A Trip Down Moscow Lanes

Sheremetyevo was bloody crowded. I found it too cramped and too ill-maintained for the main airport of the capital city of a country that boasts of centuries of global domination. Even though the airport authorities had been gracious enough to have ‘exit’ written down in English as well as in Russian on the various pointers, the underlying motive seemed not to guide the foreign passengers to the exit but to mock them for being such English speaking charlatans. The airport officials were no help with their minuscule command on English language. After traversing around baffled for a while, I eventually made my way out of the airport through one of the doors, only to find that it wasn’t an exit but an entrance. And to reenter through the same door in order to get to the actual exit two stories below I would, to my utter disgust, have to check in my luggage through the screening machine. Which I did, for there were no means whatsoever to connect to the city in this proximity.

I was there to attend a week-long conference on my limited school budget, and so was compelled to keep my expenses to a minimum. Add to that a sudden fit of adventurism, and I valiantly decided to commute in Moscow using the metro service right from day one. My courteous Russian colleague back in England had a colored metro route map printed out for me and also had thoroughly elucidated what should be my course of journey to the conference venue when I arrived there. It took about an hour to reach the ‘nearest’ metro station by a bus. But as soon as I entered the station I was hit by another jolt of bewilderment. The map I possessed had names of stations spelled out in English alphabets. While on the metro station signs, the alphabets, though still very much English, had their pronunciations and places obnoxiously jumbled up! Nevertheless, depending intuitively on the color-coding of the lines on the map and on the assumption that the train actually did stop at every station listed, I mustered up all my courage and embarked on the earliest train on the appropriate line.

One thing that allured me right away about the Moscow metro service was the arduous embellishment of most of the stations. It looked as if the craftsmanship of some highly skilled laborers as well as artists had gone into the construction of those pieces of art. But at the same time, their state of their preservation was abysmal to say the least. The metro started operating way back in the 1930s, and the trains vauntingly belonged to that very era. Except a couple, none of the stations hinted of any serious attempts of renovation. Blame it upon the gradual economic decline of the USSR and then the Russian federation, or on the nonchalance of the Russians, this is indeed the height of irreverence and derogation of the earnest labor of generations bygone.

Speaking of generations, by and large I experienced the older Russians to be pretty crude, edging on hostile. Surely it must be centuries of imperialism followed by decades of one of the most callous of socialist hegemonies that has left permanent scars on their demeanor and psyche. Younger generation, though tends to be pretty stranger-resentive, is a lot more congenial. This truth dawned on me on the very first day when, while prowling dazed and confused on the metro stations, I tried to seek some elderly people for direction, and was met with nothing but a frown. From then on, I made a note to approach only the lively and lovely young Russian women for that purpose. And boy, did they oblige!

As one of the junior participants of the conference, I was allotted accommodation free of cost in the guest house of the Moscow State University. It was like a dream come true, for the main building of MSU has to me always been the most fascinating university building in the world. One of the seven sisters endorsed by Stalin and the tallest of the lot, it has a sense of grandeur associated with it that is unrivaled for a university. It’s truly a masterpiece of neoclassic architecture. Actually when it comes to Russian architecture of up to mid 20th century, to say that their buildings are big and broad would be an understatement. Though not much of a construction work has ostensibly been carried out since then, except for some recently sanctioned development projects that I noticed in the suburban city, even the modern constructors try to adhere to this archetypal giganticness. A good exemplar would be the Russian Academy of Sciences building which was hosting the conference.

Two days before the conclusion of the conference, on a Sunday, the organizers had arranged a detailed bus tour around the city. Besides the seven sisters, what caught my attention on this trip was the ubiquity of humungous and mostly whitewashed buildings with magnificent golden domes. Russians follow their own variant of Christianity which is rooted in Greek orthodox, and these chapels and cathedrals are unparalleled in their design and charisma. The enormity and splendor of the reconstructed Cathedral of Christ the Savior right in the middle of the city had me wonderstruck. There are quite a few other famous cathedrals too, at least one in every major enclosure; The Smolensky cathedral in Novodevichy Convent , St. George’s Church in the victory park and the unique St. Basil’s Cathedral in the red square, to name a few.

The tour culminated in the red square and from there I, with a couple of other attendants, set off for a stroll around the square and followed it up by a visit to the Kremlin. We had barely half an hour before it closed and that turned out to be terribly insufficient even to take in all the awe of that glorious conformation. Afterwards, we went on to further explore the inner city on foot. Meandering about the peculiarly wide Moscow roads in the soothing evening breeze, coupled with the sights of undoubtedly some of the prettiest females of the human species to inhabit the planet Earth, was just divine. I noticed that the evening life there was pretty vibrant. The downtown streets were flooding with people and it was particularly surprising to see most of the high street shops open until as late as eight on a Sunday evening. These shops included outlets of some of the best designer brands in the world with some of the most expensive cars waiting outside; not quite fortuitous for a cosmopolitan city that’s home to plenty of nouveaux riches making hay with both hands in this wave of capitalism that has recently taken over the country.

I do not happen to be a foodie, so testing the local food would be the last thing on my mind during a sojourn in a foreign land. Most of the time I relied on baked stuff from a local grocery store or the canteen of the conference centre. Only rarely I joined some local participants to a nearby roadside food stall. Such stalls can actually be found aplenty along every busy alley. However, on a par with the tradition, we had a conference dinner at the end of the conference, and there I finally got a chance to try my hands at the Russian cuisine. As sheer adversity would have it, all the four main dishes on the set menu contained smoked slices of two types of fish and two types of meat, probably ham or beef, I didn’t even care to confirm. There were bowls of two types of salad also but even they contained bits of meat, as if the Russians had connived to admonish my contempt for red meat by fervidly exhibiting their own contempt for vegetarianism.

I was sharing the university guest house with some young local administrative staff members and so mostly socialized with them. On our way back from the dinner in the official conference van they decided to pop into some local club to have some adieu drinks and gossip. I had to catch my return flight early next morning but inadvertently joined them when they insisted. It didn’t take me long to find out that I stood in one of the country’s most famous night clubs where popular indigenous bands played live jazz music. And even though it was a Tuesday, there was a swarm of exquisitely dressed elite youth. The evening started off with some soft jazz tunes but the atmosphere turned excessively flamboyant as the night progressed. It’s there when I realized that the younger generation of Russia has subsequently come of age to learn to ‘lose itself’. I left the club at about midnight to get myself enough sleep for the next day’s travel. A few hours later I reached Domodedovo, the second of Moscow’s two International airports, only to find it cramped and bloody crowded!