tsaritsino park and the honey festival

It was the most amazing weekend.

On Saturday we went to the museum of the great patriotic war (the second world war). It has a room called the Hall of Sorrow, which had 2,600,000 tear-shaped crystal pendants hanging from the ceiling - one for every 10 Russian soldiers that were killed in the war - and big leather bound books listing all their names. A very quiet, very beautiful place. And, as a mark of respect, parked outside the museum were two enormous white limos for two separate wedding parties, each complete with outrageous Sobranie-smoking meringue-bride and weedy new husband posing drunkenly against the memorial obelisk for photos. Everything about this was tasteful and appropriate and I hope to see many more tacky wedding receptions at similar venues around Moscow – in cemeteries, perhaps, or outside a hospice.

…apparently I'm supposed to be writing about Sunday. Philip's going to write about Saturday. Oops. We're such a well-oiled blogging machine.

So. As I was saying. Sunday. It was a glorious day. The birds were singing, the sun was shining. Philip, Felicity and I all hopped on the metro and made our way to Tsaritsino park, home of Tsaritsino Palace and the annual honey festival. It occurred to us as we came out of the metro that this might have been a terrible idea. For one thing, there was no park there - just a massive junction, a petrol station and an industrial estate. It was stop-a-stranger time and I was nominated.

'Excuse me, please,' I said in my best Russian, 'where park?'

'Forward forward,' he replied, and so we obediently followed his pointing finger for a long, long time, until finally, we saw crowds of people disappearing into a tunnel. There was nothing to do but join them and when we emerged from darkness, crushed and blinking in the light, we saw a sprawling, magnificent park, glowing in the sunshine. We've either found it or died, I remember thinking, but then I saw another tacky wedding reception and meringue-bride posing for photos and decided we were still in Moscow. Hooray! To the honey festival!

Except I only knew about this festival because a) it had been advertised in the Moscow Times online as 'On until October, or until the honey runs out!' in an article written in 2008, and b) someone at work said it might be on. Couldn't find any other information about it in English. Moscow: not really a place for tourists. But Felicity, who is the second most optimistic person I have ever met, was convinced it was there, and that we'd find it. It was stop-a-stranger time and Felicity was nominated.

'Excuse me please,' she said in her best Russian, 'Where honey?'

'Forward forward,' the lady replied, pointing towards a huge mass of yellow tents in the distance and people drifting away from it carrying bags of honey jars and looking really shaky. SUCCESS!

It was absolutely incredible. There must have been thousands and thousands of different sellers, each with their own twenty or so different types of honey, depending on the species of bee, the flowers that grew locally, the strains of pollen.. and everyone was so keen for us to sample as many as possible, clear and watery, yellow and buttery, slightly citrusy, one that tasted like green fruit pastels (according to Felicity), one that tasted a bit like brown bread (also according to Felicity, who obviously has a very developed palate), one so thick and dark it looked like treacle and tasted abnormally tangy. One that just looked like loads of dead bees crushed into a paste and put in a jar, which tasted like death and brought back terrible memories. And there we were, with our little white plastic sampling sticks, for hours and hours, dipping away, loving it.

That was until about 4pm, when we realised that we hadn't had any breakfast or lunch and that all we had eaten all day was honey, and that the only food we had with us was the jars of honey we had just bought for a million roubles each. I suddenly felt unsteady. Felicity was pale. Philip looked especially dreadful, since he'd also had an entire pint of kvas, the favourite drink of many Russians and not found anywhere else in the world because it's too, too disgusting.

We drifted away from the honey festival carrying our bags of honey and looking really shaky, and wandered up to a café in Tsaritsino Palace where we ate weird meat-filled brioche rolls, too weak to care what the meat was, or even what Tsaritsino Palace was. I think it was a very impressive building. I don't really remember.

I haven't eaten anything sweet since Sunday, or as the press are now calling it, 'honeygate'. It's too soon.

russian chocolate

hello rain (or in russian: здравствуйте.. rain)

I started to feel that carrying my umbrella around in my handbag every day was becoming a bit silly. Out it came.

We squelched into work yesterday (an office full of immaculate people) Philip with his hair all plastered flatly onto his forehead and me with my sodden Kurt Geiger heels and swamped in Philip's enormous bright blue windproof jacket which came down to my knees. We looked ridiculous.

The weather had better bloody well improve this weekend though because I have visions of bright, crisp afternoons surrounded by scenes of autumnal beauty. Autumnal beauty dammit. Not cold wet misery. That, and there's a HONEY FESTIVAL on! And it finishes at the end of September! How did I not find out about this sooner? I'm so excited!

In other news, my Russian is improving so slowly that I am forced to conclude that I am some sort of idiot. I am literally mastering one word every three days. I now know 'I would like', which is 'можно' (pronounced 'mojna') so today at Starbucks I actually said 'Mojnaaa.. a small earl grey tea, please.' RUBBISH. I know 'tea', and 'please'! But apparently I can only say one Russian word per sentence! Don't desert me now, language skills. It's not a good time.

part 2: ozymandias*

Question: What to do when your CCCP goes bust and you're left with a large collection of ideologically defunct monumental statuary? Answer: stick it in some wasteland to the south of Moscow city centre, lock the gates and forget about it. Then a few years later, once the emotional impact of perestroika and the fall of Russian communism have faded a little, open it to the public. This is just what happened during the eighties and nineties, and now the Moscow sculpture park has become more than simply a home for fallen Soviet icons, and is also populated by a quite large collection of contemporary sculpture.

The park is also right next door to the Tretyakov gallery of modern art, and home to a 100m or so long tent-cum-shack which is filled with paintings by local artists. Some are quite good:

and some are… not. Saccharin kittens and pots of flowers are apparently all the rage in certain Muscovite circles.

The Tretyakov gallery itself is a big secondary-modern of a place and mostly dedicated to Russian artists. There is some brilliant stuff in here. Some of the most exciting bits are in the 20^th century sections - no-one does propaganda quite as stylishly as the Soviet Union did and Vera Mukhina's 'Worker and Kolkhoz Woman' (a large maquette of which is in the gallery) is about as good as it gets. Alexander Deineka is another worth looking at if you don't know him (I didn't). The collection is based very much on figurative works, and doesn't seem to be home to much avant-garde stuff, either contemporary or historic. Having said that, we did half of the gallery at the charge as there was nowhere at all to eat in that part of the city, apart from an ice-cream kiosk, where we filed up on caramel megas – these are highly recommended - and a 'café' selling a couple (this was their whole stock) of slices of plastic white bread with a strip of smoked (with a cigarette) salmon and a hearty topping of bright pink cod-roe (or perhaps third-class caviar).

If you want to see all this, go soon. The park and gallery are soon to be obliterated by Norman Foster's massive Orange (really).

* please forgive the pretentious title of this post

in search of the arts (part 1): saturday, the metro and the arbat

On Saturday, we decided that the time had come to start exploring Moscow properly, especially while the weather was still friendly. Yeah that's right Moscow. I know what you're about. Yes, the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Yes, I have been uncomfortably hot in my coat every day since I arrived here, no-one else is even wearing a jacket, and carrying an umbrella around in my handbag has so far been entirely pointless. But I refuse to be fooled. The blizzards are coming. THE BLIZZARDS I TELL YOU.

The guide book told us of a magical place near the river: 'the Arbat'. Popular with tourists, it boasted market stalls! Street artists! Crafts! Cafes! Interesting little shops with Things in! A place for the arts, it promised, and as it happened Philip and I were feeling quite self-important, so, after about four hours of studying the Metro map and some google maps online, we were off. Sort of. The only street map we own is so enormous that it takes two people to fold it out and hold it up (and preferably a third person to actually examine it), which means that every time we go anywhere we have to put on a humiliating street performance of unfolding, refolding, rotating and accidentally tearing. We're feckless tourists, in other words.

Luckily, people are kind here. An old Russian man with mostly gold teeth and no English language skills shuffled up to us and offered help by pointing in various directions and looking very earnest. I think he was trying to help anyway. Either that or he was trying to distract us by pointing at random in the most half-arsed mugging attempt ever. But either way, friendly.

Oh my god, though. The Moscow Metro (pronounced myet-RO) is absolutely incredible. Metro stations here are all about palatial high ceilings, mosaics, chandeliers, trains arriving on time, Muscovites looking smug. It's so reliable that the Russian police travel around on it and reformate into army lines on the platforms, and so classy that you can hire out whole stations for corporate functions and wedding receptions*. It puts the dingy, shambling, broken old London tube to shame.

The Arbat, on the other hand, was horrendous. So much for the arts: just shop after shop of lurid arcades, cheap souvenirs, hundreds and hundreds of painted Russian dolls with wide eyelashioed - I know this isn't a word - eyes in ever-diminishing sizes, Soviet-style military hats for all our Communist role-playing needs, hideous puppets in traditional Russian dress hanging limply from walls, rows of small dead weasels and foxes marketed as fur scarves, and 'antique'.. crap. 'Street artists' turned out to be the shifty-looking people standing next to stalls displaying weird pictures of boggle-eyed animals or washed-out celebrity portrait sketches. It was like Blackpool had decided to throw a Soviet-themed party and no-one had turned up.

Bewildered and faintly disgusted, we saw a MOO-MOO cafe replete with cowprint sofas, cows all over the walls and even a big toy cow looming over the dining area. In we went. A world-famous milkshake, please, to lift our spirits! Philip said. Milk-what? they replied, looking utterly baffled, and thrust a bottle of very dark Czech beer at him. He accepted it as a plausible alternative, drank the first half and then just stared at the second half. We went home.

And that. Was the Arbat.

That evening, we watched 'A Single Man' while making raspberry jelly and drinking port. Not sure why I have either of these things in my flat (as opposed to basic necessities like bread and clean water) but whatever.

*not true

Красная площадь

Sometimes you visit a place that you have seen hundreds of times on the news and in films, and the reality sadly fails to meet expectation. Not so Red Square. James Bond, Michael Burke and Arnold Schwarzenegger had totally failed to prepare me for it.

Nish and I found a quiet back-street route on our first proper tourists' jaunt, and arrived after sunset and a good beef stroganoff. Our first glimpse was of the glowing red star above the crenellated wall by Lenin's mausoleum. That had to be a clear signpost to the centre of Russia. We crossed a garden of fountains, and then entered the vast red-brick entrance to the square itself. St Basil's (of lurid onion-domed towers fame) sat at the far end, a huge light studded edifice on the left, a massive curtain wall with eastern looking fortification on our right. The square shouted 'Russia' in a strident voice, and loudly. It must be one of the most impressive architectural spaces in the world.

Curiously, the 'Red' of its name has nothing to do with communism, or with bricks. The Russian name for the square is Красная площадь (Krásnaya plóshchad), which is rooted in an old form of the language – the proper translation of the name is 'Beautiful Square'. It's certainly impressive… but you'd have to make your own mind up on the beauty question.
I looked at the light encrusted monster and made out the letters УМ, and thought, "ah! The Russian parliament!", but actually this was the major shopping centre of Moscow: the ГУМ, (Gum), not the ДУМА (Duma) at all. Actually, perhaps my mistake wasn't far from the truth… This is by far the most extravagant and impressive shopping centre I have ever been into. It puts London and New York equivalents into the shade. A good symbol of what modern Russia is trying to be, and presumably something that sets Lenin spinning every day in his squat angular tomb opposite.

Another thought, while on that point. It's perhaps surprising that the message of this place seems to be so clear – that this is Mother Russia and it's not going anywhere – when in fact the symbolism is very mixed. All over the place you can see the old Romanov crest of the Tsars, right alongside emblems of the Soviet Union (hammer and sickle), and the new capitalist state (Zara). Perhaps that's actually why the whole is so effective. In one five acre area it gives you a pretty good idea of where today's Russia has come from.

Philip.

Hello everyone! I am now the second author here in sunny (yes, sunny) Moscow. I will be helping to keep you posted about our Russian adventure.

I will warn you in advance that I am a por typist so this will be riddled with spelling mistakes... but hopefully the content will be less flawed...

babushka

In other news, the old lady/babushka/porter in the reception of Philip's building keeps trying to talk to us. She has a ghostly pallor and a burning question to ask us. Perhaps it concerns an ancient prophecy in which we unwittingly play a crucial role, or the key to the happiness and wellbeing of the masses, or the whereabouts of a family heirloom, but whatever it is it's clearly important because she asks it over and over again, rephrasing it in every possible way and becoming increasingly more upset with us. But it's not English. It doesn't involve the words 'hello' 'thank you' or 'my name is'. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to us. We politely wait for her to give up and then say 'goodbye!' and leave. It's awkward, frankly. I just hope it's not something like 'why do you English bastards keep turning up where you're so emphatically not welcome?' or 'are you aware that if you use the lift one more time the building will implode?'. Or worse, maybe she's not even the porter. Maybe she's just a little old lady who can't remember where her house is. Oh my god. I absolutely must learn how to speak this language.

more incompetence, philip's arrival and moscow by night

The supermarket. I found it. It was an enormous triangular beast of a building, '24' in neon lighting, trolleys outside, people lugging shopping bags to cars and looking deeply unhappy. Unmistakably a supermarket. I'm not sure how I had failed to find it even after a week of aimless meandering and deciphering. Decided that yet another and perhaps the most important reason for looking forward to Philip's arrival was that he had the Moscow city guide book. (I bought one for the whole of Russia, which is probably the least useful thing in the whole of Russia.)

Inside was a shopping arcade: a glittering three floors of arbitrary ware-peddling, shops selling everything, antique clocks displaying the wrong time, big slabs of wool, pen-knives, clothes, brass.. items (as in, old trombones, fruit bowls, old-fashioned steam kettles complete with hanging chain, pocket watches displaying the wrong time), dried fruit and nuts. A fresh fruit juice and smoothie stall. A shop devoted solely to teddy bears, all lined up in rows like a school choir, staring through the glass shop front, judging me with their beady eyes. You've been walking around in here for a long time, they said, and you still haven't seen the supermarket, have you? Damn you bears, I thought, you're right. Where the hell is it?

And forty-five minutes after first entering the building, I actually found it. It was on the basement floor next to the car showroom (where else) and it was divided into three sections: Alcohol, Meat and Misc. Fish were decapitated, vacuum-packed and displayed next to a tank of live fish swimming about nervously and looking a bit sick. A box of cereal cost roughly £6. Many things weren't priced, and when helpful members of staff told me the price I just nodded and reflected upon how unfortunate it was that I hadn't learnt numbers yet. It was a high-stress situation from beginning to end. But at least I have more bread and cheese for my fridge now. Yay.

Then on Saturday, Philip finally, finally arrived. It was like I was in Inception and my spinning thing had fallen over. I could stop purchasing random fruit and talking to shop window bears now. Everything was fine.

We had just enough time to get ready, jump into a taxi (ie. nervously negotiate our way into a taxi) and meet all the other trainees at a bar called Soho Rooms, which, from the guide book, sounded unimaginably excessive in a horrible but fascinating way. It was. Swimming pools, marble floors, roof terrace, sparkly girating ladies on tables, high-end hedonism in all its tacky glory. This is what Moscow transforms into at night. During the day, everything seems subdued, slightly shabby and totally dominated by billboard-driven consumer frenzy of the "aspirational middle-classes" (euphemistically so-called by almost every description of Moscow I've ever read). But at night, everything lights up in the most spectacular way, and all the average-looking people seem to shuffle back into their houses to make way for the immaculate, shimmering Russian elite who are so wealthy that they can probably settle any bill just by smirking at it.

Our approach, apparently, is to accidentally leave without paying. Oops. Just one of a million reasons to never ever go back there.

the watermelon

A sad time. My supervisor (who’s a Scottish Moscow-enthusiast, and speaks Russian with a Scottish accent in a way that I find quite disorientating) asked yesterday if I knew where the supermarket was.

And I replied ‘yes, yes’ in a reassuring sort of way, even with a little laugh in my voice, ha ha, how hilarious, imagine that, imagine if I hadn’t found a supermarket yet and I’d been living here for five days without being able to buy even the most basic groceries, hoo hoo, oh dearie me. Priceless.

NOT SO FUNNY WHEN IT’S TRUE THOUGH, IS IT. I should of course have said, ‘actually no – is there one near here?’ like a normal person who has been rendered faint and slightly woozy after living for many days solely off the stodgy white bread and processed cheese that was in the fridge upon arrival. So many days. So many cheese. So many bread. And cheese. Breadcheese. Fridge.

‘Ah, good, he continued, ‘and have you seen the street kiosks?’

‘No actually – is there one near here?’ I NOW replied, (to compensate for before? to check I was capable of framing this question? why?) and it turns out that there are many street kiosks in Moscow and that they all sell fantastic seasonal fresh fruit, peaches so sweet they taste like mangoes, watermelon picked in the Southern Republics such a stunning deep red and so crisp, cherries so.. but by this point I had drifted off into a world of exotic fruit, Madagascar maybe, or one of the “Southern Republics” (whatever the hell they might be) a glorious land of flavours, colours and textures, miles away from my flat and the fridgebreadcheese.

Anyway, by this point, I must have been starting to lose my mind. Three days of living on my own, malnourished, with just my own mind keeping me company somehow led me to believe that I had to go to a street kiosk after work and purchase a Seasonal Fruit. It was like I'd been hypnotised. I soon snapped out of it at about 7.30pm on Monday when I found myself laden with a plastic bag containing a watermelon about four times bigger than my own head and heavier than a professional bowling ball tearing into my hand. I heaved it all the way back to my flat, staggering along in my heels and ignoring the pity on the faces of onlookers - and set it down on the floor. And then sat on the floor next to it. Realised for the first time that I was now going to have to sit, by myself, in the kitchen, and eat watermelon for dinner. And dessert. And breakfast the next day. And all of the next week. Numbly, I lifted it up and launched it into my quite small fridge, which now looked as if it had been bought to house the watermelon. A lesser person might have cried. I just closed the fridge door quietly, wondering what would have been wrong with peaches, and walked away.

Tonight I’m going out for dinner with some of the other trainees (which might hopefully allay some of the dislocated first-week weirdness) but tomorrow is Find a Supermarket Day. It has to be.

tweezers, starbucks and moscow: day one

I left my flat today for the first time since my arrival. I had to, really, because I had accidentally left my tweezers in London and it was a stark choice between either venturing out into a world of Cyrillic to find a replacement pair or growing my eyebrows out and eschewing the possibility of making friends here. So there I was, on a road, map in hand, and there it was.

Moscow. Wow. How often as a little girl did I dream of one day living in an enormous, noisy city full of traffic, militia and alienation where no-one understood a word I said, everything was written in code and every fourth woman on the street was tall and whorish? But years of hard work and arbitrary life choices later and finally, finally, here I am! It just goes to show, doesn’t it.

The map was in phonetic Russian and the street signs were Cyrillic and I had no brilliant ideas about where to start so I wandered about hopelessly for a while, stopping every so often to squint at street signs, side-stepping the Muscovites charging past me, looking from map to street sign and back to map, enunciating letters very slowly to myself and wandering around more or less in circles until I happened upon a Starbucks, felt a disappointing surge of pure joy, and skipped inside.

Dangerous amounts of sugar and cream and caffeine later, everything seemed wonderful. Sod the map, I thought, thrusting it back into my handbag with wild abandon. It’s not like it has an arrow on it labelled ‘shop that sells, amongst other things, tweezers’ – in fact, it’s totally incomprehensible and all it’s really telling me is that I’m in Moscow, and I have definitely come to terms with that fact now*. I’ll just walk! And look around! And maybe go into that clinical-looking, mint-green-coloured shop that is clearly a chemist! And yes I will inevitably be forced to mime plucking my eyebrows to a bemused member of staff, but I will embrace this deeply awkward and embarrassing encounter as a delightful quirk of my new life in Russia, and I’ll also be able to buy some toothpaste at the same time, and that will qualify today as a resounding success story.

Generally though, I think I might be facing the weirdest six months of my entire life. Just one day of relentless confusion and I’m totally exhausted. Philip gets here on Saturday, by which time I hope to have:

1. successfully navigated the metro system at least once;
2. befriended the daughter of an oligarch;
3. completed a week at work without offending or alienating anybody; and
4. found out where the supermarket is.
   

Although, realistically, I can probably strike off 1 and 4 right now.


*This is a lie.