massive headaches after trying to translate mutual fund documents into Russian for an investing friend.  I don't know what liabilities, assets and mutual claims really are in English, so I can't say I was very helpful.  We also spent a few days exercising our more cosmopolitan sides and touristing around Moscow.

As the week's title might indicate, there was a lot of Tchaikovsky in our "Great Week in the name of Tchaikovsky."  Our first adventure was to visit a house museum in an apartment where Tchaikovsky lived for a year.  Readers, please notice the indefinite article 'a' here, because of course, there are several.  We were the first visitors of the New Year, and to celebrate, we had a private tour all to ourselves.  That meant lots of questions, lots of pictures, and lots of discomfort when our tour guide attempted to sell us her own recordings under the table.  As we strolled around after the tour though, taking still more pictures, a second Babushka came over to talk to us.  And talk to us.  And before you knew it, we had a new best babushka friend, telling us the secrets to a long and healthy life, and giving us both advice in our romantic lives (problems with coming to Russia single).  Though I can't say I agreed with her on all the points, it was a really engaging and interesting conversation that reminded me of how much I like people.  People are interesting, funny, and unpredictable, and usually this is a really wonderful thing.  If you want to remain young even as you accumulate years [according to the babushka], just remember to always work with youth, be excited about something, love your mother, and don't hang on too tightly to anyone else.  We probably could have stayed and talked to her for another hour or two, but the city was calling and it was time to move on.

You know its warm when Moscow's rivers aren't completely frozen over by the beginning of January.

Several days later we decided to increase our tchaikovskographic exposure by travelling to the land of his birth: Klin.  A little more than an hour to the north of Moscow, the town featured a whole estate dedicated to the composer, an extensive market, the strangest pay toilet I have ever encountered (reminiscent of a Grecian or Babylonian altar/garden/ziggurat) [for those of you who haven't been to Russia, all toilets in train stations cost somewhere around $1, and that doesn't necessarily guarantee 1) toilet paper, 2) stalls, or 3) anything other than a pit in the ground.  It is a bit of an adjustment coming from the US] and a very friendly Tajik waiter who would not let us leave without his phone number.

Parts of Klin looked strikingly similar to parts of New England.  

Americans aren't the only people who like to edit signage.  Парк закрыт means "park closed".  But, in this case, парк зарыт (park buried) works too.

Me and the man himself.  He looked cold so I lent him my hat for a bit.

 We visited many museums in Moscow: Tchaikovsky, Bulgakov, the outside of the Theatrical Museum (never trust signs.  Always call ahead to ensure the door will be open) but the museum that I want to focus a little more on was a bit of a spur of the moment decision.  After confirming that we would indeed not be able to visit the Theatrical Museum at all that day, we took inventory of our nearby possibilities.  One item on the map seemed interesting: The Museum of the Cold War.  Clearly it's still a bit of a sensitive topic, however an opportunity to learn about it from the Russian side would be fascinating, and maybe we could just keep our mouths shut and not let our accents give us away.  Though frankly, I expect that this museum probably gets a fair amount of American patronage, even though it isn't highly advertised.  It took us a while to find the entrance to the museum, even after we had already actually found it.  The reason for our uncertainty can be depicted below:

Though completely fitting with the feel of the museum, "No trespassing" signs infront of the entrance can be somewhat confusing.  As can be locked entrance gates that you need to call in to unlock.

The museum turned out to not at all be what we expected.  It was much better.  This wasn't a normal museum building.  We gasped a little at the price and shivered a little as we waited outside for the next tour, but when we started heading down stairs, and down, and down, and down, the nature of the museum became clear.  The building itself was perhaps the most telling artifact: Stalin's nuclear missile proof bunker.  18 stories down, 0.6 kilometers below the earth at its deepest point, the top of the bunker was level with Moscow's subway system, the depth of which is shown here in this short clip:

Of course when we started out, the museum had the overwhelming feeling of Soviet kitch/hipster/BA, something the museum has certainly fostered to keep afloat in today's economy (keeping up this thing isn't cheap!) but even as the boys on the tour were laughing, pointing old guns at each other and trying on all the uniforms, maybe I tend to brood too much, but the fear that drove these people to build this thing kept forcing itself on my attention.  At the beginning of the tour they showed us a short history film (heavy on Soviet interpretation of course: the primary purpose of A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to cow the USSR) and then our tour guide started telling us about some of his own memories.  He couldn't have lived through any but the last 15 years of the war, but he remembered in no uncertain terms his dad coming home one day after a particularly tense day in the foreign affairs office, and telling him that if the US were to launch any missiles towards Moscow, he was to run to the metro station and hide there.  Not because it would be safer, but because "instead of being afraid in the house, we could all drink coffee and be afraid together."  The museum didn't include too many artifacts, it was still young, but it did have many dramatizations: sounds of bombs exploding, running through long corridors with blinking red lights, and getting to watch a member of our tour "launch" a missile to incinerate Manhattan.  Plenty of over dramatization, but still, chilling.

Maybe nobody has told you this before, but the Soviets were kind of fond of the color red.

In addition to the museum, Bunker 42 houses a conference room, a night club, a restaurant, and lots of space to rent.  Like I mentioned before, really anything to keep itself afloat.  Funding for such structures has dried up (and one can dream that it is because of decreased demand)

By the end of her visit, I was nowhere near ready to let her go, but R----- flew her way back to Florida and I packed myself off to Siberia, which will be the subject of the next post.