Arriving in MOCKBA. Battered trains! Rain-dappled platforms! Gloom! Trudgery! Nothing evokes the old-school romance of Russia quite like...
Vladmir Putin en route to shooting tigers, putting out forest fires and a limber tryst with his gymnast mistress. Okay, fine. It's a practice limo-run in Red Square. But I'm not the only one who got all excited and stuff.
Russians are a hygenic folk, who believe in running water (hence no sink plugs) and regular trips to the banya (bathhouse) to beat the bejesus out of themselves with dried branches. However, they are first and foremost a paradox, which is why, upon visiting Red Square in all their finery, they like nothing more than having their photo taken in front of St Basil's while rolling around on the filthy ground. Apparently they reckon the camera picks up the church better that way. Maybe I was just doing it wrong.
Obligatory Red Square "couple shot". Note St Basil's actually being in the picture, despite the fact we're standing up.
This is Serbian/Bosnian/whatever film director Emir Kusturica, taking notes in the Moscow Metro for his new screenplay.* His 1995 film Underground was a black comedy in which an entire community was kept in a cellar until 1961 in the belief that WWII still raged above. Much like the entire population of Moscow, who have not yet been informed that these days, it's okay to smile, talk or do pretty much anything but spy on your fellow commuters with a look of rigid disdain.
* Or maybe it's just some fat guy playing Sudoku. It's Kusturica.
Arbat Street is Moscow's most touristy strip, with hucksters galore flogging Dr Zhivago hats, hologram Putin magnets and "authentic" Russian vodka distilled from the old socks of a Chinese factory worker. But it is absolutely covered in gigantic matryoshkas, and for that, all other sins are forgiven.
This is also on Arbat, and may well be the result of all the aforementioned sock-vodka getting around. You hand over a fistful of rubles to try and ride a ridiculously wonky pushbike down the cobblestones. If you make it past the first line without requiring knee reconstruction surgery, you win a bottle of bubbly; past the second, a warm sixer. Who says Russians have been resting on their laurels since inventing Tetris?
Thanks to greed and lashings of incompetence, we were made homeless by our (for now to remain nameless) Moscow hostel, despite bookings and payings and all that stuff. After purred threats, narrowing eyes and a complicated rendezvous with a spotty Mongolian, we were deposited here, a central Moscow flat filled with bizarre Illuminati artwork, the entire works of Stalin and a porcelain bust of its previous owner, a certain V.Molotov. Little wonder that we exploded like his signature cocktail when the dimwits from the hostel tried moving another couple in with us at midnight.
"Don't fuck with the babushka" is a motto well worth keeping in mind anywhere in Russia. On long-distance trains, she will either protect you (from the legions of howling drunkards) or will reduce you to a blubbering puddle of regret and terror (if you are among the legions of howling drunkards). In church, she feels no compunction in knocking you to the ground for a better view of the priest, or in snuffing out your devotional candle if she catches you ogling the devushka in the spangly headscarf. But most intimidating of all is the Museum Babushka. From grand exhibition halls to hick "regional studies" collections, every public repository has at least two beefy grandmas on the lookout for unticketed photography and roving bandits intent on making off with the museum's priceless reindeer horns/rotting peasant sandals/rocks. If you linger too long, she's suspicious. If you breeze past yet another yawnsome display of broken stone "tools", you're an uncultured halfwit. Either way, she's going to follow you around with squeaking shoes and your identifying features burned into her memory.
