Back to (Russian) Reality

I made it back to Moscow.

I left my mum's house Monday, at 9:30 Winnipeg time and arrived at my flat in Moscow around Tuesday 8:00pm local time. A 25 1/2 hour journey, 1 1/2 of those devoted to sleep.

If you think it was uneventful you know little about me, little about air travel and damn near nothing about Moscow.

What did I do with a whole day's worth of waking hours? Here's a rough breakdown:


-14h 45 minutes in the air (Winnipeg -Toronto-Montreal-Brussels-Moscow
-3h by car to and from airports
-2h clearing various security and customs checkpoints
-2.5h waiting on tarmacs after scheduled takeoff, because airline scheduling personnel are sadists
-1 h eating airport sushi because I'm a masochist
-1h searching for free wifi in airports (you win this round, Pearson Intl)
-1/2h talking to an insanely flirty Romanian waitress (you also win this round, Pearson Intl)
-1 1/2h watching Hot Tub Time Machine (I recommend this)
-2 1/2h watching Sex and the City II: Carrie Somehow Manages to Insult the Middle East with Shoes (I do not recommend this)
-Some 7 hours listening to my iPod, staring at strangers, and willing their children to shut up
-However long it took to partially finish 47 crossword puzzles (I also discovered that when you are hopped up on daytime cold meds, you think you are awesome at crossword puzzles. You are not. All your answers are wrong, and the stupid puzzles are unfair, anyway)
-1/2h watching Russians try to cheat the laws of physics to into amending the space restrictions of overhead compartments to accommodate the insane Russian love of all things duty-free


But after 22 hours I landed in Russia. And we are in the home stretch now, right?

Ha.

I have to say, getting through customs is easy. Way too easy. In my jet-lagged, cold-pilled, free-mini-bottles-of-wine state I have filled out all my entry documents with 2011, promising an exit date of 2012--a full year after my Russian visa expires. My border guard takes one look at my documents, one look at me and stamps my paperwork through, laughing.

So much for international security.

But all the better for me beause now I can get my luggage. Well, half of it. The very friendly (?!) Sheremetyevo airport personnel inform me that one of my suitcases is still in Brussels, and will be delivered to my home the next day. This being the suitcase with the smuggled peanut butter, I am understandably disappointed, but too tired to care. I do hate Belgium now, as much as anyone can hate a country best-known for its waffles and lace, but it's just time to get home already.

I make a quick beeline through customs where 3 completely unrelated people are trying to check through either melons or squash (what?) and nobody looks at me twice. Then to the airport doors where I argue with a few taxi drivers until I find one who will accept my price. I head to a car with the one who begins to freak out because I'm wheeling my own luggage. That's right! I've been away a little too long to remember this particular awesomely sexist perk of Russian alpha-maleness, and I gladly give him my bags.

"The traffic is terrible" he tells me as we climb in. I shrug. I've got a fixed rate and a comfy back seat--bring on the Moscow rush hour. It'll be the easiest thing I've done all day.

As we pull out of the Sheremetyevo lot, the dashboard starts beeping--Cabbie isn't wearing his seatbelt. His response to this situation is to complain about the noise and turn up the radio to drown it out. Three months ago, this probably wouldn't have fazed me, but I've been in the West for a whole season, land of worrying and caution and believing that the rules pertain to you. I've forgotten where I am. Hey, Putin was recently photographed on vacation killing whales, with a crossbow in a rubber raft. So yeah. Fuck seatbelts.

Five minutes into the drive and over the upbeat blare of 1980's britpop I hear a groan and the most polite Russian curse words this cabbie can muster. I look out the windshield. Traffic is backed up. Not Canada, "this might take an hour" sort of backed up. Moscow backed up. Here's an example of the worst this city has to offer:

And it's like this, but on the highway. Standstill for what looks to be kilometres. There are more cars on this one stretch of road than are on every street combined in a Winnipeg rush hour. I'm prone to exaggeration, I know, but not this time. This is a three or four hour traffic jam if I've ever seen one.

We wait patiently for ten motionless minutes. But there's a fixed rate at stake here, and Cabbie's having none of it. He pulls onto the shoulder of the road where traffic is at least moving--bumper-to-bumper at a slow crawl, but moving, nonetheless. Yet even that only works for so long and when the shoulder of the highway comes to its own standstill, more heroic efforts must be made. Without a word to me, Cabbie pulls off the highway into a ditch and proceeds to drive in it the length of the road for at least a full kilometre, offering only "You can't be expected to use roads in traffic like this." Just like that. Like: "You must use an umbrella when it rains." "You must sleep if you are sleepy." "If the roads are full, you must drive in the ditch." Common sense, right? When after about a kilometre there's no more ditch to be had, we pull back onto the main road. I clap heartily, because bloody hell, well-done, man. And he's pretty proud of himself.

Our celebration is cut short as something rattle-bangs under the car. We pull into a gas station where Cabbie gets out, leans under the car and--I swear to god--rips out the offending piece of machinery with his bare hands. Then we get gas and it's back to the highway. We painstakingly crawl through another 15-20 minutes of traffic, Cabbie shaking his head and saying "Moskva, Moskva, Moskva" (I imagine for my benefit) until we reach the MKAD.

And this is his chance to make up for lost time. To make up for it at 125km per hour. Picking and weaving through the still-heavy traffic, we approach speeds I last felt on the airport runway. Of course this, thinks Cabbie, is an excellent time to chat.

"Where are you from?" he predictably asks.
"Canada. But I live in Moscow."
"Canada?! Beautiful! Beautiful place. Where is Canada? It's in Germany, right? You speak German?"

Um.

Now I ask you: is there a good, honest response to this question when this man is driving at the speed of death and has already demonstrated that he may in fact be capable of tearing metal with his bare hands? No, there isn't. The passenger in me warns the teacher in me to shut the hell up.
"Um. I speak English."
"Aha. England. Canada's in England*. Alright." We zip past a semi so fast I can't even read the side.
"Mmhmmm. England."


We reach my block two hours after we left the airport. I tell him he can let me out on the road, where one of my neighbors is ineplicably walking a pig on a leash, but he insists on driving me to the door. Seeing as how I haven't really slept in more than a day, am still full of cold pills, and am not entirely sure that the pig was not a hallucination, I decide to let him, and direct him to the guard house.

He talks to security and tells them he's dropping me off from the airport, that I live here. One security guard peers through the windows.

"Yeah, okay," he says, signalling that the gate be lifted, "Yeah, she's ours."

Yes. Yes, I am. I belong here. I made it. I'm home. Finally. Yes, I am one of yours.

"It's okay." the first guard relays to the second "It's Lydia."

Whatever. I'll take it.





*I'd like to point out, for the record, that Cabbie's knowledge of international geography is in NO WAY representative of the average Russian's knowledge of international geography. This man is a special case. In every way.

Holding my Breath for Moscow...

Some paperwork hiccups have me re-entering Russia at least a week later than I'd originally planned. While an 11 week vacation sounds great, these days I'm just missing my adopted hometown. The chaos, the quirkiness, the insistence on dill as a food group... I love a hot Moscow summer, drinking (usually) cold kiosk beer on the edge of a fountain, while a busking band covers everything from Joplin to Nirvana to Gogol Bordello.

But this is one summer that I'm missing nothing. As the fires rage on outside the Moscow, the capital is smothered. Word is, it will have moved on in two weeks. I'm hoping the same can be said for me, by then.

Yeah, Okay, I'm a Sh*tty Blogger

It's been nearly a year since I last wrote.
But in my defense, it was a busy year.

In September I got a brand new always-has-water flat in the Yugo Zapadnaya neighborhood, renting from an amazing client. For the first time since I got to Moscow, I can really stretch out. I have three rooms to myself. Myshka has a whole room just for his litter box. No joke.

In October I got very sick, got a Russian specialist, and learned all about paid healthcare. Yep--it's just as horrible and elitist as you imagine. Luckily the Limey was there to take care of me.

But in December the Limey had to go back to England, where I visited him for the New Year's holidays. England twice in six months, and no home for two years...I know, I know...

It was worth the visit, because in February the Limey moved again, this time all the way to Japan (follow him here). He'd always had a yen for all things Japanese (God I hate myself) so off he went, but not before popping into Moscow for a visit. On this particular visit he and I got into a massive row about the directions to a Japanese restaurant. This argument was quite quickly ended when the Limey proposed. Marriage, that is. We're planning a wedding for next summer in Gimli Manitoba. Pardon me for not using exclamation points, but I don't do that.

At the beginning of, March I spent two boring weeks in gorgeous Kiev, admiring the friendliness and Slavic good-looks of the locals, and waiting for my workvisa to get processed. Seeing as how I spent most of that two weeks on a bottom bunk with a computer and a German almost constantly snoring one bed over, you'd think that would have been an excellent time to start blogging again, but there you totally underestimate my laziness.

At the end of March, you no doubt heard about the rush-hour metro bombings. I don't know what to say but that that was a quiet, quiet day in Moscow. The sadness was so palpable in the streets, you felt you were breathing it. Piles of roses in the stations were chest high for weeks. But apart from that, you wouldn't know anything had happened. Russians are not people to be shaken easily, or scared into their homes. Life in Moscow carried on, undisturbed by those who wanted nothing more than to disturb everyone.

In May, my dear Katie came for a visit, and she enjoyed all that a world class city like Moscow has to offer:


It was an amazing time though, and a chance to do all the touristy stuff I forget to do. If you know her, ask her to tell you the story about being forced into line to see Lenin's mummy. It's a good one.

Then In June, I managed to finally get home, where I am now. So seeing as how I'm in my mother's basement right now, all Moscow news I have to offer is second hand.

And apparently, I picked a good summer to be gone. Moscow is blisteringly hot and blanketed in smog.It started with and insane heat wave, which led to drought, and tragedy and now there are fires, leading to more tragedy.

So if there was ever a time to take off, this is it.


I'll leave you with a somewhat disturbing video of an all-too common fire in the Russian countryside: