There are no cows in Moscow...

…but this past five-day weekend, there was my friend Sam, who made it from Budapest, where he’s been studying this semester, to the gate at the Sheremetyevo-2 airport, where I greeted him with a look that was part happiness to see him and part outright disbelief that he was, in fact, there. The plan “poluchilosed,” as we fluent Russglish speakers say, after a few weeks of frantic e-mailing and a whole lot of sketchy visa-related situations. But hey, without the sketchiness, it just wouldn’t be Russia.
In the four days that followed that first landing in Moscow, Sam and I managed to experience what was basically a condensed form of my entire semester in Russia. And yes, that includes a dacha. This happened thanks to Moscow’s ACTR group, who rented a three-story house in the middle of some forest on the outskirts of the city. After checking Sam into his hostel, I hailed us a taxi so we could meet up with the group. The group included most of the Moscow ACTR people, the other three Petersburg girls, and quite a few Russians of unknown origin.
So by the time we got there, two very dangerous things had happened: people had started in on the vodka supply, and all the dinner food had been eaten. Making matters worse, I had “slept” on a train—plotzkart, what else?—the night before. Fortunately this situation ended up working out very well for me, in that I passed out at such a time that I missed the more *cough* interesting parts of the evening, but I still got to introduce Sam to the wonders of the Russian banya. Well, technically it was a sauna, but people kept pouring various liquids on it. And there were birch branches, which automatically add that magical element of banya-ness to any situation.
The next day, after a harrowing detour through the Russian wilderness (we left earlier than everyone else, and the directions we got to the station were less than stellar, and I really like the word “harrowing”) we took a train back to the city center. Here we took in the impressive grandeur of Red Square and the even more impressive grandeur of the nearby Teremok (fast-food blini, for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure.) We wandered around downtown before heading to the Bolshoi for an opera. And yes, we went to the Bolshoi Theatre on Thursday night wearing the same clothes we’d gotten dressed in Wednesday morning. The opera itself—“Love for Three Oranges” by Prokofiev—was both trippy and hard to follow, even with the libretto. Fortunately, the giant mechanical rat made it all worthwhile.
After the opera, we ate a Thanksgiving dinner—well, sort of—at Gudenov, an upscale Russian restaurant. And I mean upscale. Not only did we get free bread (a miracle in this country), there were also free puff pastry things with caviar on them. Needless to say, we only ordered appetizers, along with the restaurant’s horseradish-infused vodka. Except that then we decided said vodka was so good that we had to have some to take back to Claremont, so we paid a massive amount for half of a water bottle full of what we thought was vodka but was, the next day, revealed to be some kind of honey-based drink, forcing us to go back to the restaurant two days later, where we finally received our rightful beverage after relating our sob story (in Russian) to the manager. But anyway.
The next day, our cadre of Pomona students (Steph, Katie, Sam and I, along with Kathleen, who I keep forgetting doesn't actually go to Pomona) visited the Armory and the New Tretyakov modern art museum, after which we headed out to one of Moscow's best--or most crowded, at any rate--clubs to see "5'Nizza" (pronounced "Pyatnitsa" and meaning "Friday.") It was a lot of fun, and the music wasn’t bad (“reggae,” they called it, even if a lot of it sounded either Russian or Jack Johnson-esque), although the band didn’t play the only song of theirs that I knew. Maybe this was because of, and not in spite of, my loudly and beligerently requesting the song every five minutes, but who knows. After the concert, we met up with Oleg (do I even need to add an “of all people” here?) for all of about five minutes, after which we had to hightail it to the metro before it closed for the night.
Saturday morning was a trip to Izmailovsky market for souvenirs. I didn’t get anything, but I helped Sam get low prices using my minimal Russian bargaining skills. Maybe it’s the Jew in me, but I looove bargaining, even if Katie’s tactic—standing there and looking indecisive until the shop people offered her a good price—worked better than my blunt “Will you give me that for cheaper?” This was followed by the ferris wheel at the All-Russian Exhibition Center (so much fake wheat!) and the Cosmonaut Museum, where they had Yuri Gagarin's space capsule and a couple of display cases that contained either statues of the first dogs in space, or...uh...the dogs themselves.
Sunday, our last day in Moscow, was just all-around Russian: a visit to Lenin, followed by Sovietskaya champagne, cheap caviar and "Red October" chocolate on a park bench across from the newly rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The dirty looks we got from Russian passersby were so worth it.
In summary, the visit further confirmed my suspicions from when my dad visited: in order to be a tourist in Russia, it is necessary to know either Russian or a Russian-speaking person, although the fact that Sam learned how to read Cyrillic and had spent the last few months gallivanting around random European cities made things much less stressful. In fact, thanks to him, my visitor-to-robbery ratio has gone down an entire third! Any potential travelers can now rest assured that only 67 percent of people who come see me in Russia get something stolen. Of course, I managed to lose a ring, a glove and long underwear over those five days, but that's another story entirely.