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I think I left off on Saturday evening.
Paul and I decided to go out and grab a few drinks with his friend Melissa, who is studying here in Moscow, somewhere downtown. While he was fixing up our dinner of onions and rice... and a salad, I was charged with going across the street to the market and grabbing a few beers.
This "market" was more reminiscent of a 7/11 that was shrunk to about 10% of its normal size, and there were only two Russian ladies inside. About half of the store was dedicated to alcohol, however about 99% of the bottles were completely unrecognizable. Drinking in Russia is incredibly casual, and until recently (although most people choose not to follow the new law) public drinking was completely legal. However, they have yet to figure out (along with clean water) how to package drinks into containers of 6, 12, or more. Thus, stores are left to offer a selection of hundreds of different single bottles, which made my job very difficult. I walked in and uttered the seemingly requisite "anglyetsky" to the worker, and she immediately shuffled over to help me. I was forced to point at the
heineken and miller lite bottles (i will be more adventurous when paul is there to translate for me) and use my fingers to note how many I desired, but the lady kept turning around to verify the number... which made me realize how badly I needed to work on my basic Russian.
I got back to his apartment and we munched on the surprisingly good dinner before heading out to meet Melissa. It was only about a 15 minute walk, but whereas I had the mental image of us meeting at a classy Russian bar for a few relatively quiet hours, she led us towards "Pancho Villa", a Hispanic/Spring Break/Tequila bar right smack dab in the middle of Moscow. Fortunately for us, the bouncers let me in, as it seems that while the drinking age is more or less disregarded, bars do tend to set an age limit of 20 or 21 to push away the teens.
The bar met all of the stereotypes for what we would presume Russians would think of our neighboring country. They even had a mariachi band playing live music the entire night. Drinks were incredibly expensive, but we managed to break it
up by walking to the neighboring market and sneaking in a few beers every once in a while. One of the more interesting lessons of the night was centered upon Russian relationships. According to Paul, (and verified by others that we met), Russian girls tend to get married around 19 or 20. If they do not marry immediately, and it seems that mostly urban girls are tending to shy away from this alternate approach, they instead "choose" a "sponsor"; ie a wealthy man in his 30's who, in return for having the girl as his young, beautiful mistress (as he is almost always married), spends incredulous amounts of money on the girl. Thus, while it appeared that there were tons of single women dancing around in the bar, one had to be wary of the hoards of older men sitting and chatting at the bar, for there was a good chance that the girls were already taken. A few guys we met laughed about how they had experienced several nights where they danced with the same girl and bought her tons of drinks only to end the night with a good bye as the girl went back with her sponsor.
We managed through this predicament, but it made for a much more challenging night than one would be used to elsewhere.
Sunday was a bit rough, and we opted to watch 2 different movies until our naps took us to about 5pm. At that point we decided to make for the Red Square, where we were met by great weather and surprisingly small crowds. Most of the tours were closed for the major landmarks (St. Basils, GUM, Kremlin, Lenin Mausoleum, etc), but we managed to see and take pictures of all of the major places before walking back to the apartment. I will most likely try to find an English bus or bike tour of the city in the next day or two before attempting to pick and choose which exact places to pay to visit.
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