Occasional photo #3

At first glance, this may look like a photo of some women waiting to take their clothing for a bus ride. In actual fact, it’s a sort of informal market.

It’s about 9.45 am on a September morning and I’m outside one of Moscow’s main train stations, on my way to meet some people and go for an excursion. I’m early (for once), so I’m wandering around, keeping on the move so I don’t attract hopeful taxi drivers. I notice two or three women standing in the street holding up jumpers. This seems odd, so I keep my eye on them. Before long, there’s a line of women holding up clothing, looking stoic and expressionless as only Russians truly can. Eventually one or two customers start to drift over, and I see one of the women make her first sale of the day before I have to go and catch the train.

It stuck in my mind, partly because of the questions that occurred to me – where do they get what they’re selling? How tired do their arms get? Are there unwritten rules about how long they can be there, and is that why they all turn up at about the same time? How much money do they make in a morning? – and partly because of the contrast. The building behind them in the photo is the European Shopping Mall, a big glitzy consumer palace of a place teeming with Western brands, from Italian designers to Marks & Sparks and Top Shop. Other attractions include cafes, restaurants, nail bars, a cinema and an ice rink. It gets predictably busy in the evenings and weekends. There are increasing numbers of these malls in Moscow (i.e. it’s no different from the rest of the world in that respect). So there are those who can shop in the malls, and those who shop at the markets, formal and informal. There are probably those who do both.

It strikes me that it’s a very Russian approach to buying and selling. I talked before about all the strange things you can buy in various places, but it took me a while to stop thinking about the weirdness of what people were selling and start thinking about why they were selling them. Perekhod kiosks and market stalls are one thing, but presumably these are hard to come by (knowing Russia, you probably have to fill in sixteen forms over a period of three years and give ‘presents’ to four different local officials). And that assumes you can afford the lease in the first place. But it looks like the authorities mostly turn a blind eye if someone gets on a train with a bunch of gadgets they’ve picked up cheap somewhere, or sits on a plastic stool outside the metro selling redcurrants from their garden, or stands outside a shopping mall with an armful of blouses. It seems very Russian to me because it’s pragmatic: no-one expects the official system to be the only way of doing things. You find ways round it and do whatever you can.

Occasional photo #2

This is mostly a picture of a lamp-post in knitwear. I don’t know who came up with the idea of keeping lamp-posts warm with woolly jumpers, or indeed why, but it was a cheerful sight. I should say that clothing for lamp-posts is by no means common throughout Moscow. This was taken outside Gorky Park  on a February afternoon during Maslenitsa, which is the Russian equivalent of Pancake Day and lasts a week (Lent’s quite a big thing here, so you need a full week of stuffing yourself with dairy products in order to prepare properly). I’m guessing it’s therefore a limited-time festive lamp-post.

The thing with all the columns behind the lamp-post is the suitably Soviet-splendid entrance to Gorky Park, and like most such entrances it has a few bored security guards hanging about, and some security arches through which everyone has to pass. Like many expats, we’re a little baffled by security gates in Moscow. The ones at the airport are quite normal and part of the usual sort of security procedures, but there are quite a lot of them elsewhere, at the entrance to shopping malls, parks, sometimes museums. It’s noticeable with these that even if you make them go ‘beep’ when you walk through no-one actually seems to care or do anything. Sometimes people want to peer into your bag, but this seems unrelated to whether anything’s gone beep or not.

The security checkpoint which really puzzles me is the one you have to go through to catch the express train to the airport. That one has an arch for people to walk through, with a table next to it for you to put your bag on while you do it. This means that people struggle to heave heavy holdalls onto the table, then walk through the arch (which may or may not go beep – it doesn’t seem to matter) while the guards ignore their luggage, then heave their bags down again and go off to catch the train. The only time the guards leap into action is if you try and take your luggage through the arch with you, at which point they get quite cross. If there is logic here I have so far failed to detect it.

Occasional Photo #1

I was going to say ‘Spring has finally sprung’, but it’s more like ‘Spring has finally sidled apologetically into view’. But the signs of spring in Moscow are here: the bolder parents have started allowing their children to go outside without a hat, the lady violinst has reappeared outside the metro station, and the sound of hammering is echoing down the pedestrian streets as the outdoor seating areas are constructed outside the cafes.

In honour of Spring, and marking the fact that we now have only about five months left in Moscow, I’m starting a new feature of this blog: Occasional Photos to introduce you to whatever I find in my photo collection that I feeling like rambling on about for a bit. So. Number One.

This is Christ the Saviour Cathedral, on the banks of the Moskva river not far from the Kremlin. I’m standing on a pedestrian bridge over the river on a blowy May day looking back at it after a tour of the building organised by the British Women’s Club, during which we got to go up to the roof terrace (above the arches and below the dome) and walk all the way round looking at Moscow rooftops. We also got a look at the conference area underground where the Patriarch of Russia gets to address his assembled clergy in slightly overwhelming splendour.

What you’re looking at is actually a replica, or at least a replica with a few changes. The original cathedral was constructed (slowly) in the nineteenth century, and was intended as a way of saying thank you to God for saving Russia from Napoleon, although it wasn’t finished till the 1880s. It then had a rather short life, by cathedral standards, as the Soviet government blew it up in the 1930s, with the aim of replacing it with the Palace of the Soviets. This was intended to be a whacking great monument to the power of the people, topped off with a hundred-foot statue of Lenin looking down over Moscow (just in case anyone managed not to notice all the other statues and monuments to Lenin dotted around the place). The foundations were laid, but a combination of the war, Moscow’s inherently swampy nature and a lack of enthusiasm for the project after Stalin’s death meant that nothing else was ever constructed, and when Khrushchev came along he decided it would be much more useful to build the world’s largest open-air swimming pool on the site instead.

After the fall of the Soviet Union swimmers were out of luck as the newly resurgent Russian Orthodox Church pulled out all the stops, raised a vast amount of money from eager donors and got the cathedral rebuilt fairly speedily. It’s now the ‘official’ church in Moscow, where Boris Yeltsin’s body lay in state and Putin et al. go to celebrate Easter. This is why it was also recently the venue for an anti-Putin burst of punk rock from the band Pussy Riot, causing cries of ‘blasphemy’ from the Patriarch and outrage from others who feel that this doesn’t warrant seven years in prison, which is what three members of the band are currently facing.

The Patriarch is probably not a happy man at the moment, as not only have nasty blasphemous punk feminists been singing songs in his church, but also there was a slight spat about his books getting dusty and the world’s media has been showing inconvenient interest in the watch incident. But he does have a lovely beard.

Rules and regs

Going through photos today I found this forgotten item from our trip to St Petersburg in May 2010.

As far as I can make out, it prohibits the following:

1. Doing Nazi salutes.

2. Using weighing scales.

3. Taking a rocking horse for a walk.

4. Jumping off buildings.

5. Playing the saxophone.

6. Walking around wearing only white underpants.

7. Skiing very badly.

8. Being too drunk to get the bottle in the bin.

9. Burning things.

10. Drinking straight from the bottle while looking at a lamp-post.

11. Riding a bike that’s too small for you.

12. Breaking trees.

Good job we were paying attention.

Pros and cons

Things I will miss about the Moscow winter:

1. The squeaky crunch of your feet walking on packed-down snow.

2. Feeling like you’ve just stepped into Narnia.

3. Gobbety snow

4. The sense of achievement you get going for a walk in minus 17.

 

Things I will not miss about the Moscow winter:

1. Icy, slushy, death-trap pavements.

2. The length of time it takes to get yourself into boots, scarf, hat, gloves and double-zipped coat, especially when all you want to do is nip up the road to the shop.

3. Cleaning brown slushy grit off the floor all the time.

4. Being woken up at 8am on a Sunday morning by the scrape of shovels clearing snow in the courtyard.

Winter walking

I’ve mentioned the incomparable Phoebe Taplin before, I know. She lived in Moscow for four years and during that time explored every inch, as well as most of the surrounding towns and cities, and gathered up many of us to go along with her. I’ve heard a Muscovite say that Phoebe showed her her own city. Her weekly column ‘Phoebe’s walks’ in the Moscow News was always a hit, and so, with rare acumen, the paper decided to publish some of her walks in book format. It’s coming out in four volumes, one for each season. This is great for many reasons, not least because Phoebe and her family had to leave Moscow a year or so ago, and many of us have been missing her and her expeditions. Because of the books, she gets to come back to Moscow four times, one for each book launch, and each time she revisits a few of the walks destined for the next volume. (Not that she needs that excuse. Phoebe in Moscow is Phoebe walking. And partying. She has more energy than three of me put together.)

She’s just gone back to the UK after her trip to launch the winter volume, so I’m feeling newly inspired to do some more exploring of my own. Phoebe walks range from town centre routes taking in architectural quirks and tiny museums, to rambles in the parks and along the river, to bus and train expeditions out of town (like one I mentioned here). On this latest visit she was followed on a couple of occasions by film crews, with the result that I can now show you all what a group of women of various nationalities looks like walking through snowy paths and parks in minus seventeen degrees centigrade. Yes, I am visible at one point (well, two, but I’m probably the only one who’ll recognise my backpack at a distance). There’s a very brief interview with a fellow walker. Those of you who know me well will not be surprised to hear that when they asked for volunteers I rapidly headed in the opposite direction, with a like-minded friend.

Food revisited

I’ve been re-reading some of my earliest blog posts. This isn’t just narcissism. Two years isn’t a huge amount of time, but looking back from our current routine to the time when everything was new is oddly interesting. So I thought I’d do an update on my chief pre-occupation, namely the obtaining of food. See this post for my thoughts on the matter in October 2009.

The ‘Gastronom’ over the road is still somewhere I visit almost daily. Normally I buy beer (it’s startling how fast that disappears) and 5-litre bottles of water for drinking and cooking. It’s also become the usual source for fruit juice, fizzy water, tonic, loo roll, milk, yoghurt and frozen peas (when available), and occasionally bits of veg. The people in there have become well and truly used to me: I’m the odd Englishwoman who turns up all the time and empties sections of their beer fridges.

I’ve now been able to identify that there are four types of staff in there. There are the cleaning staff, who at this time of year spend a lot of time attempting to trip customers up with mops. Then there are the women who serve on the deli counter and weigh veg, and who also get the job of shelf restocking. I don’t have much to do with them, except that I think there’s one who still hasn’t forgiven me for knocking some tins of fish over a couple of months ago. Then there are the checkout girls, with whom I usually exchange hellos, and who are mostly quite helpful these days. One of them was even the only person in Moscow to be nice about my new haircut. Finally there are the men. There are usually two or three of them about the place. Their job seems chiefly to be to stand around, although they do also occasionally get sent off to fetch things by the checkout girls and I think they may have to unload things now and then. They also move empty baskets about. This seems to be a typical Russian staffing pattern: slightly too many people to do the actual work, and then extra people whose job it is to stand around watching them.

One of the blokes, after I’d been going in there for several months, started saying hello and wanted to know where I was from. After a while, his mate joined in the ‘hellos’ and started trying out some of his English phrases, partly as a way to flirt with the checkout girls. So now I get things like ‘Happy New Year’ (cue much giggling from the girls), ‘He is crazy boy’ (pointing to his colleague – ‘I know’, I said in Russian) and on one occasion he decided to address the checkout girl with ‘You are beautiful girl, I love you’ (cue much giggling from everyone within earshot). It brightens up the evening now and then.

The ‘Sedmoi Kontinent’ branch down the road closed in the spring of 2010, so for about a year I was doing the major grocery runs on the metro – 5 mins to our nearest stop (or ten in winter), three stops down the line, and then 2 mins to another ‘Sedmoi Kontinent’ branch in the centre of town. I discovered while doing this that older Russian women on the metro seem to look approvingly at you if you’re carrying groceries. On one occasion an octagenarian with cataracts got up to offer me her seat. I assumed she was just standing up to get off at the next stop, and she then got really offended when I didn’t sit down.

Happily, a year or so later a branch of ‘Perekrestok’ opened. There’s not a lot to choose between the two. Sedmoi Kontinent has a slightly better range of what I want, and Perekrestok looks a bit glossier. This new branch has fairly friendly staff, although hanging around waiting for someone to magicallly appear and serve you at the meat counter can get irritating. The Sedmoi Kontinent in town is in a touristy area, and I think the checkout staff get tired of dealing with incomprehensible foreigners. At our Perekrestok I’m more of a rarity, so most of them are more friendly and even reassuring.

There have been changes in what’s available in supermarkets over the last couple of years. It’s now easier to buy lasagne sheets and tonic. Hooray. Some things come and go according to various external factors – tinned tuna, for example, is rarely available at the moment. A company called Wyke Farms started exporting cheddar to Russia, much to my delight (it’s one of the things we’ll feel it’s worth paying a bit extra for), but which shops it’s available in, and whether you can get it pre-packaged or you have to go to the cheese counter varies hugely. This does seem to be a feature of most Russian supermarkets, in that you can’t rely on them having a particular product. This was also true of my local Sainsbury’s back home, but whereas with Sainsbury’s whatever-it-was would usually reappear in a few days, here it might take a month or two. There are therefore certain things I stockpile, meaning that a quick trip to buy a couple of things for dinner may lead to you staggering home with four packets of pasta, eight bars of chocolate, three cartons of chopped tomatoes and a wine box, on the grounds that they were there.

Still, it’s all good exercise. It’s amazing how much you can get into a backpack and two shopping bags.