Well, friends, as much as this account needs a proper conclusion, I should let you know, in the interests of transparency, that I have been back in the homeland for almost two weeks now. Yes, I know, I’m a fraud.
Here’s a joke to soothe the pain of deceit, though:
Brezhnev flies to the United States to meet with Nixon. After hours of exhausting talks, the two leaders decide to go to the banks of the Potomac to have a heart to heart. Nixon brings a bottle of very expensive California wine.
“What’s the occasion, friend?” asks Brezhnev, “what money are we drinking on?”
“See that bridge over there?”
“Yeah.”
“We were supposed to build it for $2 million in six months. We built it in four months for $1.5 million. That $500,000—that’s the money we’re drinking on.”
After a few months, Nixon reciprocates the visit and arrives in Moscow. After the official state business, Brezhnev and Nixon go to talk heart to heart on the banks of the Moscow river.
“So, Leonid, what’s the money we’re drinking on?”
“See that bridge over there?”
“No.”
“That’s the money we’re drinking on.”
Final Brown Count: 54 (remember, these aren’t individuals, these are sightings, which can involve one happy mustachioed desi, or a whole throng of sweating, salwar-kameezed tourists)
So yes—where I last left off, the relatives had just arrived in Moscow. At this point, of course, the whole flavor of Russia changed—from a public-transport-riding, street-food-eating, shirtless experience, suddenly everything was paid for, and there was no way I could hide my foreignness behind my knowledge of Russian.
The parents arrived first, and much of that day was taken up by my dad being thoroughly dissatisfied by the apartment they had picked in Moscow, saying so loudly, and the lady from the apartment company finally agreeing, after much humming and hawing, to move us to a different property (in the next building, by the way), one in which there was actually A/C in two rooms! Let me remind you that in a country of even fewer working climate control units than independent media outlets, this was quite a luxury. Amazingly, we were on Tverskaya St., which is probably the single most famous street in Moscow, and just a stone’s throw away from Yeliseevsky grocery store, which is in turn probably the most famous grocery store in Russia, let alone Moscow.
Let me tell you about this store: from ceiling to floor, there are amazing decorations and carvings. There are massive chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The service is actually friendly. And it remains the only store in Russia where I have seen tortellini. Yeliseevsky became our food source during our time at Tverskaya No. 8. My dad claimed we were “living like locals” because we weren’t eating in restaurants the whole time, but shopping at the fanciest grocery store in the country was hardly the local life.
But their first night in Russia, we went out for Georgian food.
Prior to coming to Russia, I thought I was well-acquainted with the great cuisines of the world. Surely, if it was delicious, it had found its way to the palates of American foodies (and less picky eaters like me), right? Wrong. Friends, let me tell you, when it comes to mutual awareness of cooking styles, there remains an Iron Curtain so fearsome that even 20 years of free-ish trade haven’t budged it. The world is still, unbelievably, inexcusably, woefully unaware of the joys of Georgian food. The khachapuri (cheese bread), the lobio (mashed or boiled bean dish), the eggplant dishes!
If pressed to describe the cooking style, I would say it is somewhere between eastern Mediterranean and, well, Indian, but with some Central/ East Asian influence as well. The use of olive oil and red wine points westward, but the spices used with their grilled meats are awfully subcontinental. The red lobio we had was a whole lot like rajma. And then there are the boiled pork dumplings (which we did not have, naturally) which are awfully reminiscent of something from northern China, or of Nepalese momos.
Basically, it was really frigging tasty. If I knew anything about restaurants (or making food at all), I would open a Georgian restaurant.
Anyway, the other great thing about this particular Georgian restaurant was that it was a lot like Disneyland. The management had taken great pains to recreate a highly idealized Georgian village feel, complete with fake grape vines hanging from the ceiling, fake cobblestones on the floor, fake wooden beams holding everything together, and fake smiles on the wait-staff. I almost began to wonder where the winding turnstiles were.
The restaurant was in the Old Arbat, which we strolled before going by foot to O. and V.’s to pick up all my stuff; I was movin’ out. There was a bit of a bittersweet parting there, hardly dulled by the fact that my parents were clearly taken aback by O.’s full mustache. We then took our leave and returned.
The next day the grandparents arrived, and although we did some walking around then, it was clear that in the heat and smoke, they simply couldn’t see the city by foot and metro. So I bustled them onto a bus tour the next morning, which they claim to have enjoyed. All this time, I wasn’t going to work, because the boss decided that braving the smoke just wasn’t worth it.
We had bought train tickets to St. Petersburg, which is an ordeal in itself—you can buy them through a machine at the train station, but you still have to wait in line for an hour in a room that’s probably 110 degrees. The machine itself sports a design so far removed from any known standard of ergonomics (I mean it’s Russian-built, right) that your first urge is to yell at customer service, until you realize that nobody in Russia has heard of such a thing.
We traveled to Petersburg on a fast, air-conditioned, very pleasant German-built train, the Sapsan. Our seats weren’t together, so we just sort of sat in comfort for the 4-hour trip north. Arriving on the platform at St. Petersburg, one gets the sense that one has arrived in a city of culture—soaring classical music greets you as you exit the train. I could tell already that this was my kind of city.
Petersburg did not disappoint. Aside from taxi drivers who seemed actually more unpleasant than in Moscow (actually Muscovite taxi dudes tend to be pretty chill, in my experience, especially the guys you just flag down), Petersburg is a gorgeous city—it has the feeling of order, and of gentility. Practically every building is an architectural or historical landmark of some sort.
Our first day there, we got a tour guide and went outside the city to see the Peterhof, a summer palace built by Peter the Great, the Russian czar who founded St. Petersburg in 1701 or 1703 (I can’t remember off the top of my head). The palace itself, by criminally wealthy European aristocratic standards, is not out of this world, but the palace gardens are. There are about 150 fountains on the grounds, with ten times that number of individual jets. Peter the Great made sure there was a lot of gold leaf, so that in case you were in doubt that he was really fucking rich and powerful, the gold would drive the point home. He also had a very impish sense of humor, turning on fountains where unsuspecting noblemen would least expect them. He didn’t spare the ladies, thereby founding the first wet corset competition.
The next day we went to the Hermitage Museum. Now although I have never really been to France, I imagine that if you took the entire collection of the Louvre and put it inside Versailles, and then dropped that palace right on the Seine waterfront, it still would be a distant second to the Hermitage. The Hermitage is situated inside the Winter Palace, the Big Bertha of all Russian palaces. Right on the Neva River, with a view of basically everything important in Petersburg, and so big that the entire area of Red Square couldn’t accommodate it, the Hermitage is meant to say, “check us out, West. We’ve beat you at your own game.”
The truly amazing thing is that, as huge as the palace is (several football fields long, four stories, actually two buildings fused together), it only accommodates about a third of the entire Hermitage collection. To give you an idea of the kind of stuff this museum contains, let me recount an anecdote. We get up to the “French art of the 19th and 20th centuries” section, which begins pretty tamely, but before you know it, you’re in a room filled wall-to-wall with Renoir. You begin to believe that they must have a Renoir fancy, but you then realize the next room is filled wall-to-wall with Monet. You think you’ve seen it all, but it keeps going—an entire room filled with Cezanne, then another room filled with Gauguin, some Degas and Manet scattered here and there, and then a whole room filled with Matisse. You go back to the Degas/ Manet room to inform your parents that there is a whole roomful of Matisse, pass through the room again and then onward, only to realize that there is a WHOLE NOTHER ROOMFUL of Matisse. I thought I was going to have a (he)art attack (ho ho! You liked that, didn’t you)!
After seeing the physical impossibility that was the Hermitage, we returned home and collapsed for the next four hours, but at 12:20 AM we boarded a boat tour, right outside our apartment. (Did I mention that we were staying in a building at the corner of Nevsky Prospect, the most famous street in Russia, and the Fontanka, one of the most important waterways of St. Petersburg? Well, we were.) Anyway, why a boat tour? Because there are lots of canals and waterways running through St. Petersburg. Why are there lots of canals and waterways? Because Peter the Great liked Amsterdam. Any questions?
The nighttime boat cruise was magical. The entire city was lit by opulent lighting, and the ubiquitous pastels and gold leaf were brought out in splendid detail. St. Petersburg looked quite the classical gem on the Baltic. We saw the raising of the bridges over the Neva River—an amazing spectacle not just because you see these huge bridges going up for the night, but because thousands of people turn out to see it. At 1 AM, the city is as alive and as festive as ever. You just have to make sure you end up on the right side of the river before the bridges part…
Unfortunately, even in St. Petersburg we couldn’t escape the now ubiquitous heat and smoke. The day we spent at the Hermitage was the hottest day in St. Petersburg history, at a sweltering 99 degrees. The next day was only slightly cooler, but first of all, the smoke blowing from inland reached the coast, and second, we, like the doofuses we were, decided to wear long pants in off chance we wanted to go inside a working church.
We took a (non-air-conditioned) bus tour of the city that day, and we stopped at no working churches. Furthermore, not a lot was visible, because of the thick smoke. But the city was beautiful anyway—the Church of the Savior on Spilt Blood, with its stunning mosaics and bizarre history (built on the site of the assassination of tsar Alexander II, used as storage for Mariinsky Theater sets), the monumental St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the final resting place of all the tsars since Peter the Great, etc. etc. I walked home afterwards, paying a visit to Nabokov’s house and Kazan Cathedral along the way.
The day after, we returned to Moscow to see one final, quintessentially Russian attraction: the ballet. The fabulous Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theaters were closed for the summer, so we went to the Russian State Youth Theater, i.e. where the top ballet students in Russia perform. I had long been told that these performances are secretly the best, because the students actually have some life in them, even if their technique is not perfect. We were not disappointed by the performance we saw of Swan Lake, especially since it was about 100 degrees and very, very stuffy in the theater—so much so that I was the only one of our group to stay through intermission. But the dancers were champs—they withstood the heat and kept performing utterly convincingly and poignantly. And the music, oh, oh!
The next day we flew away, away from the never-ending smoke and heat at last, back to Amurrica. I will miss Russia. I would like to say that I will miss keeping this blog too, but really I won’t. Enjoy life. Have fun. Drink kvass.
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