Moscow

It didn’t take long after leaving Paris yesterday for me to start experiencing Russia. On my flight to Moscow I happened to sit next to a Russian man close to my age who introduced himself as Kazma. On the surface Kazma didn’t seem to be unusual at all, but after talking with him for an hour or so I discovered he’s had a very unique life in Russia. Kazma was selected at the age of 5 to train to be part of the most elite hockey club in Russia: CSKA, also known as the ‘Red Army’. Throughout his entire childhood, Kazma devoted his life to playing hockey, and after playing hockey for the most elite junior team in Russia for several years, he was recruited to play hockey in Toronto. Eventually Kazma made it to the NHL, playing for the Chicago Blackhawks for two years before sustaining a career-ending injury to his shoulder. It was fascinating to talk to Kazma about his experience growing up in Russia, and about the friends he made in the world of hockey. Kazma listed off several star NHL players who were personal friends of his. Unfortunately I don’t know hockey very well, so I couldn’t discuss it with him in detail, but the whole experience was pretty amazing. Kazma currently is working in finance for a large Russian energy company, and occasionally works with the Russian billionaire who recently bought the New Jersey Nets. Kazma also likes to race sports cars with his friends, and showed me several pictures on his phone of his yellow Lamborghini.

This morning I left my cozy room at a guesthouse near Moscow’s Sheremetyvo Airport and waited at the nearest train station for a ride into the city. The ambiance was exactly like I imagined rural Russia would be like: crisp, cold air, a desolate train station with a few locals bundled tightly in warm clothing, and the silence broken only occasionally by old Soviet-era trains rumbling by. The ticket office was a formidable brick building painted pink, with only one tiny opening about four inches by ten inches on the side. A well dressed Russian man named Sergei communicated on my behalf with the mysterious people on the other side of the opening, and 49 rubles bought me a ticket into town. After waiting for several minutes, another train arrived that looked as if it had just rolled in from the USSR. Sergei indicated that this was the train we would be taking into Moscow, and we both found a seat in an interior that looked like that of an outdated American school bus.

As it turns out, Sergei also works in finance in Moscow. His English wasn’t quite as good as Kazma’s, but I gathered that he works with several large banks in Russia, and occasionally travels to Siberia for business, among other Russian destinations. Sergei is originally from Kazan, a city of great cultural significance about 500 miles east of Moscow. For some reason Sergei was eager to show me pictures of his cat, and when he flipped through a few of them on his phone I could understand why. Sergei’s cat is a full grown leopard. He flipped through picture after picture as we both laughed to ourselves. One picture was of the leopard sitting in the passenger seat of Sergei’s car and leaning out the window. Another picture was showed Sergei holding the leopard on a leash as the animal pulled ferociously away. Several others showed the leopard lounging and Sergei petting the beast like it was a house cat. Sergei used his limited English vocabulary to articulate to me exactly what kind of cat this was: ‘Big cat! Dangerous cat!’

I found out the hard way today that Russia can be a real challenge to get around in. Very few people speak any English at all, and all the signs on the streets and in the metro are in Russian (with its Cyrillic alphabet), and no accompanying English translation. With that said, the challenge makes it more of an adventure. After arriving at the train station in Moscow I literally wandered aimlessly for twenty minutes before I finally found an ATM where I could pull out some Russian rubles. Wandering through the metro system was a fascinating experience in itself. The turnstiles and ticket booths are completely antiquated and decrepit, and long, rumbling escalators transport commuters deep into the dark belly of the system. Train platforms are dimly lit by ornate chandeliers hanging from the ceiling above, and grungy marble covers nearly every surface of the walls. While using the metro I felt as if I could be in Soviet-era Russia sometime during the cold war, and when I arrived at the station closest to my hostel I was welcomed by hammer and sickle emblems prominently featured on the ceiling and walls.

Visiting the Kremlin in Moscow is obviously an essential experience for any traveler to Russia, and although I didn’t quite know what the Kremlin was about until today, I was excited to experience it for myself. After another brief adventure navigating the metro system, I arrived at the entrance to the Kremlin at its west wall. I guess I didn’t quite know what to expect inside, but I was surprised to find a number of ornate Russian orthodox cathedrals. I spent about an hour wandering through Assumption Cathedral, Archangel Cathedral and Annunciation Cathedral. Each cathedral featured bright golden onion domes and whitewashed walls on the exterior, and dimly lit depictions of various Russian orthodox saints painted in red and blue and gold covered the walls. I was surprised at how religious the whole place felt. I always imagined Russia as a place that had eradicated religion and allegiance to God in favor of communism and allegiance to the State. I guess I just wasn’t aware of how much of a religious presence there still is and how deeply rooted Russian culture is in it. My favorite of all the cathedrals was Annunciation Cathedral. I enjoyed slipping into the narrow entrance through the tall wooden doors at the front of the building and exploring the tiny, ornately decorated interior. The exterior was particularly fascinating to me, and I took a series of pictures of the white and gold building glowing in the morning sunlight.

A short walk back through the Kutafya Tower that marks the entrance to the Kremlin, then along the side of the structure towards Red Square, took me to a long line that led to Lenin’s mausoleum. To me, seeing the decades-old remains of Russia’s greatest communist leader is more grotesque than symbolic, but it is an iconic experience in Russia, and I couldn’t pass it up. A pathway to the museum took me past several monuments to Russia’s most famous and revered leaders, and eventually looped back around to the entrance to the mausoleum. Young Slavic men dressed in Russian military uniforms stood stoically at every turn and quietly pointed me to the center of the building. As I circled the dark, silent interior of the building I observed the pale white glow of Lenin’s face and hands in the center of the room. He was dressed in a conservative suit and tie, but was much shorter than I imagined him. Besides that, the remains of the man looked less like a human being than a Maddame Tussade’s wax model, or even a stone carving. It’s interesting to me that Russia still maintains the mausoleum and even (apparently) reveres the man. I wonder at what point the country will decide that it has entirely abandoned communism and finally put the man to rest in the ground somewhere.

The exit to Lenin’s tomb led me straight into the Red Square, and I was excited to finally see St. Basil’s Cathedral. Unfortunately a gigantic temporary stage and bleachers is in the square this week and is blocking the best views of the iconic Cathedral, but I still enjoyed wandering around the immediate perimeter of it and snapping pictures of the wild looking domes on top. The interior of the cathedral really surprised me. I guess I imagined one gigantic room inside with a series of smaller chapels on the edges of the building, but it’s actually a number of different rooms inside; most of them decorated with Russian orthodox artwork similar to what I saw in the cathedrals at the Kremlin. I wandered up a few narrow stone staircases in St. Basil’s, and through stone rooms covered with intricate patterns that resembled vines. The place felt very old and unique, and more like monasteries I’ve visited in Greece than any kind of cathedral I’ve ever been in.

This afternoon I learned the hard way how huge and difficult to navigate Moscow can be. I originally wanted to go to a museum called ‘The Gorky House’ and began walking in the direction I thought it was in. The street I was on must have been twice the size of State Street back home, and was filled with cars rushing by beneath towering Soviet architecture, but despite the size of the street I still had a difficult time locating it on my map of Moscow. To make a long story short, I wandered aimlessly through the outskirts of the city before finally deciding that my efforts trying to decipher the map and Cyrillic street signs were getting me nowhere. Finally I walked all the way back to the metro station nearest to my hotel, but that getting around beneath the city wasn’t any easier. Every dilapidated sign hanging in the dimly lit tunnels is exclusively in Russian. Also, unlike other metro systems, when lines converge at a single station that station has a different name for each line (and, of course, every name is in Russian). Originally I thought that getting completely lost in metro tunnels several hundred feet beneath Moscow was terribly inconvenient and frustrating, but looking back, it was definitely an adventure. I tried to communicate with a few very Slavic-looking police officers stationed in the tunnels (none of whom spoke a word of English), and finally found the metro line that took me to my next Russian adventure.

Sanduny Baths is the oldest bathhouse in Russia (called a ‘banya’ by Russians), and has been operating since 1808. When I consider that 1808 was before the British recognized the United States as an independent country, it really puts the tradition of the Russian bathhouse into perspective. After pulling off all my clothes and covering myself with a linen sheet, I walked into a giant tile-covered room featuring showers, a couple luke-warm pools of water, and plenty of naked Russian men. I began my banya experience by showering up, then observing my new Russian friends in an effort to avoid breaching any kind of banya etiquette. The banya experience is simple enough: visitors spend a few minutes at a time in the ‘parilka’ (steam room), often beating themselves lightly with bundles of birch branches (called ‘venik’), then return to the cooler room and submerse themselves into the pools of water to cool down before returning to the parilka.

As I entered the parilka I was instantly drenched in my own sweat, and sitting for just a few minutes in the room left me light-headed and feeling as if the tips of my extremities were literally cooking. According to my Lonely Planet book, the experience, ‘appears sadomasochistic, and there are theories tying the practice to other masochistic elements of Russian culture’. At the time I assumed the experience was meant to be enjoyable, and I tried to enjoy it as much as possible, but after reading about it in the Lonely Planet book, I definitely agree the banya is a bit sadomasochistic. I returned to the parilka repeatedly, and even beat myself with the birch branches as naked Russian men lounged exhaustedly nearby. Back in the tile-covered room I soaked in the pools of water and watched as the others collapsed into the pool like the polar bear at Hogle Zoo. Several of the Russian men used a long ladle to pour water into a scalding brick furnace in the room, and at one point they combined eucalyptus oil with the water to create a soothing, pleasant aroma in the steamy air.

My final activity of the day was a stark contrast to the sadomasochistic experience of the banya: a visit to the nearby Nikulin Circus. While researching Russia I had read that Russians take their circus very seriously, and I had to experience it first-hand. I was surprised by what I found.

I’ve always thought of attending the circus in America as a very tacky, childish affair. Nonetheless, it’s entertaining to watch parades of elephants and tigers, daring stunt men racing around metal cages in motorcycles, and undignified clowns honking their plastic noses and piling more bodies than anyone would imagine is possible into a tiny car big enough for no one. The Russian circus is very different. Russians tend to be more concerned with maintaining dignity than Americans do, and their circus certainly reflects that. The circus in Russia is very well organized and well presented. It has the feel of a professional acrobatic show, and the event is treated more like a Broadway musical than an American carnival.

The show began with the Russian host introducing a few dignitaries to the crowd, then presenting a skilled trapeze artist. The woman swung back and forth on the trapeze, doing flips in the air while flashing her wide smile for all to see. Later acts included jugglers (including one who juggled several large plastic rings while bouncing a ball on his head), a girl who contorted her body and spun several hula-hoops around each of her limbs, a girl who creatively climbed to the top of a long rope before wrapping herself in it and falling nearly to the bottom, a show with trained animals at the end. The animal show was my favorite part of the event. Two leopards, two black panthers, and three large tigers entered an enclosed ring with their two trainers and performed for the crowd by walking skillfully across narrow beams and jumping between several tall platforms. As I returned to my hotel I was reminded of Sergei and his own leopard, and I actually enjoyed navigating the contorted, confusing tunnels of the Moscow metro.