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Published: June 25th 2017
Geo: 55.75, 37.62
After being unceremoniously dumped at one of many Moscow train stations, we managed to track down one of the underground Metro stations. DH saw this as another attempt by me to save a couple of dollars by using the Russian metro (which, admittedly, was only a dollar each), but Moscow is famous for it's decorated underground stations which served as both nuclear bomb shelters during the cold war and propaganda vehicles (this underground communist paradise reminded its riders that Stalin and his party had delivered something substantial to the people in return for their sacrifices). DH might have appreciated the historical journey more if we weren't packing all of our worldly belongings on our backs, and discovering that Moscow attempts to be more tourist friendly started-and-ended with one sign posted by the ticket booth that used Roman characters. After that it came down to memorizing the Cyrillic spelling of our destination station and wandering around until something looked familiar. Somewhat surprisingly we were able to find our way and, even more surprisingly, we were able to find our nearby hotel, the aptly named Sleepbox Hotel.
We had seen capsule hotels in Japan but didn't
use them because they were very serious affairs used by Japanese businessmen to sleep off a drunken karaoke event (with all the body noises and smells that that entailed). While looking for a place to stay in Moscow I stumbled across a capsule-built-for-two complex that we just had to try. The timing could have been better- we had just come off a 7 day adventure in a tiny train cabin so the novelty of sliding into torpedo-sized sleeping berths wasn't as fun as it might have been otherwise. We did seem to have the entire complex to ourselves because apparently numerous tourists had cancelled their plans after the recent downing of the Malaysian Airliner and the mischief Putin's been up to in the Ukraine.
We were catching up with a river boat tour later but we decided that we'd head down to Red Square anyway so we'd have a walk that didn't involve shuffling behind a guy with a little blue flag. Moscow was always a significant player in Russian history even after Peter The Great built St Petersburg to be the new, opulent, European-like capital city, but for us, Moscow is/was the face of stern
communist Russia. The Red Square and the Kremlin didn't originate with the communists but numerous spy novels have created an inextricable link between them. Red Square doesn't actually have anything to do with communist 'red' but gets its name from a Russian word meaning 'beautiful'. The square was meant to serve as Moscow's main marketplace. It also became the site of various public ceremonies and proclamations including the very famous May Day parade that celebrates Russian military might (or at least enough military might to beat up on the neighbouring Ukraine). Perhaps more importantly, the Square was also the site of an outdoor KHL hockey game, and perhaps more important/painful than that, in 2013, Pyotr Pavlensky, a Russian performance artist, reportedly sat naked for an hour and a half on the square with a nail driven through his scrotum into the ground before he was removed by police- he said the stunt was a metaphor for "apathy, political indifference and fatalism in modern Russian society". Presumably Putin was not amused and personally drive a couple more nails through his scrotum??
After a short subway ride from our capsule hotel, we rounded a couple of corners and stood face-to-face with the
most iconic symbol of Moscow, St. Basil's Cathedral. In a somewhat odd twist in a former communist paradise, the largest, most expensive shopping centre in Russia borders Red Square- the GUM department store. It was rescued from the potential bourgeois scrap heap by the wives of major communist officials who obviously operated on the Marxist theory that "everyone is equal but we're just a little more equal than everyone else".
After watching the changing of the guard just outside the Kremlin, we jumped on a Hop-On Hop-Off bus that took us to many of the bigger attractions outside of the downtown core. It may not have the elegance of many European capitals but it is a beautiful city and well beyond the grey and characterless metropolis that we had expected.
After seeing all of the most exciting sights of Moscow, we headed down to the harbour, hooked up with our boat gang, got on a bus, went back downtown, and saw the same sights all over again. The biggest difference was the extraordinary number of bathroom stops we made, along with a healthy helping of souvenir stores. Third world travel has
forced us to develop extraordinary bladder control, and souvenirs are not for the homeless, so we amused ourselves by clocking how long it took to load or unload the bus. We did have a running narrative from the guide which did fill in a lot of the blanks for us and it was nice to get a Russian perspective on Russian and world events (although it's amazing how effective a state-controlled news/propaganda machine is at shaping opinions- even the English language version of rabid Russian TV that was broadcast on the boat would make Fox News or CNBC seem like balanced and dispassionate news agencies by comparison).
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Marlene S.
non-member comment
Please, tell me. Does it taste exactly the same??