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St. Basil's
Welcome to Moscow! Since I'm out of pocket I'm mostly ignoring the touristy photos of the city. It's lovely. Consider this a placeholder for that fact. The last leg of a trip that had started mid-September meant heading out to Astrakhan; near mouth of the Caspian Sea. Yes, once again this visit continued a healthy theme of oddball conference spots, this time to talk about the Arctic.
What's in Astrakhan? As it happens, not much. There's a nice Kremlin (no, not that one) dating back to Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the region, but I think I was the only one to take the time for a visit. Once again with my boss, this was the part of the trip where we both started to hit our respective limits. Out of country, language, and still spending 95 percent of our time in the same hotel listening to countless presentations is a peculiar form of endurance test. To my memory, we hit peak loopiness right around the time we found an Italian restaurant. Or perhaps the following day where we made a point of hunting down a Route 66 themed bar, complete with Harley Davidson license plates on the walls, to try and assuage the feeling. It didn't work, but Russian brisket’s not bad. More fortunately, the trip for me was bookended by two days in Moscow,
Behemoth and Koroviev
Far more interesting for me was the little shrine to Mikhail Bulgakov in his old apartment. The Master and Margarita is one of those books that never leaves my mind, and the same holds for many of its fans. The whole place was a joy to visit. and I've got a few more things to say in that vein:
Know your Surroundings. Not once, but twice, taxi cabs successfully took us for a ride. Yes. That's their job, but typically it should not cost 30 USD to go a block, or 50 USD to transfer from an airport when the going rate turned out to be 5. In both cases I had some notions of what to do, but I hadn't refined my game plan. So in Moscow, I was almost certain that transferring by train would get us to the same block as our hotel, but I couldn't quite see it. It took a cabbie driving us in circles for ten minutes to really show the folly of our ways. In the latter, I didn't arrange for transfer from the airport, and didn't ask the nearby American for aid. Costly errors, but the nice part about not being a student is that these were mistakes my organization was willing to reimburse me for. At heart I try to be careful with money, and that has not changed when my costs are covered, but it does make the many times I screw a little easier to
bulgakov pt 2
The apartment stairwell is very much a part of the museum. It's "signed' by fans from all over the world. bear.
Know your job. Per usual it’s good to know exactly why I was doing any particular thing, and in Russia this meant planning accordingly for certain meetings and the like. But as the case went, it also meant knowing that at least once in the proceedings I would end up downing a considerable amount of vodka in toast after toast over the final night banquet. In drinking terms, this is a little like doing a marathon, and pacing turned out to be vital as we were staggering on to a plane at four in the morning.
Recharge. This is also key. Work travel’s not really fun travel. It’s a day job stacked atop another day’s worth of job set to an East Coast time delayed fuse. It can be satisfying, but the fun tends to be at the edges, meeting someone new, finding some good food, or the hours of free time when some wandering is possible. I feel like I have only learned it at the end of this trip, but it is vital to spend time doing something else. Otherwise my mental batteries eventually just run out. Anything else. Walking’s nice. Bring a book. Pick
Moscow art
It's nice. up a new show. Write the Great American Horror Novel. Stare at the wall and contemplate the infinity of time. Summon a Shoggoth. Whatever floats your boat.
Enjoy the time you have. This was easily the best part, but Moscow is a fascinating city. I had little time to check out the museums, or really do much more than wander down to Red Square and the surroundings a few times and check out the apartment of Mikhail Bulgakov. But I wouldn’t trade that for the world. To stop in Moscow is to wander through 500 years of history stacked atop each other. It’s to see a square flanked on all sides by the Church, the State, and Lenin. More recently, it’s also the site of a protestor nailing his genitals to the ground to make an extremely vivid statement. And a Linkin Park Concert, apparently. It was a lot to take in, especially on the first snow of a wintery October that caught Basil’s Church in an almost fairytale light. Some of it is beautiful, and some of it, past and present, is grim and oppressive. In the middle is the absurdity of it all, captured best by Bulgakov. I have loved his work the Master and Margarita since I first turned the pages in Russian Literature in high school, and it was with a lot of feeling that I mounted the lovingly graffiti’d stairwell to his fifth floor apartment.
Two months on the road, three conferences later, and that was more or less how I finished out, barring one day or more or less enforced exile on a farm in rural Slovenia while I waited for my plane and ate a baffling attempt at Tex-Mex in the restaurant. Coming back from it all has marked several major changes in my life, and it would have been enough on its own, except I happened to return to the United States the morning before the United States presidential election. I guess I’ve still been trying to process the personal change alongside the dissolution of my country’s political structures.
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