Day 10, Sat, 8/1
Moscow, Russia
Stepping off the train after three dreadful nights, the huge sign that read “MOCKBA” might as well have been labeled “WELCOME TO HEAVEN.”
I bid farewell to my three German roommates and Lady Gaga, giving each of them a hug.
Gyu and I noticed English words covering street signs and restaurants, while store clerks, waiters and taxi drivers spoke enough of it so I didn’t have to jump up and down and wave my hands anymore. What Gyu had told us was true: eastern and western Russia are polar opposites of each other, as the former is much more European than the more Asian latter.
The Moscow subway station was so crowded that more people seemed to be jumping over the railing than waiting in line to buy a ticket. JW and I considered this but we had too much luggage to hull around. Fortunately the ticket system was very simple in that it cost you 22 rubles (60 cents) to anywhere you wanted to go. At first glance, the station seemed to be grimy and salted with litter, but once we went deeper inside I found myself in a museum. Everything was made out of marble as enormous chandeliers dangled above our heads. I’d also never ridden an escalator that took minutes to get me from one floor to another, even though it was moving twice as fast as one you would see in an American mall.
On the base of the escalator, there was a gigantic shield hanging on the wall with swords crisscrossing over it. I then assumed that this place was so magnificent because it was the main train station in Moscow, but that wasn’t the case; every other station we passed ended up looking equally impressive and I just couldn’t stop wondering about the amount of work and money that went into all of them.
JW and I arrived at our home stay in around twenty minutes. The lady that owned the place was quite rude and seemed unable to speak without yelling. She also insisted that it cost $90 a night rather than the original $70 my dad and I had clearly read on the website. JW and I were irritated because we calculated that it was cheaper if we’d just shared a hotel room.
JW also explained to me that we needed to sign up for a visa registration if we were planning to stay in Moscow for more than three days. Again, going to a hotel would have been advantageous because there we can register for free, rather than paying a yelling woman $50 per person.
After showering and unpacking, it was just past noon and JW and I went out to explore the immediate vicinity of our neighborhood, saving St. Basil’s Cathedral for tomorrow.
Amateur, dirty street artists took up about half of the sidewalk with their work. I felt sorry for them having to sit under the unforgiving sun all day, painting their lives away, surrounded by stifling competition.
The gothic buildings, along with enormous arches and curly-Q lampposts definitely portrayed the atmosphere of Europe. Searching for food, JW and I passed by Italian pizza restaurants, Starbucks, and a Japanese place. After considering veal tongue salad for a while, we instead went into a Mexican restaurant and ordered a less exciting slice of lamb.
After our meal, we meandered into a pastry shop for some dessert. I chose what looked like two thin brownies stacked on top of each other, with whipped cream sandwiched in the middle. Terrible decision. When I took a bite, I realized that the white stuff in the middle wasn’t cream at all; it was as hard as candy and seemed more like pure sugar or dried frosting. I immediately threw the rest of it in the trash without even offering JW a piece.
Once we left that candy store of a bakery, JW and I wandered aimlessly, farther and farther away from our home stay. I must’ve asked him about twenty times if he had any idea what street we were on, and only one of those times did he do so much as to begin taking out the map in his bag and then stopping because he was too lazy. We honestly had no idea and didn’t really care, because we were just happy that our feet were treading on normal, immobile asphalt. We decided to walk in the opposite direction of our home and flip a coin whenever we came upon a forked road, and when we got tired we’d stop a taxi and drive back. Now this was fun.
What happened next though shocked and scared us to a point where we couldn’t realize just how incredible the situation was. We came upon two narrow alleyways and the coin came up tails, so we were supposed to go left. But we had gotten so many tails before that we were tired of going left and stubbornly disobeyed the random coin toss. And I swear to you, out of no where, no where, appeared St. Basil’s Cathedral, towering into the sky several hundred meters ahead of us. AHHHH!!!
What are the odds, not only of the series of coin tosses, but also accounting for the fact that JW and I decided to change our minds on that particular turn? I don’t even want to begin to know.
There were two twin arches - collectively known as the Voskresensky (Resurrection) Gate - that we had to walk under in order to enter the famous Red Square, Moscow’s favorite attraction. While directly ahead stood the cathedral, to our left was a shopping mall in the form of a palace, and on the right laid Lenin’s body in an enormous, rectangular grave. The vast, open space made me feel as if I was in Paris.
As you may already know, public bathrooms aren’t free in Europe and apparently neither are they in Russia. Usually someone sits in a beach chair in front of a row of portable toilets and demands about a dollar if you want to go in. Or if the bathroom is in a building, there’s a booth where you pay in front of the doors. This only makes me wonder, what happens if one of these workers has to use the bathroom? In any case, it was my first time in one of these portable toilets situated on the beautiful quad of St. Basil’s Cathedral, and what I saw in there ruined my mood for the rest of the day. Breathing through my mouth didn’t help either, as I had to chew 7 pieces of mint-flavored gum before the taste went away.
The colorful, twisting patterns that covered the cathedral gave me the impression that I was at an amusement park. Die-hard Tetris fans know that the original Nintendo version has the cathedral in the background, and once you get up to a high enough level, it takes the form of a rocket ship and blasts off into interstellar space. Thank goodness the real cathedral didn’t actually take off and incinerate everyone on the square.
Also on the quad stood a type of wishing well, except the area in which your coin was supposed to land in was terribly small. The “well” was also no more than an inch deep, so it was more than likely that your coin would bounce back out if it actually landed inside. So our tactic was to gently toss our coins underhanded, rather than hurtling them like a baseball like everyone else seemed to be doing. I ended up getting two in, and I used both of my wishes on the same thing so the chances of it coming true were twice as high. Should work, right?
Back outside, JW and I walked behind the cathedral and found a series of cannons next to a pile of bowling-ball sized cannonballs. There also seemed to be a wedding going on, so I couldn’t help but get JW to take a picture of me with the Hummer limousine.
Walking further away from St. Basil, we came across a bridge that went over Moscow River. I think I can safely say that the middle of this bridge was my favorite spot in Russia - I wondered why this area was so devoid of tourists. St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Kremlin, the shimmering river under the setting sun, lilies, ferries, skyscrapers and the enormous Lomonosov Moscow State University - standing there, you could see something breathtaking no matter where you looked. JW and I remained here until evening, taking pictures and soaking up the last rays of the day’s sun.
As we walked off the bridge, it began to rain. Not a really exciting piece of information for a travel blog you may assert, but let me explain just what made Russian rain so exciting. The rain wasn’t a light shower, nor was it a heavy pouring, and not even necessarily anything in between. In fact, JW and I marveled at how we’ve never encountered this kind of rain in our entire lifetimes of rain encountering. The raindrops were so huge that we could clearly see them and even catch them before they landed on the ground. We felt like we were being pelted at with mini-water balloons. But it was again a different kind of pelting than the one you receive in a torrential downpour; instead of hearing a soft thump or a thud, you could literally hear a splash. To this day I regret not having taken out my camera and getting a picture of my shirt, which looked like it was covered in dark, near-perfect circles about half-inch in diameter. When a raindrop landed on my forearm, it would explode and cover literally half of the length of my arm, and I would show JW before I wiped it off. Though at first we cursed ourselves for forgetting to bring our umbrellas, we ended up enjoying this Russian rain and tried to get hit by as many raindrops as possible, while we still could.
The mysterious rain mysteriously stopped after just a few minutes. JW and I finally admitted our exhaustion by spreading out on the benches and waiting for a cab to take us home. Unless you’re at the train station, cabs in Russia are quite rare, as we had to wait half an hour until we finally spotted a sedan wearing a little yellow bar on its roof. We had read countless horror stories of taxi drivers ripping off foreigners, but at this point we were too tired to care; besides, even pessimistically thinking, about how much would an evil taxi driver actually charge us for a five-minute drive home?
The answer is three thousand rubles, or the U.S. equivalent of about one hundred dollars. That’s right - pause from reading here so you can let that soak in for a bit. JW and I had made the fatal error of failing to ask the driver how much he thinks the drive would cost before we got in the taxi. When we arrived at our home-stay, the meter read 7km and the number 200. So JW and I thought that number was the price of our ride. However, the driver leaned over and pushed a random button that was apparently used for multiplying by fifteen. He leaned back and looked out his window, as if nothing had happened.
“Um,” I started. “How much?”
“Three thousand rubles,” he said, pointing at the meter but still refusing to make eye contact with me. I looked back at JW in the backseat, and found him just as confused as I was.
“I’ll sit behind the driver and put him in headlock,” JW explained in Korean. “And you can present a few blows of your fist to his face.”
Seldom having felt so enraged, I’ll admit I considered JW’s idea. But that would get us nowhere. I jokingly told him that criminal troubles abroad would get confusing, anyway. JW then proposed that we could just leg it. I considered that even more. Now that I look back on this, I think I would have; the streets were packed outside, there were no cops, I carried nothing but a camera while JW carried a tiny bag, I was on the track team and JW said that he was pretty fast, even though he was a semi-chain smoker. In any case, we weren’t even carrying that much combined, for we had spent most of our cash on food, entrance fees and grotesque public toilets.
Unable to think clearly due to the sheer ludicrousness of it all, JW and I emptied our wallets and paid the driver the rest of what we had. Put together, our coins and bills totaled only 2,500 rubles. However, instead of getting angry that we were short of his demand by 500, the driver nodded his head and repeated “Ssank you, ssank you,” multiple times and made a gesture as if to say “run along now,” still not making eye contact with either of us. Stunned, JW and I stumbled out of the bogus taxi. Seven kilometers. Five minutes. Twenty dollars per minute. We had paid fifty bucks for an hour long taxi ride in Irkutsk when we had the street expert, Gyu. Here we were in Moscow, undoubtedly robbed. Should we have written down the car’s license plate number and reported him? Possibly. But as I’ve told you before, Russian cops were quite corrupt as well in that they sought to squeeze money out of clueless foreigners.
JW and I walked back in a drunken zigzag, cursing the driver and not wanting to spend a ruble for the rest of our trip. It was comical to know that we couldn’t even afford a bottle of water to quench our thirst.
“At least we can’t get robbed anymore,” JW wisely noted. “Now I’m not afraid of anything.” Maybe that was the cheap safeguard against getting ripped off - traveling with your wallet empty.
The day that had begun and nearly ended so beautifully had, in fact, ended horribly. Serendipitous luck followed by frustrating unluck. JW and I entered our homestay in sour moods, only to encounter something else distasteful (of course!). The lady had demanded 90 dollars for a night in one of her lukewarm rooms, but since JW only carried Russian currency, he asked the woman how much it’d cost to pay in rubles. She pulled out her calculator, pressed some buttons, nodded her head and told him that it’d be 3,160 rubles. Now I don’t know about you, but just by the sound of that number I thought that that sounded like a little much. All day we must’ve passed at least a dozen currency exchange booths, all of them clearly showing that the dollar was worth slightly over thirty rubles. JW pulled out his cellphone and divided 3,160 by 90, expecting the dividend to be somewhere between 30 and 31. Instead, his screen flashed a number slightly greater than 35. Either the woman was a crook, or suffered in the subject of division to a tragic degree. Even if she were a crook, she was still kind of lightheaded for expecting us not to notice anything unusual in her demand.
On the verge of being ripped off for the second time, JW clenched his fists and eventually I had to restrain him from going out and buying Coke and Mentos to leave the lady a little surprise by the time we left the next morning. Instead, he vowed to leave the worst review ever written by man once he returned to Korea (by the way, this home stay is called RUSKO. The website looks snazzy but don’t be fooled!). That idea I was okay with.
After a while we fell out of the desire to argue with the woman, and concluded that I’d pay his share in USD and he could pay me back later in the correct amount of rubles.
At five minutes to midnight, once we were washed up and getting ready for bed, the white walls suddenly glowed pink and neon green. Looking out the window, we noticed fireworks setting the velvety black sky on fire. Although there was nothing particularly remarkable about these fireworks - as they ended as abruptly as they began - something about their mediocrity calmed us down. After the show, JW and I tried to summarize the day’s unfortunate events once more, except this time viewing them in context.
On the transsiberian I had finished a highly entertaining and informative business book called The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow, a genius author and professor who co-wrote A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking. In it, Mlodinow expresses how in a world ordered by chaos and chance events, strings of highly unlikely occurrences are inevitable and should mathematically come as no surprise. And though it is not wrong to say that today was full of unlucky surprises - discovering that a night at the home stay costs $20 more than we expected, choosing the worst tasting cake, getting cleaned out by the cab driver and meeting an unfriendly owner who also tried to clean us out - the human brain tends to single out these negative moments and as a result overshadow the positive ones. Instances of wonderful fortune such as unknowingly arriving on the same day in Irkutsk to meet one of my closest companions, meeting Gyu the day before he left and coin-flipping our way to the Red Square were memorable but would’ve gone generally unnoticed and unspoken about tonight - or ever - had we not seen the fireworks, which in turn would’ve passed unseen unless we had stayed up the few hours disputing over how to pay the old lady, and so on. Chance is a curious thing, as you may also recognize what I’ve described as the butterfly effect. Once JW and I were able to zoom out this way, we realized that today’s events were quite nothing in comparison to what has happened to others, or what could have happened to us. For example, my dad was mugged of his passport, wallet and cameras while he slept among the homeless on newspapers when he traveled Europe in his early twenties. Numerous other mishaps befell JW’s friends, too. At least we still had our passports, food, running water, and nice beds.
So we showed appreciation for our fortune by sleeping in the nice beds.
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