Loko - MOTIV

See the locomotive back there?

Rossiiskiye zhelezny dorogi and I have not seen eye to eye since my overnight train back from St. Petersburg (oh I know, I know, the Russian railways are where you meet the most interesting people; well to you I say, yes, and also where you meet the most disgusting germs/bird diseases). But I set aside our disagreements to go see Lokomotiv (who's that?) take on Moscow's Dinamo, who are ranked 10th and 5th in Russia's Premier League, respectively.

Since this is my second Loko game, I'm going to go ahead an call myself a fan, although I'm not a fan of their colors -- red and green. They look like Christmas trees in their away uniforms. Anyway, because Dinamo is a better quality opponent than last time (that was Tom, whose record against Loko in the last four games or something is an astonishing 0-0-4, with a total goals scored of ZERO), tickets were more expensive. Thus for the same price which last time got us tickets at about Tomsk's six (see right)

we were only able to sit in the fanataky section, which are located behind the goals. (At those prices, they still only filled about 60% of the stadium.) The nice devushka at the kassa, however, helped me out, guiding me towards seats in the back corner of the section, away from the shirtless crazies.

So here's the view from our seats this time:

Q: But VB, why can't you see anything?

A: Well, in addition to the men who showed their fanhood/macho character by standing barechested and smoking the whole game, there were also flags and the smoke of fireworks set off at various times during the match.

Like when we scored! And about time too, because Loko dominated the whole first half. Although to be fair, we could hardly put any shots on frame. I think it was maybe the 70th minute before we got our goal, which was beautiful. Unfortunately, Dinamo answered just a few minutes later on some terrible defensive work by Loko.

But possibly even more entertaining than the game itself were the fans. First of all, when you arrive, you (being a 20 to 50-year-old Russian male) have to shake hands with everyone in the seats around you before you get serious and start flicking off the opponents. Then you have to get out a giant flag/your scarf and wave it around at the command of your section leader, who also starts the chants. It's all typical soccer behavior from then on out (booing at the refs, hugging everyone around you when your team scores, spilling red bull over the railing when you're ticked off, etc.).

I had been eager to learn some obscene football chants, but the only thing I could actually understand was in English and pretty stupid.

Because this was a crosstown game and there were so many opposing fans in the stadium, the militsia was on hand to empy the stands section by section. We were next to last, before the Dinamo fans.

The game was only marginally more entertaining than the last game, but since I come from a long tradition of solidly mediocre teams, I'm more than happy with this result.

At least he was straightforward.

So I'm in Kievskaya Stantsia metro waiting for someone to go on a boat tour of Moscow. I'm early for a change, and I sit down on a bench. The young man (henceforth MCh) sitting next to me turns to me and says,

MCh: What time is it please?

I've been thinking in English all day and I'm not feeling very good, so I just take the lazy way out and hold up my watch so he can see the face. Note: It's 6:40. I'm meeting Ksenia at 7.

[Pause.]

MCh: Tell me, please, what metro is this?

Me: This one?

MCh: Yes.

Dude, are you serious? You're sitting here in a metro station that's well marked and where there are actually three connected stations all with the same name and you're asking me what its name is? I'm still processing kind of slowly and having none of this.

Me: I don't know.

[Pause.]

MCh: Where are you from?

Me: From America.

MCh: America?

Me: Yes.

[Pause.]

MCh: Do you have a morsh?

Me: A what?

MCh: A morsh, do you have a morsh?

Oh man, is my Russian really this bad? What the heck is a morsh?

Me: And what's that?

MCh: Morsh, morsh, morsh. You don't have a morsh?

He seems to think this is a really obvious word. Wait, is he saying muzh? Oh my, that's direct. I start laughing, which is the wrong thing to do. He probably thinks I'm flattered rather than flabbergasted.

Me: No, I don't have a husband.

MCh: Would you like to meet one?

Me: What?

MCh: Would you like to meet one?

Man I KNEW there was something I wanted to do in Moscow. I can't believe I almost came back home without a Russian husband!

Me: I'm sorry, I don't understand you.

MCh: Would you like to meet one?

Me (Shouting over the train): I can't hear you! I don't understand you! I don't speak Russian very well! [All previous protestations to the contrary aside.]

MCh: ...

Me: I'm sorry! I don't understand!

The conversation ends there, but I'll be darned if I'm giving up my primo seat on the bench to avoid this guy. So I sit there stubbornly for the next 15 minutes until my friend texts me.

In retrospect, I would kind of liked to have seen him in action with a Russian woman. I wonder if he just hangs out at Kievskaya asking women in they're married, like the Dan Hammond of the circle line. On another note, the other day when I was standing in line at the Kremlin ticket office, I heard some overaged frat boys asking the Russian woman in front of them where her wedding ring was. I thought at the time that it was a ham-handed, language barrier-inspired pick-up line specific to Americans. Dear overaged frat boys: my apologies. Also, dear man I spurned: I bet you feel silly for approaching possibly the only woman in the whole station who didn't understand the word "muzh."

Tourists, part ii

For the past few days I've taken my parents sightseeing in Moscow. This included

1. visiting the Imperial Porcelain factory, former purveyors to the tsars. For my mother, no trip is complete without checking out the local pottery/porcelain/china. I don't know much about this (for example, I couldn't explain the difference between three things above), but I know THIS has to be the best stuff she's seen. I mean, look who uses it:

I just really love that they thought it was necessary to include this picture in their store.

2. A trip down Arbat street, a place I've been avoiding all month, and rightly so -- it was full of tourists, Russians dressed in traditional "Russian" garb, and artists selling their abilities with pictures of Dima and Britney Spears.

This picture doesn't begin to capture what it's like. I'm not sure what the draw is.

When I went in to look at a store, the salesgirl quoted me a price on something that was over three times what I'd paid in St. Petersburg (with a little bargaining). I turned to leave, and before I could get out the door the price dropped two more times -- but was still higher.

3. St. Basil's.

Isn't it nice?

4. An Uzbek restaurant for dinner, which had

a. servers who weren't familiar with non (bread)

b. enough horse on the menu to freak out my mom

c. enough morozhenoe on the menu to pacify my mom

d. belly dancers.

It might've had cockfights as well, but we didn't stay long enough to see.

5. A tour of the two places in Moscow open at 8 am, Coffee House

and the bakery near Patriarch's Pond. I like it better at 8 pm.

6. Sparrow hills, another place that's way overrated, to get the panoramic of Moscow.

It's not even a great view. You can see a few churches from here but mostly you just see new skyscrapers. Again, I don't know what the big fuss is about.

7. Yet more Kremlin sightseeing. This time I saw in addition to everything else I got to see the Armory museum, which was amazing. They had Ivan the Terrible's throne! Faberge eggs! Boris Godunov's armor! And other things that are exciting only to Russian history geeks.

Beware Macdoof

I went with Daniel and Danielle to see Bolshoi Theatre's production of Verdi's Macbeth. The cheap seats -- neudobny, or inconvenient ones -- are just 50 rubles if you show up an hour before the show. Unfortunately, the box office to the biggest theater in Russia is poorly organized. There's the window for pensioners and others entitled to free tickets, the window with a line of woman that's not moving at all, and one window with no cashier. Everyone, not just the foreigners, is wandering around trying to figure out where to buy tickets.

Daniel, who's gone here before, took the lead in approaching one ticket window after another until a cashier finally told him to just wait a few minutes and she'd have tickets ready. We milled around for a little while since it was long before 6:30. Then another woman wandered up to the window to wait. After a few minutes, there was a loud argument between her, the guard, and the cashier. The latter two both vehemently protected Daniel's right to be first in line. They kept telling her to get behind the molodoi chelovek. Nevermind us -- we got shoved to the end of the line. At any rate, thanks to Daniel's in with the cashier he/we got first crack at the discount seats.

On the far wall is a little model of the theater.

Because the Bolshoi is undergoing an enormous renovation, this show was actually in the New Bolshoi. This is in the hallway leading to the auditorium...

And here's inside the auditorium:

Isn't it fantastic? Don't you just expect to look over and see Madame Olenska scandalizing everyone?

But let's settle down and pay attention to the opera. Oh wait, we're not done with the ticket problem. Although we bought three tickets at once, one is in a separate section. These particular neudobny seats are so far to the right of the theater that you can only see 60% of the state, and the third ticket is in the farthest section. The usher wouldn't let us sit together even though there were plenty of seats. (She was actually pretty nice about it; later she yelled at a patron who had hauled the usher's chair in from the hall and set it up at the railing.)

So we take our respective seats and watch the first two acts, wherein there is a whirlwind of predictions from about 50 witches who spend a lot of their time swinging their hair at Macbeth.

At intermission we stop by the refreshment room, where tea, salmon sandwiches, salami, champagne, and caviar are available for purchase.

You serve yourself hot water for tea from a giant samovar in the middle of the room.

And then after intermission we return to find in our seats two elderly ladies holding hand written tickets with our seat numbers. I'm just waiting for the strict usher to return when they figure out that they are in the wrong. Once everything gets sorted out, we can pay attention again to the play.

Highlights:

- the Russian subtitles revealed the spelling Макдуф, which is pronounced "Macdoof" in Russian. This adds an entirely new, unheroic dimension to his character.

- I know an opera is not a play, but I wanted to see some action. I mean, most of the characters die violently. The murders and battles were disappointingly abstract. Duncan was murdered with a slashing of black fabric, Banquo just ran off stage, and Macbeth staggered off stage. Eh.

- In general, there were a lot of abstract elements, some of which made no sense to me. Random extras were wearing red gloves. Fleance, who was approximately seven years old, showed up at the banquet with the ghost of Banquo. The strangest part was the use of these long poles with cotton or tin foil on the end of them. Picture a series of giant q-tips: that was Dunsinane Wood. The tin foil ones were alternately apparitions, Dunsinane Wood, and Banquo's descendants.

- I'm happy to report that no one actually answered his/her phone during the opera, which I fully expected.

1,2,3, etc.

1. Remember the jaguar benz? Well apparently that's a real thing here. For example, this young man had a picture of a woman (not his girlfriend) surfing on his car. But the best was in St. Petersburg, where I actually stopped on the sidewalk and gaped at a black Porsche Cayenne with naked female body parts on it. I would have taken a picture, except that it was sort of X-rated. Can you imagine driving around in that car? Can you imagine it, period?

2. In the past few weeks I've been to two events that required a line of policeman to stand between the event and the metro in order to keep crowds in line. Here's the second: a Lokomotiv game. (They tied Tomsk 0-0, which apparently is the same result these teams have had the last four or five times they've faced each other. The first half was great, the second pretty dull. Why? Because Tomsk was counting itself lucky to get a tie, which meant they sat back all second half and defended. I'll try again this weekend.)

3. In Russia, there's a flavor of ice cream called byely, or "white." It is frozen cream with sugar, I think, and it's disgusting. Or as disgusting as frozen cream with sugar can be. White ice cream should be vanilla, or coconut, or even pina colada.

On the other hand, here I was, calling these ice cream flavors by their colors because I didn't know what flavor they were, and it turns out I was absolutely right. Sometimes (consider my predilection for dark literature, need to take off my shoes inside the house, reckless sincerity, adoration of Russian women, ability to shake my head at the hijinks of young people) I think I was meant for Russia.

4. In the U.S., when an area is roped or fenced off, no matter how small that barricade, it's generally respected. But not so here. Let's take a look.

This is part of Alexandrovsky Sad, the garden just outside of the Kremlin. It has a very low (maybe 6-inch high) wrought-iron fence around it to keep people out of the geometrically perfect flower beds. Does it work? Nope! It's all one with the picture-taking culture that requires people not just to look like idiots but to actually climb over guard rails into fountains to take pictures.

5. You asked about food. Here's a salad:

FAQ

What's the white stuff all over it? Sour cream.

Where's the lettuce? There isn't any.

What about that green stuff? Dill. Get used to it.

6. Finally, here's where D.A.M. works every day when he's not on vacation in Africa/getting drunk at the G8 (look, allegedly -- you know I don't buy it):

So today while we were at the Kremlin maybe eight black Benzes pulled up, and we (by we I mean I, as I frantically scrambled for my camera/Russian introductory phrases) thought that D. Prez himself was going to emerge from the cars to briefly interact with the people. But it was not to be. Alas.

If you were the Baltic Sea and I were a cup.

Okay. I might have been just the slightest bit wrong about Petersburg. I will review the evidence, and you can judge for yourself.

Exhibit A. My friend Charlie is working there for the summer. This means that we got to hang out a bunch, and the following took place:

a. an interview with a drunken Russia at a little market. Charlie, whose version of the evening's events you can read here, doesn't give credit where it's due. Mostly to his own patience. He must've talked to this man for 10 minutes, in the course of which d.r. asked six times, "Do you know Russian?" (Answer: Obviously.)

Not only was this accompanied by hand gestures, but the man grabbed Charlie by the shoulders and shirt, gave him a lecture about his beer choices, then proceeded to get out his ratty notebook and write down Charlie's information. D.R. also lectured him about a city tour and some other b.s. I couldn’t hear because it was a man-only, confidential chat. Charlie is completely right that I got a kick out of it. I made no effort to help him; instead I documented events for you (and for YOU, readers of Charlie's blog who never get to see him in action):

b b . b. an evening at the Irish pub where they played a lot of western music, in the course of which I realized I’m not the only one who really digs this:

c. viewing of St. Petersburg's bridges at night. The bridges are illuminated when it gets dark, and then a bit later, around 1 am, portions of them are raised for big boats to pass underneath. It was pretty spectacular. Look here:

and here:

Charlie illustrating how the bridge mechanism works:

And here's what I would have done if Charlie weren’t so common sensical (“uh, sure, if you want to fall in the Neva”).

But Lizachka, you’re saying. Charlie is not a permanent fixture of Petersburg. That doesn’t really count. That's not very nice of you, but point taken:

2. Peterhof. Yes, it's true: this is one of the most beautiful places I've been. And I almost didn’t go. Thank you to those of you who expressed in no uncertain terms what a life-altering experience it could be (that would be Olya and Olya) and no thanks to everyone else.

So Peterhof is Peter the Great’s summer estate, which has been greatly expanded since he designed it. It was wrecked during the war but there’s been extensive renovation. If I lived in St. Petersburg, I would be a regular visitor. Also, I would get married there, preferably to an oligarch who would buy me a piece of the property before fleeing the country.

Let’s discuss at great length.

So when you get off the boat

you see in front of you a long boulevard with a canal. At the end of it are huge fountains and the palace at the top of a hill.

Wow, you think. How wonderful. Well, Moscow-jaded veebs says that. You would more likely gasp in awe and start making plans to move here. But wait! On the grounds there are both wooded areas

and more than one nice beach.

Here’s one of the brides.

This is a landscaped terrace on the outside of the one of the smaller palaces.

There are a series of gardens around the palaces, and this one

included a fountain that was suspiciously similar to the one in Millennium Park (open mouth spouting water, unpredictable timing, low water level and all). I suspect whichever jerk designed it ripped this one off.

This fountain, without any machinery, rotates.

Here's the view from the steps of the palace looking out towards the Gulf of Finland. We did a tour inside the palace but a. you’re not allowed to take pictures there this year and b. those kinds of overly ornate baroque/classical rainbow rooms leave me kind of cold. My favorite part of the tour was actually going underneath the palace to see the fountains' internal workings.

From the spot in the picture above, I walked down a short set of stairs and then back underneath the black and white floor to get into the stone passageways. After you go through the pipes, you come out to stand at the level of the fountain itself, a place that is not only covered in water but constantly getting hit with the spray from other fountains. It was like Louis XIV's version of a water park.

[Don't look too closely -- I'm frowning for some reason. I really don't know.]

Not sure yet how you feel?

How bout now? Are you ready to come visit?

Exhibit C/Begrudging Admission: The people in St. Petersburg are much nicer than Muscovites. Maybe they’re in a better mood because their city is prettier or maybe they’re just used to tourists, but it was a pleasure to have people smile at me when I spoke with them in a way that didn’t convey contempt.

Exhibit D: the Dostoevsky factor. How could I not be charmed by a city that was home to such fantastic artists? Like Jpey, I snuck some illegal pictures.

Dostoevsky's study.

There were a lot of other contributing factors, like four days of glorious weather with only a wayward rainstorm, cheap cab rides, charming waitresses, and the color of the Hermitage – oh wait.

Exhibit E: The Hermitage. I guess maybe from watching Russian Ark (what's that? -- ugh, it still makes me shudder), I had this image of the museum as a dreary, dark place. But it’s actually incredible. So the Hermitage is the biggest museum you can imagine, set up in the winter palace of the tsars. Lots of rooms are exhibits themselves, but what’s really astounding is the breadth of art contained there. There’s some incredible statistic about how looking at piece of artwork a minute for the rest of your life wouldn't cover a fraction of what's there.

Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

Inside it alternates between disgusting (full of tourists/opulent) and amazing.

Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to two things. First St. Petersburg's anti-corruption campaign takes the form of these stylized ads. Here the fist is crushing "corruption." Moscow, not surprisingly, has nothing along these lines.

Second, look what I found on the shelves of my local bookstore.

Just to really underscore the difference between the cities, the night train back to Moscow was waaay less interesting/wonderfully old fashioned than it sounds/Cary Grant made it out to be, and the conductor hated me. Now that I think about it, she was probably from Moscow.

So I'm back home, where I can scowl all day if I want to, bitch about grimy streets and bad weather, obsess about the state of Russian media, and not have to worry about tourists getting between me and morozhenoe.