five things

I've loved everything about the last couple of weeks (except for work, obviously.) Not even sure where to start, so instead, here's a list of 5 arbitrarily selected things I love about Moscow.

1. The first one is actually a view. You reach the gold-domed and magnificent if slightly chavvy Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, walk around the back of it, cross the bridge and all of a sudden you're faced with the most incredible panoramic view of the city and whatever difficulties or problems you've encountered that week all seem insignificant because at that moment you can't help but think, oh my god LOOK AT THAT GHOST SHIP.

ssome quite impressive Russian poses from Filye and Felushka

2. The opera. We went to one and I loved it. I think. Sort of. It involved a fat man dressed up as some sort of Arabic peacock (arguably camel) and I'm quite sure it wasn't supposed to be a comedy but it was VERY funny, unapologetically mad, and when the crowd took their bows there was this ridiculous, triumphant technicolour explosion of fireworks, dry ice and glitter pouring down on to the stage, wonderful. It was like my life had been massively lacking glitter and I hadn't realised it until that moment.

The audience though.. their applause was the most bizarre thing I've ever encountered at a performance. No real applause.. they just clapped along to the music. So the exhausted cast were bowing with these fixed, weirded-out grins on their faces and for their efforts they received an unsmiling audience stoically clapping along to the reprise music, beat by excruciating beat. No resurgent breaking into appreciative we're-going-now-but-well-done-again applause. Just: smack, smack, smack, smack, and then it stopped, and everyone left. Soviet era clapping. So that was totally weird. But not as weird as...

3. THIS DOG:

which I felt the need to mention only because it is one of the most stupid-looking things I've ever seen. They abound in Moscow, these tiny pseudo-dogs peeping out of their mobile handbag houses on the shoulder of their adoring bejewelled human mothers.. but they're not normally as bad as this tiny Yoda-bunny dog-gerbil. The owner: when I asked if I could please take a picture of it, she stooped to the ground, put its ludicrous little rabbit-hood up, propped the dog itself up on its hind legs and beamed at me. I took the picture and then thought.. yes. That was an extremely unusual moment.


4. The supermarket. Admittedly it has been a bit of a love-hate relationship with supermarkets so far, mostly hate. But I was in a particularly bad mood when I wrote that last post and my poppy seed phase had probably reached its zenith - the thing is, yes it's difficult to find things like cheddar cheese and worcester sauce, and yes they usually only stock ONE LEEK AT A TIME, but these things become much easier to forgive when the supermarket itself looks like this:




And sells drinks like this:

(which I bought, because cheddar cheese or no cheddar cheese, it obviously wouldn't feel like home without my favourite "English Traditions Manchester Gin & Tonic made with London dry gin".)


5. And finally, Zara Moscow. A shop I have no strong feelings about in the UK, but that's because they're not completely unironically selling THESE:

Did not buy. Massively regretting.

poppy seed cake and the deli counter: unfriendliness, rage and shame

After some dedicated weeks of scouring supermarket shelves and google-translating cyrillic I had nearly gathered together all of the ingredients required for Rachel Allen's poppy seed cake, which was the most Russian-sounding recipe I could find that didn't involve fifteen different layers or have the phrase 'bird's milk' in the title. I now had all the ingredients except for poppy seeds. Fail. I'm determined to make this cake to the point of insanity. I don't know why. I just must make it. My quest is now a long drawn out and ridiculous one that involves me going into supermarkets, picking up bread with poppy seeds on it, finding the least hostile-looking member of staff, pointing to the poppy seeds and saying 'You have?' like a retard. They don't have. They never, ever have. They glance around dully as if there might be some scattered around on the floor somewhere, and then they say 'Nyet.' And with every stony-faced nyet, part of my dignity crumbles. They don't care about my poppy seeds. Literally nobody does.

On Sunday, as a final effort, I decided to seek out the famous Eliseyev supermarket: chandelier-lined cereal aisles, gold-plated fridge sections, jewel-encrusted carrier bags; it really was stupidly ornate, and surely they since they had all sorts of totally pointless groceries they might also have poppy s… nyet. The bloody woman couldn't even find it in herself to be nice about it. Not 'really sorry, we seem to be out!' or 'I don't think so, but perhaps you could try [useful information]', or 'I know poppy seeds is the Russian element in your cake, and here we are in the most quintessentially Russian supermarket in the world, and all we eat is poppy seeds on everything, but we just don't seem to stock them or sometimes even know what they are – weird!' Just another stony-faced nyet.

So now I was depressed and so hungry I was starting to feel dizzy, and I knew that what I needed most in the world was an uplifting snack and as quickly as possible. So it was against this background that I went to the deli counter. I queued for 15 long minutes. Finally, deli counter woman looked at me humourlessly. I brightened. My uplifting snack! It was coming!

'Um,' I said, gathering my thoughts and summoning the word for 'I would like' – and then an Odious Witch bustled in and barked her order at the deli counter lady, as if my presence in the queue in front of her was an inane fact that had absolutely no bearing on her life! Like a football score! And I could just be brushed aside like some sort of small beetle! My mouth fell open. The humourless deli lady regarded me for a moment - as if some social etiquette was niggling at the peripheries of her consciousness, something about common decency, but she couldn't quite… no, she'd drawn a blank – and the Odious Witch was duly served, and the beetle was not.

I had expected to encounter a lower threshold of unfriendliness here, mostly since all of the advice given to me before I left for Moscow revolved around the central premise that if I smile too much people will think I'm some sort of lunatic. But that wasn't a massive revelation, frankly. I was actually very confident that I had, over the years, mastered the art of not smiling in situations where to do so might sound alarm bells in the minds of the people around me. Overcrowded buses. Post office queues. A crowd of people gathered around a cyclist who is lying about 8 metres away from his bike. I'm usually quite adept at playing these things by ear. How different can Russia be, I thought.

No but seriously, they said.

Oh, I said. Well. Then maybe I'll take it up a notch or two, maybe I'll extend my repertoire of non-smiling situations to also include situations where I previously might have smiled if I was in a good mood! I don't know like, handing clothes back to fitting rooms assistants. The Waterstones queue. Standing up to allow someone to get to their seat. Where they might have had a smile in London, they will have a curt nod of acknowledgment in Moscow. I will conduct interactions with sales assistants and waitresses with an air of gravitas. There would be a distinct cooling of my general demeanour.

No, they said, as in, even when you meet people for the first time and you're introducing yourself, don't even smile then.

But that's actually just rude, I said, and thus began my struggle with the cultural personality of Moscow, which came to a head right at the moment when the Odious Witch pushed in front of me in that queue, and the Rage came, I knew it would, I tried to quell it but after a month of stony-faced nyets it was so evitable it was almost prophesized, and as I walked up to her I thought (so angrily that if this thought had been hovering in text above my head, there would have been flames blazing off it) 'Let's see how easy it is to ignore me when I do THIS' - and lightly shoulder-shoved her as I walked past. I think I meant to just pointedly elbow-knock her handbag, but I must have made real contact, in the way the you might if you were trying to get off the tube and the doors were about to close, because she actually oomphed. I've just done that, I thought. I've just shoved a lady. She oomphed.

The Rage fizzled out like a crap firework, quickly to be replaced by the Shame. I dashed out of the supermarket, genuinely mortified by the discovery that after years of believing that I was well-adjusted, I was, against all odds, an aggressive anti-social menace. What else might I be capable of? I caught up with Philip and examined him anxiously from the depths of despair, wondering if he would break up with me when he knew that I was unhinged. But apparently he already knew, so we spent the rest of the Sunday much like we had spent Saturday: not baking Rachel Allen's stupid sodding poppy seed cake.

Actually, we went to the zoo and it was quite fun. Maybe I should have been writing about that instead.

the eastern front

You might think it tricky to visit any museum about the Second World War and not leave feeling depressed, but the Museum of the Great Patriotic War is not simply an immersion in the horrors of the second world war. The way the loss of life is dealt with is quite beautiful (as Nish mentions below), and also the building itself is spectacular, even inspiring. The diorama displays are painted (with one or two exceptions) brilliantly and are almost worth the visit on their own – although you'd probably have to see them to quite believe that. I would.

As Nish also points out, this is also somewhere that plenty of people choose to have their wedding photos. This seems a peculiarly Russian thing – wedding parties climb into their white stretched Hummers and then drive to all the tourist spots around and have their photo taken at each. I saw the same in St. Petersburg, where some of the photos also included a baby black bear… I can't see this happening in Oxfordshire.

A number of the photo parties were grouped around the massive obelisk between the main museum's embracing wings. The obelisk really is very, very big indeed – 142m high, with each 10cm of representing one day of the war (the war on the eastern front being from 1941-1945). It's a modern, triangular Trajan's column, with its flanks covered in high relief scenes of battle, intermingled with comic-book block lettering listing Russian cities that suffered during the conflict. I think the effect is a bit spoiled by a bronze angel near the top that is so large and ponderous it looks ready to snap off and ruin the wedding parties at any moment. We're learning, though, that in Russia, big = beautiful, and this feels like just part of an odd kinship with the USA. Perhaps if Philip Pullman had set Lyra Belacqua's home in New York then its alternative reality would be Moscow.

However, for all its grandeur, artistic flair and surprising cultural comment, the museum did not fail in its primary purpose: something we won't now quickly forget is that the Soviet Union lost around 27 million of its citizens during the Second World War. This was around 15% of its population in 1940.