mystery of the metro-babushkas

I guess it’s a hangover from the CCCP’s glory days. Or maybe just an outlet for some of the more creative minds at work within Russia’s vast bureaucratic übermachine. Whatever the reason, Moscow’s streets are awash with the human products of a multitude of job creation schemes. You see them everywhere: teams of workmen who sweep up the autumn leaves in between tower blocks; young militia lads ‘standing guard’ around the metro; security guards at fruit markets. The list goes on.

Easily my favourites, though, are the babushkas* who sit in little booths at the bottom of every large escalator inside the major metro stations.

My flatmate Reinhardt and I have theorised at some length about what it is these ladies actually do, what function they serve. Haven’t managed to puzzle out a definitive job description for them yet. Here's the current crop of theories:

EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

According to this hypothesis, every booth contains a large on/off switch, which the babushka must operate if, for example, a female commuter gets her stiletto heel stuck in a groove and is sucked underneath one of the escalators. (Enormous high heels are typically the workaday choice of the lady Muscovite.)

 
LIGHTING MALFUNCTION EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

In this scenario, the babushka keeps a close eye on the scores of vertical fluorescent tubes lining her escalator shaft, and informs maintenance people if a globe blows. (An adjunct to this theory is the idea that the babushka herself will throw her emergency switch to “off” every few days or so, go up the escalator and scrape any errant particles of grime from the fluorescent tubes with a pocket knife.)

SLEEPER AGENTS

I personally like the idea that the babushkas are actually there to make sure no tourist takes any happy snaps of things they shouldn’t be photographing, and will inform the militia of any transgressions to the unwritten (and apparently arbitrary) rules about this.

To explain my choice of the word "arbitrary" here: on quite a few occasions I’ve asked the women in booths mozhna sfatagrafeeravat v stantsye? (“May I take photographs in the station?”, or at least something not too far removed from that.) The first time I did this, the response seemed to be along the lines of “Don’t be silly, of course you can!” Since then I've twice had a "yes", while the rest of the time the answer has been a stern and disapproving “no” (which makes the photo on this page a tiny bit illegal - depending on which babushka you talk to, of course).

Hmmm.
 

WASTE CONTROL

This theory goes that, once in a while, the babushka will reluctantly leave her booth and sweep metro tickets into a little pile, which southern gentlemen in iridescent orange workmen’s vests will later come along and remove.

The waste control hypothesis is weakened somewhat by the fact that, while walking through Bibliotheka Imeny Lenina station one night, I watched a swarm of middle-aged women (not booth babushkas, but the beneficiaries of some other job creation scheme) busily cleaning. They were leaning over the wood-panelled areas between escalators and dragging huge cloths along the surfaces, wiping off a day’s worth of dust and skin oils. So I’m thinking that either they would handle stray tickets as well, or there’d be someone else doing that. (I’d love to know if all of these jobs have titles and, if so, what they are.)

Still, I wouldn't discount the waste control theory altogether. Russian authorities appear to like the word "control" every bit as much as their German counterparts, so any role which has that word in the job title could seem worthwhile inventing.

If anyone can help me get to the bottom of this mystery, I’d very much appreciate it. Hold off for a couple of weeks, though; Reinhardt and I are having fun speculating!



* Brief linguistic aside: I’ve noticed that a lot of people understand the word babushka to mean “baby”, while others think it refers to those dolls that fit inside one another. Just to be sure we achieve mutual understanding in this rather silly blog entry, let me clear that up: babushka means “grandmother”. (The nesting dolls are matryoshka.)

seeking out the little things

“It’s the little things that make a difference.”

How many times have you heard that clichéd little phrase?

I’m asking rhetorically of course. Please don’t send me an email that goes “Hi Anthony, hope you’re keeping well. In response to your question regarding the ‘little things’ cliché: at last count it was 327”.

Actually, no ... on second thoughts do send me that email. It’d be marvellous to know there’s someone out there who makes more notes on their own life and keeps more lists than I do.

Anyway, I’m quoting the cliché because "little things" is a theme that has so far run through my experience of life as a foreigner, like the stripe through certain kinds of toothpaste when that suddenly became fashionable in the 90s for no apparent reason. I’ll give you an example:

You all heard about how, after the Cold War ended, the bread queues in Russia disappeared and the shops began stocking up for a new era of delirious consumption, right? Well, it seems to be true. The scale of retail here is quite staggering; there don’t appear to be as many mega-malls as there are in Australia (and what a pity), but instead there are mega-markets, backed up by clusters of little shops and stalls that radiate out from every metro station. And they’re huge. The size of my local market in Prazhskaya, for example, is measurable in PadMarks*, a unit of retail space equivalent to the area occupied by Paddy’s Market in Sydney (much as a ‘SydHarb’** is equivalent to the volume of water in Sydney Harbour). One circuit of Prazhskaya market provides almost half of your daily exercise requirements.

In these markets you regularly come across things that make you go “hmmm”, and the little shops that line each aisle are packed to the ceilings with stuff. Some of them specialise to a remarkable degree – like the yoghurt stall at Prazhskaya, which stocks a dizzying variety of cultured milk products – while others seem to sell just about anything they can lay their hands on, from designer passport wallets to little packages of kalimar (a local snack that bears roughly the same relationship to squid as beef jerky does to cows, except that it’s kinda stringy). So it’s fair to say you can get just about anything in Moscow.

However, there do seem to be some fairly basic items that have slipped between the cracks in this retail renaissance.

The Lonely Planet recommended that I bring a bottle opener with me to Russia. My reaction when reading this: “Er, sorry guys, but why would I need a bottle opener in a country that reportedly has an enormous problem with alcoholism?” But I brought one anyway. Haven’t used it ... they're everywhere.

However, the other thing they recommended I bring was a universal sink plug. Here again, my reaction would probably be pictured in cartoon form as a speech bubble with just a question mark inside it. In this case I didn’t follow Lonely Planet’s advice and, sure as eggs (which are apparently pretty sure), when I moved in to my flat I found the kitchen sink was lacking one fairly important feature.

"No problem", I thought. "I’ll just go and buy a sink plug."

A week later, I was becoming quite accustomed to keeping one eye on whatever else was happening around me while the other eye scanned for sink plugs. They were nowhere. I learned the Russian word – rakaveena shtyepsil – and tried it out on a few market stall owners, who stared at me blankly or directed me to other stalls that sold hardcore kitchen plumbing equipment. No shtyepsil. Nyeto*.

Then finally the day came when, between piles of biros and napkins and key chains and steel wool, I saw one on display at a market stall. The price struck me as somewhat outrageous, but it really didn’t matter. I had a sink plug. It was a good day!

The obvious down side here is that if you need something urgently, as often as not it’s going to be the one thing you can’t find among the welter of household minutiae – a fact which I've definitely recorded in the “grrr” column. But there’s a corresponding up side, which is this: when you do find whatever it is you’ve been looking for, you feel a wild sense of accomplishment. You want to go out into the street and wave around your sink plug (or your blue tac, your ground cinnamon, your stiff white cardboard, etc. etc.) and just tell anyone who passes by how incredibly pleased you are. It’s a silly feeling, but a good one. It really does bring you back to an appreciation of the little things.

And yet, while that’s happening, there’s an opposite effect at work too. You can become quite enjoyably pre-occupied with the small items you’re searching for, but at the same time you actually have to get by without them for as long as your search continues. That gives you time to recognise that they are just little things. It tends to clarify the distinction between what you’d rather like to have and what you actually need in order to live, or to ‘be the person you are’. I know that doesn’t seem especially profound – probably because it isn’t. But then again, haven’t you ever marvelled at how many of the people you know have immense difficulty making that distinction? I have.

I’ve talked to a few other teachers about this hunt for little things, and they’ve had their extensive searches too, along with their moments of triumph. Interestingly, they all reflect that it’s something they hadn’t often experienced in their own countries, where things are sane and sensible and you can easily acquire any basic item you want. And perhaps that might even be one tiny part of the reason why a Moscow-born I.T. specialist who I met at the market last Saturday, and who had been working in Atlanta Georgia for the last ten years, finally concluded that “The U.S. is a bit boring” and returned to Moscow. He remarked that, in the West, “every day is the same”, whereas “here you don’t know what can happen one day to the next”.

True. You might wake up one morning, wander down to the market and come home with your very own sink plug. Who knows?



* One PadMark = approximately 1.5 standard metric bargain bonanzas.

** Unlikely as it may seem, this is a real unit of measurement.


*** Nyeto = "We don't have any".

culture and customs (the word nerd takes a hammering)

Okay, so now it’s official: my first week in Moscow has, on balance, sucked rather mightily. There have been some great moments (as reported in these pages), and I've been trying hard to concentrate on those, but it’s been something of an uphill climb. Viewed in hindsight, this week has just hurled one painful &/or irritating experience after another straight at me.

Just before I go on with this rant, a word to those of you who were/are worried about me coming here: I’m definitely not drawing any grand conclusions from the above about whether Russia was ‘the right choice’ or a ‘mistake’. Obviously I need to give it some time; I’ve never lived outside of Australia before and I deliberately chose a challenging destination, so I expected some less-than-fun times, especially at the outset. I’m not too worried yet, and nor should you be.

I should also tell you that, when I first arrived in my new neighbourhood of Prazhskaya, my off-the-bat reaction was absolute horror, but within just a week it has started to reveal a softer, more colourful side which I’m rather enjoying. I could even see it being a place I’ll grow quite fond of. 

However, as nice and fluffy as all of that is, none of it detracts from the general suckiness of the week just gone. What clinched it, finally, was the baggage issue.

Let me explain:

I sent two bags ahead of me when I left Sydney, because my stuff was well over the weight limit and QANTAS wanted to charge me a fortune to stow extra luggage on the aircraft. QANTAS and Lufthansa teamed up to get my bags from Kingsford-Smith airport (Sydney) to Sheremetyevo (Moscow), at a cost of about AUD$450 – more than I had expected to pay, but not too unreasonable, I suppose, to have 30 kilograms of miscellany transferred from one side of Earth to the other. And it took me about 20 minutes to arrange this.

The thing is, planning the first 12,000 kilometres of my bags’ travel itinerary turned out to be the easy part. The insanity began when I started to enquire about how to move them the extra 50 kilometres or so between Sheremetyevo airport and my flat in Prazhskaya.

The bags were being transported – or so I believed – to Lufthansa’s customer service counter. Which is why I called their number continually throughout Monday. No answer. My flatmate, Reinhardt, told me not to be concerned about this. “That’s pretty standard for Russia”, he said. But I called again on each subsequent weekday, just in case – by some minor miracle – they decided to answer their ‘customer service line’.

Meanwhile, the school told me that my bags had arrived at Sheremetyevo on Tuesday. On several occasions they offered to help sort out the transportation of said bags to my flat, and I accepted their offer(s). The story changed a little each time, though: first it was me and a staff member who would go to the airport on Wednesday (which didn’t happen); then the staff member would go alone and retrieve the baggage for me on Thursday (which didn’t happen); then a staff member would go on Friday with a driver (whom I would have to pay for), and so on.

Once again, when none of this came to pass, Reinhardt was philosophical. “It’s not a surprise; this is a Russian organisation.”

Finally on Saturday afternoon I decided to go to the airport myself. Two-and-a-half hours later I had successfully traversed nearly the whole of metropolitan Moscow, and I had Sheremetyevo Terminal Two in visual range. The terminal, though, proved to be just the first in a sequence of locations within the airport ‘district’ to which I was re-directed. So it was that, after a further three bus trips, a 20-minute walk along a deserted highway and an accidental visit to an airport vehicle maintenance facility (where a vicious-looking hound signalled its intention to kill me if I tried to enter), I finally found the international cargo centre.

A note here: the building I’d found was not operated by Lufthansa. This was, pure and simple, a customs facility.

So what then? Well, the next step was to make somebody at the information counter acknowledge the presence of a sentient being in their midst. That accomplished (with some difficulty), I was ready to start grinding my cranial bone against the brick wall of Russian bureaucracy.

Here’s how it began: I met a customs agent. I showed her I.D. I had papers stamped. I signed forms. I accumulated duplicates of these forms, along with copies of my own documents now bearing florets of red and blue ink. I attempted (at the agent’s request) to recall every single item in my bags and estimate its monetary value in $USD, then translate this information into Russian.

At the conclusion of this 90-minute session, I was advised: “You will not get your bags today, because it is late. Come back tomorrow.” And so I crossed the city again, arriving home exhausted a little after 11pm, with half of my first weekend in Moscow now in the past.

Sunday morning – an early start. Out the door at 8:30am and back to Sheremetyevo international cargo. There to meet with another customs agent, who checked my I.D. and stamped my papers and made notes and took copies and asked me to sign things. I didn’t mind; I was becoming acclimatised to this now. Then he says “you must go to the kasa (cashier)”. So off I went, with my growing pile of documents. With great deliberation, and wearing her standard issue “I’m so over this; I could list off the top of my head at least 50 more important things I’d rather be doing” Moscow Face, the woman at the kasa slowly, thoughtfully pressed buttons for about 10 minutes. (Think about that for a second: when was the last time you spent ten whole minutes waiting for a cashier to ring up your purchase?) She then handed me a piece of paper with a price written on it: 5,064 roubles. At today’s exchange rate, that’s AUD$232. I looked up the word for “expensive” in my Russian phrasebook and read it out.

What happened next was the very last thing I had expected: the kasa woman actually smiled at me.

It was an evil smile, though. I’m sure of it.

Her smile said “Yes, you would think that, wouldn’t you? You haven’t been here for long. Don’t worry; you’ll come to expect this kind of treatment. Bwwwwwuuuhhh-HAHAHAHAhahahahaaaaa!!!!!”

Choking back the odd stray tear of despair and disbelief, I paid my 5,064 roubles (which had to come out of my day-to-day living money, because Russian customs doesn’t accept Visa card payments), and was shuffled back to the so-called information counter. Another 20 minutes of stamping, signing etc. Then another kasa where I was charged – get this – a daily storage fee for my luggage! At this time I was also informed that the cashier would be charging me 30 roubles for making the transaction (i.e. for printing out a receipt and taking my money). But she was feeling generous – toward herself, at least – and charged me 60.

Then it was on to the systems department, which was located adjacent to the actual cargo warehouse, for more stamping and signing and – almost unbelievably – an actual physical sighting of my bags. (Fortunately, there was a big iron gate protecting them from their owner.) That was followed by another round at a separate counter whose function I still couldn’t even guess at, but which required me to go back to the information desk again and use their photocopier to make a copy of some documents I’d received earlier. Information sent me back to the mystery counter, who stamped and frowned and sent me back to customs, who stamped and copied and sent me back to systems, who stamped and laser-printed and sent me to another part of customs, who stamped whatever it was systems gave me and sent me to the warehouse, where the big iron gate was opened and – after almost three hours – it seemed as though I may actually be allowed to take my bags.

I estimate that, by this time, there were about 200 people left in the Russian Federation who had not yet checked my passport. Give or take a few.

Once inside the warehouse, a very congenial armed guard – tickled pink, it seemed, to see an Australian person in his workplace – tried out his English at me, gave up, ventured the word “Deutsch” as a question, then proceeded to talk and joke with me in bad phrasebook German. I attempted to respond in my even worse Russian, as I tried to clarify whether or not this was really happening – that is, whether I could now actually leave with my bags. I picked them up. He made noises. I wasn’t sure what he was signalling – was this okay, or not? So I started walking. More indecipherable noises. I thought “Well, I’ll just have to keep going and see if he stops me”.

Phew. He didn’t.

A moment later, I was through the door, my eyes adjusting to the sunshine.

Finally, to cap off what had been an unrelentingly surreal experience, the last thing I heard at Sheremetyevo customs was the voice of the guard, who called out after me in a cheery, fun-to-have-made-your-acquaintance tone, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

“Da Svidaniya!”, I called back.

And so once more across town I went, towing two huge bags behind me – one with its wheels behaving like those of an Australian shopping trolley. Being shouldered out of the way and cut off by endless rude Muscovites. Being muttered at by station attendants, and eyed avariciously by militia men. Taking the train in the wrong direction at the second of three stations where I had to change lines. Generally having a phenomenally awful time.

So. Now the results are in, let’s review:

Final arrival back at Prazhskaya: 4:30pm. Total hours spent retrieving my baggage: 15. Total cost: AUD$738. Reaction to the fact that, on this same day, there was a huge festival in the town celebrating Moscow’s 850th birthday? Erm, somehow, I didn’t feel overly keen to attend.

And there ended my first weekend in Moscow.

I hope you’ve at least drawn a laugh or two from this whole sorry tale. Any good that comes of it will be ... well, will at least be something. Please let my rant be a caution to you if you’re thinking about freighting some excess baggage on an upcoming o/s trip or move. My advice: pay the hideous airline fee up-front, and stick with your bags!

autumnal shades (a single day in moscow)

So far, Moscow is turning out to be the kind of the place where, if I were to plot my states of mind over the course of any given day, the [x;y] graph would most likely resemble a weather forecast for New Zealand*. It’s possible to experience a pretty full spectrum of emotional states here between one sleep and the next.

Take today, the first day of the reputedly fleeting Russian autumn. Here’s a timeline for you:


10am: relief and contentment

Leaving my flat, I wander down to the local supermarket to pick up some milk, taking a shortcut I haven’t used before. Without warning, I find myself on a short but rather pretty section of wooded path, where overhanging trees completely obscure the socialist tower blocks. “At last”, I think, “some beauty in Prazhskaya.”


1pm: spring in the step

I take a break between lectures at the school’s central office on Borovitskaya (about 1km from Red Square). Standing in the street smoking a cigarette, I can see the sun glinting off the elegant domed roof of a government building across the road. Behind that are cheerful blue skies and motionless fluffy clouds, almost hyperreal in their vividness and calm stillness. Suddenly I’m feeling rather chirpy - even verging on ‘blissed out’. This place can be rather grand.


4:30pm: fits of fury

A plan to meet some colleagues for coffee on Tverskaya Ulitsa (Moscow’s main street) goes disastrously wrong when I find I literally cannot cross one of the roads lying between me and the meeting place. I decide to go ‘around the block’. A comedy of errors ensues – except that, by the end of it, I’m so not laughing!

When you’re lost in Moscow (except on the Metro), everything seems to stack up against you. The streets twist and turn in disorienting ways; not a single motorist will cut you a break by acknowledging the existence of pedestrian crossings; the city maps are pathetically bad (Where’s a “YOU ARE HERE” arrow when you need one?); most of the non-famous buildings kinda resemble each other to the untrained eye; and the people power-walk straight at you (much as they do in Sydney, only more so) .

By the time I reach Tverskaya Ulitsa – 40 minutes late, but in perfect time to see the other teachers exit the café where we were supposed to meet – I’m ready to let fly with a furious “Screw-this-whole-damn-city-and-everybody-in-it!” outburst. Which I do.


7pm: anxious moments

Myself and four other teachers are in Kuznetskiy Most, two metro stops northeast of the centre. We walk onto a rather stately open square, and myself and Louis (a very pleasant and bouncy Spanish/Mexican/Californian colleague) decide it’s time to whip out the digital cameras for some happy snaps. It’s the first time I’ve been brave enough to use my camera in the city, and what happens within ten seconds of producing it from my shoulder bag? A militia man materialises, looking decidedly pissed off, and barks “No foto!” while almost running at us. I’m thinking “Oh no, he’s going to impound my camera, and me with it”. Fortunately not.

Apparently (we worked out later), one of the more anonymous buildings on the square used to be KGB headquarters. It isn’t anything sensitive now, mind you – but it used to be. Which is evidently enough to make this a no-happy-snap zone.

To put this into its proper context: right now all of us new teachers live in fear of the militia. They’re fond of stopping anyone who looks &/or sounds like a foreigner and doing an on-the-spot document check. At the time of writing our school has our passports, because our visas have to be registered, which they’ve offered to do for us. (Apparently the process is interminable and difficult.) So each of us is armed only with a spravka – a kind of affidavit letter – and with some increasingly ragged-looking photocopies of our passports and visas.

The worst part of this, though: the documents we're carrying around with us show our visas as unregistered. That makes us quite vulnerable. Militia checks can end in a number of ways: most likely we’ll either be let off or asked to pay a fine, but a highly unpleasant experience in a Russian police station is not out of the question. So our militia man confrontation definitely qualifies as an anxious moment.


10pm: quiet awe

From Kuznetskiy Most, myself and the other four teachers decide to wander towards town, on the lookout for somewhere to stop for a coffee along the way. We end up in a sort of beer tent adjacent to one wall of the Kremlin. After sitting for a couple of hours, talking about what brought us to Moscow and so forth, we decide to head for our respective homes.

The area around this part of the Kremlin is also the entrance to Red Square (probably not the only one – I’m not sure). It’s floodlight at night, mostly in brilliant white tones. As we cross through this area, I find myself thoroughly in awe of my surroundings. We all do. Conversation slows as we take it all in. Then one of the other teachers (a fairly well-travelled American called James) tells me about an imaginary phone conversation that's been playing on a loop in his head:

Friend: “So, wha’d ya get up to last night?”

James: “Oh, you know … wandered around outside Red Square, mostly.”

The look on James’ face and his tone of voice makes the significance of this clear: he can’t quite believe he's in the position, at least theoretically, to have that conversation. I think we're all feeling a bit the same. I comment to another teacher that “I didn’t expect to be quite so overwhelmed by this place”, and she replies: “Oh? I did!” This from someone whose most recent teaching assignment was an 18-month stint working for the Peace Corps in a village in Turkmenistan.

So you get the idea, I think. The brush with Moscow's Big Red Things affected us all quite powerfully. It was awesome.


11:30pm: lost again ... but almost loving it

The final mental challenge for the day: find the right metro line and get home. This can be quite tricky, even if you’re at the right station. See, on the Moscow metro, if you have a large station with, say, four lines running through it, the station will usually have four names. The one I find myself in tonight is variously called Bibliotheka Imeny Lenina, Arbatskaya, Borovitskaya and something else I can’t recall.

The reason for these multiple names is that platforms don’t line up parallel as they would in other cities. They all point in different directions and are often spread widely apart. Some stations-within-stations are connected by long perekhodi (underground walkways), while others remain completely separate, accessed via different streets. Your job is to work out which is which, and then navigate the vast subterranean complex to the right platform.

As often as not, you find yourself traipsing through hundreds of metres of perekhodi, speeding up and down on escalators that reach cruise speed at around Mach 2.5, and generally covering a lot of territory without ever really being sure you’re heading in the right direction. In the process, though, you come upon what must be some of the most incredible architecture ever created for the purpose of city transit.

The walls of most metro stations are constructed from gleaming grey-and-white marble. All are airy and grand (especially those in the centre of town), with arched hallways – architecturally, they’re the exact opposite of the claustrophobic sausage tubes that wind beneath large Western cities. Many stations contain notable works of sculpture, depicting themes that range from past wars and famous Russian historical figures to the idealised lifestyle of the hallowed peasant family. Others have artworks and silhouetted cityscapes painted directly onto the walls.

The illumination in these places is also a feature; I’ve been in at least one station hall that was lit by chandeliers! Often you get some kind of ‘concept lighting’, like the flame-shaped lanterns set into the walls of Belaruskaya, spreading a subdued glow throughout its cavernous red-marble halls.

As far as I can determine – although my flatmate disagrees – these metro stations are Cold War vintage. They were built to double as air raid shelters if the need arose (hence the long, metal-plated escalator shafts like the one pictured). What proportion of Moscow’s population could be accommodated in an emergency I’ve no idea, but wandering along the platforms and through the perekhodi you get the feeling it wouldn’t be an insignificant number. It makes being lost kind of entertaining.

So that was my day in Moscow. Yep, just one. And I left out the work-related parts, which offer a whole separate emotional fun park ride at this point. (It’s part roller coaster, part dodgems.)

Did I mention that today was the day I found out that my first class will be full of eight-year-olds?

Mm-hmm. Let’s not even get started on that.



(* New Zealanders have an expression which they use to describe the weather in their country: "Four Seasons in One Day".)