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Published: October 19th 2007
'It is vital to spend the few hours it takes to master the Cyrillic alphabet before you go, otherwise you'll have trouble deciphering the names of streets, metro stations and most importantly the names of stations along the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian routes.' I read this sentence in the Trans-Siberain Handook as we departed from Warsaw on a twenty hour train journey that took us to Moscow. I scan quickly down the neatly presented Cyrillic alphabet, with its Roman alphabet equivalent listed alongside. Cyrillic is derived from Greek, so everything is recognisable, but not quite the same, with a few curls and dots and character reversals thrown in. 'A' in Roman is 'a' in Cyrillic. 'B' is 'b' but with a horizontal line coming out of the top of the 'b'. No problem. Next inexplicably is 'V', which is like a capital 'B' but with a the bottom and top of the 'B' extending horizontally a fraction to the left of the vertical line. I can get used to that. 'G' is like a lower case 'r' but with a couple of curly bits thrown in for good measure. 'D' is like a lower case 'n' but with a horizontal line close to the botttom with more curly bits attached. Hmm - a bit more tricky.
The time it has take for you to read this is about the same amount of time I devoted to 'mastering' the Cyrillic alphabet, eager to get back to my one thousand page pulp fiction yet hugely entertaining John Irving novel which I was battling to get through. It was late and i needed an easy read to get me off to sleep, I reasoned. I would go back to the mastering of Cyrillic in the morning since our train arrived at around one o'clock the following afternoon.
After breakfast the following day - tea and cake thoughtfully provided by our conductor, I was ready to take another glance at the Cyrillic. Except that all of a sudden it appeared that we were entering the outskirts of Moscow and the lure of the passing urban scene through the window was too great a draw to be distracted by the apparent necessity to learn a foregin alphabet. We had not figured on Moscow time being three hours ahead of Warsaw (our train tickets had the schedule in local times), and the train was nearing its destination rather than being a long way off. I took another very quick look and convinced myself it kind of looked like normal alphabetic characters and we would probably get by. One vowel or consonant sort of looked like another, and we reasoned that we would, with approximate translation and the employment of phonetics, probably be all right - at least to get to the safety and comfort of our hostel which was pre-booked and we had approximate directions. The metro would be in English and Cyrillic anyway, surely?
We arrived in Moscow on time at about one o'clock (though it felt like ten in the morning) refreshed and ready to take on the local transport system, heavy rucksacks in tow and armed with a small but fairly well presented metro map on the inside cover of our guidebook and a the translation of six of the thirty-two Cyrillic charcters.
The station was huge but sparse and grey - the very assumed image that people tend to have of Soviet architecture. I cast about for an exit sign or Metro sign, but nothing is in English, or even in Roman alhpabet. All Cyrillic and completely incomprehensible. No doubt there was a sign for the exit in Cyrillic, but it was not obvious in any way. We also had no Russian money (Rubles) and would need an ATM for cash to pay for our metro trip. We decide to head out of the front of the station and try and get orientated from there. It was raining. It would rain for our entire stay in Moscow. The sky was as grey as the surrounding buidlings lending an air of uniform bleakness to the environment. Signage was not quite absent but distinctly lacking - we were hoping for at least the classic tourist information blue italicised 'i', but nothing.
At a loss, we go back inside and finally see a big red M pointing to a different exit and figure that this must be the Metro and surely there will be an ATM somewhere along the route. We take this exit which leads onto a busy street full of tiny kiosks selling magazines, papers and refreshements. There is also a row of four festival type portaloos, with what appears to be a very small shop in the end one, with a very large surly looking women sitting inside. Are these the only public loos, and what is the large surly woman selling?
We finally locate the Metro and an ATM after traipsing back into the station, and buying a Metro ticket from the large surly looking woman was fairly simple. We even managed to trot out a few of our newly acquired phrases, to which of course she mumbled back something completely incomprehnsible.
Next we had to find our line - one of two lines that intersected at this Metro stop. Signs were in Cyrillic and Roman, so no problem there, and even after having to change lines, we arrived at our destination in very quick time due to the efficient Metro system, which is entertainingly named on the posters: 'Moscow Rapid Transportation System'. Unfortunately, that is where the Roman alphabet signage ended, and our four hour journey to the hostel covering a distance of less than a mile, began. Getting off the metro train, there was two options, left and right, and incomprensible Cyrillic signs pointing in each direction. We choose the right exit, merely on the basis that it was closer to us than the left exit. We chose the wrong exit! After what felt like miles of underground tunnels, but was probably only a few hundred metres, we finally emerged onto street level and started trying to orientate with our tiny, inadequate guidebook map.
The street names on the map were all Roman alphabet - the signs on the street were all Cyrillic. The packs began to weigh heavily on our backs as we glanced from guidebook to street name and back again, but to no avail. No sense could be made, and any attempt at phonoteic translation went awry. Sarah spots one sign in Roman alphabet called Bibliotecque am Lenina, and theorises that we might have got the wrong Metro station, but otherwise there was nothing even close when trying to translate street names with the guidebook's Roman equivalent. We decided to head off down a side street in the hope of finding something looking vaguely recognisable - perhaps a landmark or another Metro station. My neck was starting to hurt under the weight of the rucksack. Sarah was grimacing - she suddenly had the overwhelming urge to go to the loo, brought on no doubt by the intensification of the rain, now beating down hard. We resolved to try and find a cafe, have a drink and re-orientate ourselves.
We turned down another side street and entered a covered courtyard area of a funky looking bar with huge bright coloured murals on the outside wall. Whilst Sarah made a dash for the toilet, I hovered outside guarding our rucksacks, and entertained myself by watching the spectacle inside the bar - a ballroom dancing lesson was going on with well-to-do young-to-middle-aged couples tango-ing round the tables to a Brazilian teachers instruction, with a Russian translater calling his moves. All this at two o'clock in the afternoon! The murals on the wall were all rock and pop related, with huge tributes to The Beatles, pictures of David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and such like, and signatures of famous rock stars - there was even an autograph of Peter Frampton amongst others. The authenticity of these autographs is perhaps dubious...
Sarah done, we finally managed to locate ourselves on the map after a lot of searching around the very small printed street names in the guidebook, and i had done a reccy in the rain to verify or whereabouts, getting soaked in the process. We concluded that we had indeed managed to emerge from the Metro stop 'Biblioteque am Lenina'. Following this important discovery and my sincerely apology for ignoring Sarah's accurate interpretation of our whereabouts earlier, we managed to get to grips with (some of) the intracacies of the Russian Metro. Unlike the UK, where two or more different lines intersect, more often than not there is a metro station for each different line rather than one metro station servicing each line. Each metro station has its own exit and they are all interlinked by long, complex underground passages (rather like the tunnel from Monument to Bank, if you know your London Underground!). Thus we had got off at the correct Metro stop, but chosen unwisely to go right instead of left when still underground and emerged at a different Metro exit.
We discovered in the cafe that this particular intersection had four different lines with four different Metro stations. We therefore, due to our lack of command of the Cyrillic alphabet (I was rue-ing my thrist for throwaway novels at this point), realistically had only a one in four chance of getting the right exit in the first place. We consoled ourselves with this knowledge, as we happily trotted off in the direction of our hostel, an hour and a half into our epic search for our hostel, as the rain beat steadily down.
A fifteen minute walk later (it would have been two if we had got off at the correct stop), we arrived at the street we believed our hostel was located - the concisely named Afansevsfy Pereulok. Don't even ask me what the Cyrillic for that is! All we had to do now was to locate number 1/33, and hopefully a sign above the hostel door - 'Hostel Mosc' would not be too much to ask...
We went left and then right along this street, but buildings with street numbers on them were few and far between, much less any kind of sign indicating what the building was. The signs there were - were of course in Cyrillic. I stopped and asked a few people. There seemed to be a consistency in answers that we had to lead us to head away from the street we were on - the very street we felt sure the hostel was located. We turned into a main, pedestrianised shopping street called 'Arbat' before we would get to the actual street we needed. A couple of hundred metres or so down this street we were once again unsure of our whereabouts, and the rain is hammering down, so we decided on yet another cafe stop and detailed consultation of the miniscule map (despite the 'Arbat' being decidely touristy we still had not come across a tourist info to pick up a decent city map!). Besides, Sarah needed the loo again...
Its Sarah's turn to do the reccy, so she headed off into the rain as I nurse my coffee and smoke a cigarette, trying to read my book (still on the John Irving) and trying not to worry about Sarah out there on her own at the hands of the Russian mafia. 'I'll only start to worry after about twenty minutes', I reassure myself.
Thirty minutes later and still no sign of Sarah. I would occassionly, nervously glance out of the window to see if I could see her coming down the street, but I kept telling myself that there is no point doing this. If I did see her in the street she would be in the cafe seconds later, so I try to read, but cannot. What if some apparently friendly person sees her struggling with a map, and then offers to help only to lead down a dark alley and... ?
What if Sarah wanders off into the wrong neighbourhood?
What is Sarah ends up on a website as a Russian mail order bride? (not that I look at thse websites, of course)
Forty minutes had gone by and I decided to call, even though I know Sarah has her phone in her bag, and rarely answers anyway. But then minutes later Sarah does call me back, unaware that I had left a message and unaware how worried I was becoming, to tell me that she had finally located the hostel, and that (of course) we had walked right past it earlier.
In looking for 1/33, as luck would have it at 3/33 there was a Russian language school for English speakers wanting to learn Russian - the sign for this was fortunately in English! Sarah went in an enquired as to the location of the address. A very kind lady who spoke very good English informed Sarah on looking at the address that she presented for the hostel, that the 'M' preceeding the street name 'Afansvesky Pereulot' effectively meant 'small road' which was a side street off the main street ''Afansvesky Pereulot' of the same name. The kind lady even printed Sarah a map off the internet and marked exactly where the hostel should be. This small road we had already been down together on the way to the main street that was its namesake, so Sarah was still dubious since we had seen no signs - one would expect that a hostel aimed at foreign, English speaking visitors, would be well signposted somehow. The kind lady then suggested that Sarah take a course in Russian, to which Sarah politely, though maybe follishly, declined.
But Sarah trusted this advice and went back to the location indicated on her new map. After some more searching and impending panic, the 'Hostel Mosc' was finally located with a sign in small letters 'HM' - barely ten centimers high, above a small inocuous door.
Sarah was tired, wet and weary from her search in the rain and we needed some food, so stopped for a bite. I was just relieved that the mafia had not claimed my new bride and sent her to Siberia for a lifetime of slave labour. Not long after, we found the hostel and happily climbed the four floors to the hostel, only to be met with a final complication in that the ground floor of the building was actually the first floor, so we had gone up a flght of stairs too much. Even this didn't deter our spirits as we sussed this out fairly quickly, and we were soon inside our hostel and drying out, heavy wet boots dispensed with finally and settling in to cups of tea, four hours after emerging from the wrong Metro station.
The following days in Moscow were spent in just as much confusion and getting lost on many occassions. We later discovered that there is no such thing as 'tourist information' in Moscow, although our hostel did eventually provide us with a reasonable city map. Despite growing confidence in our ability to negotiate Moscow, there were just as many incidences of getting lost, difficulties locating entrances to places of interest and even achieving the seemingly simple task of crossing the road in our final two days as there were on our first two days. To spare the reader the details but for the benefit of record:
1. In another incident of Sarah desperately needing the loo, we spot some portalloos off and head off over. Same as at the Metro station the day of our arrival, there is a line of four with the end one occupied by a large, surly woman in what appears to be a small shop. As Sarah tries to open one of the other doors the woman shouts something at us. We realise that the surly woman is taking entrance fees to the toilets - 13 Rubles - about 25 pence! What a place to work - the inside of a portaloo.
2. It took us nearly two hours to get home when we went the wrong way on the Metro, including at last half an hour wandering round the same cavernous underground system in the hectic rush hour.
3. Walking right past the door to the 'Kremlin Armoury', one of Moscow's biggest tourist draws, because it was simply a side door with no discerning signage indicating it was the entrance - neither in Cyrillic or Roman alphabet.
4, Not being able to locate the 'Yalki Palki' restaurant (which apparently literally translates as 'bleedin 'ell') on the first floor of a building despite being able to see it clearly from the outside of the building.
5. To cross one particularly busy street, we had to first cross two roads at right angles, waiting at least two mintues for a 'green man' to allow us to cross (it seems almost a criminal offence to cross the road at any other time - I certainly would not risk it even if there were no traffic), then going under a subway before finally turning back on ourselves and crossing a further two roads - probably the best part of a kilometre walk to cross 50 metres of road. No wonder Communism finally crumbled - it took that much time to cross a street!
6. Encountering near blind panic (well I was - Sarah appeared quire relaxed), as we exited the Metro on our way to the Trans-Siberian Express with forty minutes before departure, and there being no signs to the train station. We guessed left. This time we got it right!
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7. And finally, once the station found, the platform for our train for the Trans-Siberian Express not being marked at all - the only giveaway being the big crowd of nervous looking westerners wandering about in the rain trying to ask Russian officials if this was the platform for the train to Beijing.
Whilst the Russians are happy to take the tourist dollar, they are not really bothered either way if you are there or not. There is very little help or encouragement for visitors arriving, departing and trying to navigate the city, its public transportation and places of interest. The almost complete lack of tourist information is a testament to this, and the effort put in to transgress the language barrier is minimal (how many Russian signs do you see in London?). With regards to tourism and attitudes to foreign visitors, Moscow is minding its own business and getting on with daily life, and if you are there then its up to you to make of it what you will. Maybe this is what foreign travel should be like. If you want to visit a Country, then you have to do it their way. This is what it is like for everyone else, the millions of locals who actually inhabit the place, so why should visitors be treated any differently to anyone else? One might argue that visitors wanting to experience an authentic picture of life in the city are getting exactly that - nothing more and nothing less.
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Claire
non-member comment
Sort it out!
Sarah and her pesky bladder! You brave things, I think I would have been heading home now if that were me. All credit to you for perseverance, tenacity and teamwork. (not sure where the big words have come from). Take care out there my lovelies. Thinking of you, Claire xxx