Goodbye, Moscow!
Sep 29, 2012
It wasn't the notorious Russian flu of 1889, but it was Russian, and it was a flu, and it hit me in the middle of the night halfway through my trip to Moscow. I first assumed that it was food poisoning. Earlier in the night, six colleagues and I went to what was billed as a trendy retro Soviet-styled canteen called Stolovaya No. 57. Evidently, retro Soviet-themed restaurants are popular in Moscow the way I suppose that '50's style diners are popular in America except instead of burgers, fries and milkshakes, they served goulash, borsch and watered-down cranberry juice. (Come to think of it, I saw several 1950s American-style diners around Moscow, too.) It was more than a little ironic that the restaurant was housed in a fancy shopping mall surrounded by expensive high-end stores. It made me wish I had time to visit Lenin's mausoleum to see if he was spinning or not.
Anyway, at the canteen, a German tourist in line next to me asked the devushka behind the counter what something was -- some kind of meat wrap that looked like a short burrito. I already had two on my plate, so I was curious to hear what she said. The German tourist didn't speak Russian, and the devushka didn't speak German, so they tried their best to communicate in English.
"You want?" said the devuska.
"What is it?' said the German.
"Meat."
"Beef?"
"Meat, meat," she repeated.
"Beef?"
She gave a half-hearted nod and rocked her hand back and forth as if to say, "Kind of."
Naturally, it's what I immediately thought of while puking my guts out in my hotel room. But from what I learned later, a stomach virus was making the rounds. Nothing as severe as the 1889 pandemic that killed a million people, of course, but mixed with the jet-lag wooziness I was still struggling with, it sure felt like it to me. Especially when I had to get up at 7 AM the next morning for work. Even though I was part of a team sent to Russia to work on the museum. I was a necessary cog in the wheel, and there was no one else on the team who could do what I was there to do.
Thankfully, I was able to return to the hotel at noon to sleep for a few hours before heading back to work at 7 PM.
My job was to make last minute fixes and put finishing touches on a series of video projections for the soon-to-open Russian-Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Although the museum itself is housed in the gargantuan 8500 square meter (over 91,000 square foot) former bus garage, the room I worked in was, as I expected. comparatively small and windowless, with little ventilation. Helpful, perhaps, when trying to concentrate on getting things done, but the lack of windows only added to my delirium.
We finished working at about 1 AM, and while my producer. Lilly and the sound designer, Andy, went to the hotel bar for a vodka-fueled debriefing session. I headed straight to my room. I didn't even notice the aging prostitute in the lobby. "She's there every night," Andy told me later.
Are you sure she's a prostitute?" I said.
Russian women have a reputation for being some of the most attractive in the world, and, aging prostitutes aside, I found it to be quite true. But their style of dress can be misleading. I don’t mean to imply that Russian women dress like whores, but the flashy body-conscious clothes and 5-inch spiked heels that so many of them wear could easily lead a lonely guy from out of town to make the wrong assumption about a single girl in a hotel lobby. No, I'm sure," said Andy. "She asked me if I wanted her to come upstairs with me."
Michael, a graphic designer who arrived a couple of days behind me. was booked into a different hotel on the other side of town, but said that his hotel had a house prostitute, too.
"Is she cute?" Andy asked.
"Yeah, she's actually quite attractive."
"Ours isn't," said Andy, before turning to Lilly and demanding that in the future, he only be booked in a hotel with attractive prostitutes.
"I'll write that down," said Lilly.
I wasn't there long enough to pick up the city's rhythm and found Moscow to be more than a little hard to decipher -- mysterious, even. It didn't help that things there don't always look like what they are. One of our colleagues -- an employee of a partner company based in Seville -- discovered a good spot for lunch after wandering into a place he thought was a bank. He could read enough Russian to recognize the word bAHK on the building's facade and walked in, hoping for an ATM. Instead, he found a cafeteria with babushkas spooning mysterious slop onto plates for lunching businessmen. The slop turned out to be tasty, though, and it became the Spanish crew's go-to spot for lunch. There was a limited menu, maybe three things to choose from at most, but the dishes looked so similar to each other that it was impossible to tell what was what, and therefore hard to decide on what to choose. Since the Spaniards didn't speak Russian, they made drawings of various animals and held them up like flash cards -- a chicken, a pig, a cow. When the drawing matched what was being served, the babushka would point to the drawing and nod. "Ah, chicken, good, okay, I'll have some of that."
The night we arrived, we went to a restaurant that Lilly found in a book. When we got there, the door was locked, and it appeared to be closed. We nearly left, but a guy entering a neighboring building gestured for us to ring a bell. We did and were buzzed into a door that led to a musty stairway. Upstairs was a bar, a karaoke machine, and a few small tables. In what appeared to be an old residence of some kind. The food took forever to arrive, but it was delicious. Afterwards, we walked back to the hotel. Andy couldn't sleep, so he went for a walk to get a drink. He saw a trio walk into a bar -- a guy and two women -- and decided to follow them in. When he got to the threshold, however, a large man stopped him. "Do you like techno?" he asked.
"I just want to get a drink," Andy said.
The guy just shook his head, “Нет!”
It became a running joke, mainly because everywhere we went, we heard the faint thump thump thump of a techno beat. In the cabs, in the stores, even in the middle of Red Square, where they were gearing up for the yearly "City of Light" light show that I, sadly, missed by a day. I'm surprised the immigration officer who stamped our passports didn't ask us the same thing when we first entered the country: "Do you like techno?"
"No."
DENIED.
