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"We have Bill Clinton and all his girlfriends," said the St. Petersburg street vendor as she swept her arm over an array of matryoshka, the nesting dolls that have long been the archetypal souvenir of Russia. She picked up the wooden, saxophone-playing mini-Bill and unscrewed him. "There's Monica, Paula Jones and Hillary. The last doll is a cigar." I bought Bill as a gag gift to brighten my husband's basement office. I also bought a more traditional matryoshka set, but only after I'd perused all the nesting doll offerings, which included, as top doll, Vladimir Putin, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Elvis, Harry Potter, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. (I didn't unscrew them all, so don't know who or what was hiding underneath.) When I first landed in Russia, I'd seen Michael Jackson as matryoshka, nesting four or more somethings inside. That'd knocked me for a loop, but now, after a week in the country, I'd seen enough, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, to know that this ain't your mother's Russia. There are way more babes than babushkas on the sidewalks. Visitors to the Hermitage hold up cellphones and take pictures of the galleries. As dinner accompaniment, restaurant video screens pump out the Black Eyed Peas moving to "Don't Phunk With My Heart" (which is also used as 7 a.m. wake-up music on the overnight Red Arrow train from Moscow to St. Petersburg). Benetton sells its colors in Moscow's Red Square from a boutique inside a gussied-up and fully stocked GUM department store, a stone's throw from Lenin's tomb. Children's clothing stores offer European designs that "will enable a Mum to dress her offspring like a doll." The affluent young and middle-aged sweat it out at health clubs. Said a Moscow mom, "When people were younger, in Soviet times, the government made us do sports, so no one wanted to do it. But now that you have to pay to go to a fitness club and it costs a lot of money, everyone wants to go." And, while you can still tuck into beef stroganoff at the famous 250-ruble all-you-can-eat buffet at St. Petersburg's deep pink Stroganoff Palace, where the dish was born, sushi is the snack of choice at bistros along the city's chic Nevsky Prospekt. "Everyone in Peter loves sushi," affirmed Sasha, a resident who likes to grill big, cold water Japanese shrimp on his barbecue. "It's good, but it's expensive." (The sushi and the shrimp.) Russia began surprising me while I was still in the air on my plane's approach to Moscow. Instead of the dour scene I expected, the view from my window was of deep, ancient pine forests hugging the city, the broad Moscow River, twinkling and twisting for miles and sprinkled with white tour boats, and multicolored subdivisions of grand mini-mansions, the new dachas, their metal roofs glowing blue, green, ochre, yellow and cinnamon in the noon sun. Moscow is a city bursting, in pockets, with energy and ambition and trying to figure out what to do with them. I walked and explored and, in short order, grew to love this metamorphic place. I visited in summer, and outside the Kremlin walls, Russian families and couples strolled, snapped photos, sipped beer at outdoor tables shaded by umbrellas adorned with product logos, and bought ice cream from rolling freezer carts. Red Square was full of brides. And grooms and proud parents and wedding guests dressed to the nines, some teetering on the cobbles in their high heels as they toasted the connubial couples and took pictures of the newlyweds in front of St. Basil's Cathedral and its riotous, colored domes. My favorite Moscow moment came when I captured a group shot of a dozen Russian navy men enjoying a few days of R&R. True sailors, they were spending a few hours of their leave on the water, on a scenic boat trip up the Moscow River, a cruise I'd boarded a few stops earlier. When I first saw them standing on the pier, raw and rough, knocking back beer and vodka at 11 a.m. and shouting songs that all ended in "HURRAH! HURRAH! HURRAH!" I thought, "Just watch. With my luck, they'll come to the upper deck and sit next to me." Sit next to, in front of and behind me they did, and it was, indeed, my luck. I now have Russian email pals. Their designated spokesman, a young, muscled guy with blond spikes and an anchor tattoo, broke the ice by offering me a hit from his beer bottle and asking me where I was from. "America." "New York?" "Nyet. Boston." He lit up and asked, "Near Canada?" I drew a map in the air, located Canada and Florida, and placed Boston accordingly. The sailors grinned and toasted me. They were very interested that I'd come to their country not on business, but as a tourist, and were intrigued to learn that I was spending the day just walking - and floating - around Moscow. The blond-spiked spokesman asked, "Moscow, good? Russia, good? Russian people, good?" "Da, da and da," I said with a smile. The whole contingent, in their blue and white-striped tank tops and broad hats with patent leather visors and black ribbons down the back, laughed, nodded their heads, and threw down another toast.
Lori Hein is a regular contributor to The Traveler. Visit her blog Ribbons of Highway Back to TheTraveler.
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