Reporting live from Estonia (and a little late from Moscow)

Wednesday, 8:07 am, somewhere in the Russian countryside (such as it is). Things I remembered to do before leaving for Tallinn: pack my hair dryer, charge my computer, withdraw rubles to change once I get there. Things I did not remember to do before leaving for Tallinn: change said rubles into kroon (if that’s possible in St. Petersburg), print my hostel reservation (to paper; I have the PDF), do any research outside of the Lonely Planet guidebook, pack a towel. Oh, well. The bus is packed, and the recorded announcement said the ride will take about an hour and a half longer than the ticket said, but in any case, I’m not terribly worried. Three days in a quiet little Eastern European city, coming up. :D

And quiet is exactly what I need right now. Moscow was…fine, but we missed the Metro bombings by eleven hours. I understand that there was no real chance that any of us would be in danger, but still. That’s just too close to call. Six hours away from major public transportation systems sounds perfect. :P I got home from Moscow, woke up to Jarlath’s phone call, checked the news, and was shocked out of the mood to do much of anything on Monday…so I slept. For about sixteen wonderful hours. Considering that the Moscow trip wasn’t that long, I’m surprised how much I needed that sleep.

So, we pulled into Moscow in the small hours of Friday morning, ate breakfast at the hotel, and then commenced a three-hour bus tour because we couldn’t actually check into the hotel yet. We were split up by language once again, and I have to say, the Area Studies program had a wonderful guide for our couple of city tours. Eduard gave us the local history without boring us at all, and he interjected many wonderful little anecdotes and quips that made me wish I had a tape recorder. I’ve recorded a few of his stories for posterity in my photo captions. :) After discovering once again how difficult it is to take photos out the window of a bus, I went a little photo-happy in Red Square and a nearby park, which Eduard claimed was the real Swan Lake as preserved for posterity in Tschaikovsky’s ballet! There were no swans around (apparently it’s more like ‘Duck Lake’, but that’s not really ballet-like, now is it?), and the lake was frozen solid…so what did we do? We slipped and slid our way out onto the lake and took pictures, of course. :) Apart from that lake, though, the rest of the weather in Moscow was as beautiful as we could have hoped for. I actually got out of the bus for photo breaks without wearing a coat. How cool is that? :D

But, I digress (no kidding). We returned to the hotel, checked in at last, and basically fell into bed for part of the afternoon. I’m not sure how some of the group managed to get a full night’s sleep on the train, but I might have gotten two hours, if I was lucky. We split up after that little refresher and set out to explore the city on our own. In the case of the group with which I wandered, this involved finding a little café somewhere near Arbatskaya, then splitting up further to (literally) get lost and see where we wound up. Moscow’s kind of a sad place to get lost in, actually. Parts of the city are beautiful, parts of it are bustling, parts of it are vastly important in that way that only blocks full of government buildings can be. But parts of it are just sad. A shuttered souvenir market, a near-empty park just before dark, some cheesy stalls and little markets that just made you feel kind of sorry for the city.

I’ve got nothing against Moscow; I just failed to fall in love with it the way some of my friends did. It may be the biggest city in Russia, it may be the biggest city within tens of thousands of kilometers, but it’s just not a very nice place. Actually, scratch that. Historical Moscow is breathtaking. Modern Moscow looks like an architectural version of my Great-Aunt Rose’s leftover soup. The city grew on itself much the way my high school has, except that Sherwood makes Moscow look organized. It’s too big, it’s too confusing, and it’s not very friendly. St. Petersburg doesn’t exactly welcome you with open arms, but it doesn’t mind your presence, and as long as you respect the city, it respects you. Moscow wants you to come, but only because it wants to sell you stuff. If you’re not interested in buying, Moscow is not interested in having you.

I continue to digress. Once we made it back to the hotel Friday night, we were planning to go see what Moscow has to offer as far as night life; however, various members of the group who’d left before us informed us that the club scene is ridiculously crowded, tightly face-controlled, and REALLY expensive. (Face control is the policy by which Moscow bouncers control entrance to clubs, based on the potential entrant’s appearance. St. Petersburg is said to have this policy as well, but only at the really upscale clubs; in Moscow, it’s EVERYWHERE.) We ended up having a quiet night in with some bad Soviet sitcoms, and preparing for Saturday’s tour of the Kremlin. (I was the first one down to breakfast Saturday morning…how does it happen that I can sleep in at home, but in hotels, I wake up at ludicrously early hours?)

Saturday was more like what I hoped to see in Moscow: a carefully guided tour of the Kremlin, including an assortment of government buildings, churches, and monuments (and the biggest bell and biggest cannon in the world, both bronze, majestic, and completely nonfunctional). We saw the Communist Party Congress, now housing its own ballet hall; we stood on the very spot where all the tsars through Nicholas II were crowned, and saw the little mark on the floor so the nearsighted Nicholas would know where to stand. We saw the tombs of the early tsars, and learned why we couldn’t see Ivan the Terrible (he’s buried inside the altar, the better to purify him for all his sins). We even toured the armory, seeing the Russian crown jewels (the coronation crown has fur on it!), Peter the Great’s boots, and a selection of Faberge eggs (and a Faberge dandelion). Saturday morning-early afternoon was the highlight of my tour of Moscow, and I’m thrilled to have been able to see all that I saw.

The rest of the trip was comparatively slow, though that is by no means a bad thing. I went after the Kremlin tour to a giant souvenir market on the northeastern side of the city, practicing my haggling skills (which still aren’t very good) and buying an assortment of small souvenirs. These included a traditional Russian shawl, called a platka, which I’m wearing now. :) Saturday night was spent in, having a hair-braiding party with a few girlfriends, and Sunday was left to tour the rest of the museums, including Lenin’s mausoleum! Taking pictures inside was ABSOLUTELY forbidden, to the point where we had to check our cameras AND our phones; the experience was very much worth it, though. We moved through the maze of the memorial garden, noting the names of a hundred good Communists on plaques on the walls and granite memorials, then ducked into the darkness of the mausoleum. After the brightness of the day, the tomb is disorientingly silent and dark. The guards herd you along – no stopping to commune with Volodya here – through the ramped room where Lenin reposes atop a black marble podium, lying in state in a red-fringed palanquin, lit with flattering fuschia lights. He looks like nothing so much as a wax figure of the former triumphant dictator. For all we know, he could be wax. Who’d be able to tell, really? And who really cares?

After less than a minute with Lenin, we stumbled out into the sunlight, collected our belongings, and continued our tourism. St. Basil’s, the Cathedral of the Intercession, is a marvel, even if the steps are painfully steep for those with short legs. Ten different chapels merge seamlessly to create a maze of a church, perfect to wander through contemplatively while at the same time playing hide-and-seek in the tiny side passages. Our group split up after this, and three of us explored the Museum of Modern History, labeled as the Museum of the Revolution on the map. It was fine, really, little different from every other history museum we’ve ever visited, and it would probably have meant more to me if there was a single word of English in the museum. By this point, I was rather tired of brightly lit rooms, so I went by myself in search of Jarlath’s recommendation, the Museum of the Gulag, located somewhere near the Lubyanka, former home of the KGB (now the FSB). I never did find it; the square is full of large, imposing, unmarked buildings, and populated by militsia officers who look like they’d like nothing better than to give a young tourist speaking poor Russian a private tour of the former KGB headquarters. (I don’t think the formal name was the Museum of the Gulag, and how do you bring yourself to ask a Russian police officer with a gun for something by that name?) I ended up in a museum devoted to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, instead. I know nothing about this guy, other than that he was a revolutionary poet in the early Soviet Union, and that he died somewhere in the Thirties as a result of some political action (and that he has Metro stations named after him in both Moscow and St. Petersburg). Honestly, I don’t remember which side of the action he was on. This didn’t matter very much, as it turned out, because this might as well have been renamed the Museum of Bizarre Shit in Art and Architecture. I apologize for the language, but that’s my lasting impression. I don’t know what the point of the vast assortment of strange sculpture and artsy things was, but the overall impression was of my having consumed something akin to hallucinogenic mushrooms in my lunch…or maybe the artist was the one with the magic mushroom blini. I need to find a translation of Mayakovsky in English just to see what all the weirdness was about.

I was about museum-ed out by this point, so I went back to the hotel, read for a couple of hours, and accepted a large bag of souvenirs and other objects to take back to Petersburg for traveling friends. (This included Evan’s coat, which I almost borrowed and wore to Tallinn, but I figure mine’s probably more waterproof.) I made it to the train station by myself and traveled back with an Ian McKellen lookalike, who mistook me for a German student (not the first time that’s happened, actually), and a young mother with two small boys of (I think) three and five. It was a quiet trip, thankfully, even though I managed about an hour of sleep over the whole thing. And that brings us to Monday, and the rude awakening with the news of the disaster we’d just narrowly averted.

When I awoke refreshed on Tuesday, I basically managed to do some laundry and send assorted emails regarding class registration before I left for the concert hall. We were playing in the small Philharmonic Hall, but my goodness, I have never had the chance to play somewhere quite that amazing. The hall was absolutely full, which I did NOT expect for the university chamber orchestra. (We also had about fifteen ringers, percussion, winds, brass and the like, about whom I learned just yesterday. It sounded really different playing with them, but different in a very good way.) The concert program was Lehar, Dunaevsky, and Strauss, in that order. Andrei Vladimirovich Alekseev isn’t a patch on Professor Berard for putting a program together, or running a rehearsal, but he might be able to give AU’s maestro a run for his money for sheer conductorly weirdness. :D Encouraging the audience to clap along at several points, having the orchestra stomp and sing along with a couple of the polkas, even leaving the hall during our second encore and wandering back in near the end of the piece…it was strange, but it was quite wonderful. :) Lyudmila Afanasyevna came and thoroughly enjoyed it, which made my evening.

And, now I’m writing on a bus on the way to Tallinn. I’ll post this when I make it to the hostel, and then it’ll be time to see what Estonia has to offer (besides the quasi-rock music playing over the bus radio). Stay tuned! :)

11:47 am. Spring is even slower in coming to Estonia than to Russia, it seems. The occasional patches of dead-looking grass showing through the snow are kind of depressing. However, we’re barely into the country, so I’m reserving judgment as of yet. Took about an hour for the busful of people to get through customs control, during which time I received many a strange look for handing over the only blue passport in a sea of red. At least I didn’t need a visa (yes!!!). We’re about an hour and three-quarters away from Tallinn, if the tickets are correct. I’m rather looking forward to a shower (the hot water was out in the apartment both yesterday and this morning) and then, who knows? :)