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Published: January 30th 2009
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In preparation to devour
Melenie prepares to unleash herself upon the Russian salad buffet. Note every salad in this picture is smothered in mayonnaise - not your typical lettuce-toting, cherry tomato garnished fru-fru salad. Moscow. We weren't sure what to expect in Moscow. Drab soviet gray buildings and despondent faces, all with a healthy sprinkling of Vodka. Sadness or depression seemed to be a fair expectation, given the exorbitant hotel prices in Moscow (currently the most expensive city in the world - who would have thought).
It seems though gray and sad is far from today's Moscow. Colour seems to be the fashion of the day and blaring red hair dye the pinnacle of said fashion. People are dressed to impress - women on every corner sporting ridiculously impractical attire to emphasise that they are 'in' and cashed up. Infrastructure-wise, it was also far from our naive expectations of subway cars reborn from ramshackle freight trains. In short - Moscow is different - different from what you think. Its a modern, bustling city driven by the energetic spending of the noveau riche, or more precisely, by the reckless spending of those who pretend that they are.
Our first stop for the day was our guesthouse - one of the few reasonably priced accommodations in Moscow. Moscow has a shortage of normal accommodation. The minimum you will pay for a hotel room is about
Lost in translation
Interesting how cryllic (russian alphabet) read as English says funny things. In this case "stardogs" reads as "crapdogs" $300USD (or that's what my internet searching dredged up anyway) - and that is for a very simple 3 star effort. Hostels are steep as well, with room prices of at least $100USD. I guess this was the reason that so many blogs we read about Moscow always lasted for at most 2 days.
Anyway, back to our guesthouse. It was a simple little room in an apartment-turned-hostel - a common enterprise of Muscovites to cash in on desperate tourists looking for affordable lodging. Our host was a rather sullen bloke who barely managed a grunt, let alone a smile during our entire check-in process.
After dumping our gear, we went for a walk around the local neighborhood. Russian neighborhoods are very European - which is what you would expect, since Russians are European. But still, I was expecting gray concrete apartments with nary a colour in sight. Yes, I know the whole Gorbachov modernisation was almost 20 years ago, but still, old habits should die hard, no? So my ignorance took a good thrashing while we took in views of local suburban streets.
Our 3 hours of wandering took us past many local sights - most
A russian street
Looks like any other street in any other European city. simply too normal to bother writing about. Which was a tad disappointing. Where were the babushkas sporting head scarves, and the old men crowding outside grocery stores with food stamps to get their cigarette ration. And what about those crouching Cossack dancers - shouldn't they be dancing on every corner in place of the teenage hip-hop wannabes? And most importantly, why wasn't anybody we met called Vlad or Alexandrovich or Natasha. Where, my friends, where has all the russian-ness gone? And more importantly, why wasn't some enterprising Russian running some tourist trap to ensnare all us 'type-cast-believing' tourists just so that we could go back home and tell everybody just how russian Russia really is.
The fact is - it looks a lot like any other western country - lots of white people driving big cars and wearing fancy clothes. A Macdonalds on every corner, flanked by a KFC and some local fast-food look-alike. Seems we weren't going to get our jolly 'post-modern-with-repressed-communism-history' experience that we had naively been expecting. (note: there are of course plenty of sights, including the Kremlin, opulent museums and plenty of famous literary sights - more on that in tomorrow's blog)
However, what
Crunchables
Dumplings, particularly fried, seem to be a popular snack over here we did get, and that we had been expecting, was to eat some jolly good Russian food. Russian food is heavy - very heavy. But surprisingly, the thing that they have the biggest selection of is .... salad. Yes, wonderfully light, healthy salad. But salad in Russia does not mean rabbit food with a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar. These Russians know how to make a salad - copious amounts of mayonnaise, lots of eggs - all those wonderful things that make your arteries clog but taste just so very good. Back home, we frequent a Russian restaurant to exclusively partake of Russian salads. So imagine our delight when we struck upon a salad buffet. Oh man - it was heaven! 31 flavours of salad - and none sporting a lettuce leaf or a cherry tomato. Particular favourites were the raw herring salad and what we can only describe as amazing buttery-dill-rosemary potatoes. Alas, no sign of Man's Prank salad, a favourite at our Russian restaurant back home, which is a salad combining potato chips, eggs and potatoes - and of course, copious amounts of Russian mayonnaise.
After over-indulgence at the salad buffet, we decided to walk for another few
Melenie finally finds a piroshkis
Supposedly a common snack in Moscow, it tooks us quite awhile to actually track down one of these tasty treats. hours to burn off all that mayonnaise. We made occasional stops to sample a few local delicacies, including blueberry crepes and piroshkies. Our wanderings finally brought us to the main tourist drag, Arbat Street. Once the home of many the busker, juggler, and street mime - its now pretty much a big shopping boulevard lined with souvenir shops. We did however stumble across a very cool street show where these Russian guys did some oh-very-cool robot dancing and acrobatics.
So that was it for day 1. The aim had been to just wander and take in the normalness of Moscow, and hopefully to be entertained by some abnormality. We definitely did see a lot of normal, but sadly, not too much on the abnormal side. Stay tuned for tomorrow, where we actually go see some of the sights, including the Kremlin, Red Square, St. Basils and most impressively, some mighty huge rooms full of treasure.
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