Modest Moral Virtues of the Bourgeoisie

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I'm in Time Online, Moscow's biggest and most famous netcafe. Billy Idol's 'Rebel Yell' is pumping on the stereo and I've just spent half an hour waiting for two skater boys with hardly any English to get my wi-fi working on my laptop. Finally they called in a guy who I knew was top brass because he was wearing a tie pin, and he sorted me out. So without further ado,

Day 1, September 9th

Day 1 was bureaucratic and arduous and has no pictures, but it does have a quite funny menu, so bear with me. Shamanic journeys often start with a difficult bit that you have to overcome by force of will in order to get to the good bit. Well, Siberia is full of shamans, so it figures that this one starts off the same.

I hardly slept on Thursday night. I was like a kid on Christmas Eve, and besides, I hadn’t yet packed the adaptor plugs or the coffee spoons and the words ‘adaptor’ and ‘spoons’ were echoing through my head all night. And now it’s half past five in the morning, in the rain, in the long-term car park of Dublin Airport, and my head is full of wool. (At least I have the adaptor and the spoons.) Ivan is worse. He didn’t finish packing till 4.55.

After all that the plane sits on the ground for an hour. I stupor my way through the first flight, not able to get properly asleep, only waking up for some synthetic egg. In Prague we wait for ages to board the Moscow flight, which turns out to also be delayed. Finally, hallelujah, the queue is moving, and there’ll be sleep and caffeine and a loo on the plane… except that Zsuzsana the hatchet-faced gate attendant is now shaking her head at us and not letting us through. "Ticket," she says. "I need ticket." People behind us are tutting. We show the boarding cards again. "No," she insists, "I need this," waving the little red bit of blotting paper you get with paper air tickets.

“Oops,” we explain, “they’re in our checked baggage.” All the holiday documents except the boarding cards went in there back in Dublin, in a fit of sleep-deprived logic.

“You need ticket,” she says, “we can’t let you on without a ticket. Standard practice everywhere.” Not when I flew through Cincinnati to LA, or when I flew through Frankfurt to Bangkok or through Copenhagen to Helsinki it wasn’t, I might mention. “Passport,” she says, sticking out her hand. She makes a phonecall ending with a chirpy “Ciao!” and a smile. Sounds like it’s sorted. “Okay?” I ask.

“No!” she snaps. “It’s not okay! The plane was already delayed and now more delayed because of you!”

We reel a bit. “Sit down,” she orders, and sends a man down to get the offending bag off the plane. When he comes back he’s red-faced and panting. Zsuzsana lectures us some more while checking our tickets, ending with ‘Never do that again.’ On the plane it’s like everyone is peering disapprovingly at us. This must be the legendary Eastern European contempt for customers, I think, surely in Russia it will be even worse.

We fly over stripy fields and copses that turn into huge plains of wheat and dark blobs of pine forest, and get served pasta in gravy, which is weird, and I re-read the guidebook slowly with my tired brain and oh god. Three different opinions on whether we have to declare our cash, and if the red channel isn’t open they will try to send us through the green channel, which is illegal and will get us in trouble. Three different forms to fill in, but they often run out of blanks, and if they do you’re in legal difficulties. Checks at passport control for evidence of travel insurance, which is (predictably) in our hold baggage. Bureaucrats who don’t cut you a moment’s slack and love to detain you for no reason and ask for bribes. A driver waiting for hours in the airport (‘and it’s often bedlam in there’) because of the delays and maybe getting bored and going home. And barely a word of Russian between us. Oh God. I imagine getting dragged off to a gulag, shrieking ‘But how can you do this to me? I teach sociology! Let me quote Marx for you!’

But passport control is okay, though I hold my breath and try very hard not to think the words ‘travel insurance’ too loudly. We meet a Dublin guy at the customs forms table who cheers me up. The customs guy does try to send us through the green channel, but when I plead ‘but the guidebook told us we had to!’ he stamps our forms with a good-humoured smile. And then, oh happy day, there’s the driver. He’s even spelt our names right.

He leads us down a flyover and leaves us on the roadside, saying ‘Vroom’ and wiggling his finger about. We wait, too tired to be nervous, and watch a posse of soldiers wandering about until he arrives back in a boxy car with no seatbelts, and off we drive through Moscow, through birch woods, low yellow sunshine, and many, many peeling Soviet apartment blocks with funny, haphazard wooden balconies. Billboards everywhere, like the second half of "Goodbye Lenin!". And this other alphabet coming at me at eighty miles an hour.

Madonna is on the radio, singing ‘I live the American dream’.

Ah, hotel. Shower. Bed. Sleeeep. At last. Maybe even getting up the energy for some sightseeing. But! There’s only one dinky little bed in room 330. We sigh and go back down to reception. “Impossible to change now,” the receptionist says, shrugging. “Is the hotel full?” “No,” says the other receptionist. “Yes,” says the first, at the exact same moment.

“But one of us will have to sleep on the floor,” I point out, getting another shrug in return.

So Ivan gets on the phone to The Russia Experience, pointing out that it says ‘twin bedded’ on absolutely everything we have from them, and they phone reception, and half an hour later we’re moved from 330 into the lovely, empty and twin-bedded 303, where I experience a total collapse.

Later, eat in the hotel restaurant. What would you order from this menu?

Fresh pressure juice
Vegetable in assortment juice
Chicken pulp
Squid rings in dough ‘Attack of clones’
Dishes from eggs in assortment
Cheese fantasy
Neat’s boiled tongue
Pies in assortment
‘Stylish feature’
‘Silence of lambs’
Boneless butt locket
Home-made meat pockets
‘Modest moral virtues of the bourgeoisie’
Apples with sugar hard boilings
Vines from Chili
Creative dessert

Well? I have Chicken Kiev, though I’m very tempted by the moral virtues, and some slightly brackish Georgian wine. There’s a mirrorball spinning, a disco light turning the bread first red and then green, and euro-trance-pop playing. Back in the room I read the safety notices:

"May we remind you that it is utterly dangerous to cover lightning appliances with items made of highly inflammable materials."

Goodnight Russia. Tomorrow, less bureaucracy and more pictures!


There were two things, completely different in Russian, both translated as ‘boneless butt locket’. What could that be? Rump steak medallions? Medallions are a little bit like lockets, sort of.

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