From Russia, with love

WARNING: this entry is long. Read only in cases of extreme boredom.

I left the comfortable confines of the EU on Wednesday morning for the far less familiar, less touristic, and less ventured-to lands of eastern Europe…far eastern Europe. Two weeks after the 20^th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing reflections of the century-long rivalry between East and West that came with it, I touched ground in the heart of America’s old adversary – Moscow.

The previous sentence is itself a testament to the somewhat tough task it is for me to wrap my head around being here, as I imagine the case to be for many Americans. Our educational upbringing and the context in which the US and Russia interacted for most of the past century was characterized by mutual skepticism, rivalry, and contempt. Of course, my generation did not live through the heat of the rivalry. My parents are the generation of the hot phases of the Cold War. I’m the generation of the Wall coming down, the Red Army becoming just plain old Russia, The Unified Team playing under a makeshift flag at the ’92 Barcelona Olympics, and as my favorite NYT columnist Thomas Friedman puts it, the world being defined by “web” rather than “wall.” But still, the cumulative history between the two countries has shaped an “us vs. them” mentality. And now it’s an uncanny experience to be here with them….

So yeah, I am in Russia. Again, crazy to think about! I felt like Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV when he first arrived in Moscow. Although “Burning Heart” was not playing in my real-life background, like Rocky I dismounted the plane via stairs rather than the tube thingy that connects directly to the terminal. So I jumped into the cold Russian air right away, bundled in my hat and recently purchased heavy winter downcoat. My co-workers and I are here working on a report on Russia’s oil and gas industry for an upcoming issue of Oil and Gas Financial Journal. I can bore you with the details of some industry development that we’re looking into, but I’d rather not. My visa lasts until mid February, so I can expect to be here for a shade under three months with a ten to twelve day break in the US for the holidays.

I’m not in Kansas anymore, but by that means Paris is equally a world away. My first thoughts about Russia before arriving: cold weather, blond haired bone thin ballerina women, strong vodka, and cooooooooold weather. Turns out I haven’t been proven completely correct in any one case. The weather is cold. No denying that. But so far (knock on wood) it hasn’t been the piercing, bone chilling, stinging, painful cold that smacks you in the face and makes your grunt the second you step outside that I was envisioning. Don’t get me wrong, it will probably get like that in December or January, but the end of November weather isn’t quite there yet. The temperature has been hovering around the mid 40s during the day and probably gets to mid 30s at night. There were spurts of snow during my first two days but nothing too heavy and it ended up turning into rain rather quickly. The wind chill has been mild so all in all things have been pretty bearable. The skies are constantly overcast, however, and only now on a Sunday morning am I seeing patches of blue for the first time.

I have been staying at my boss’s apartment for the past several days while I checking out places for myself. I just settled on a new place and should be moving in by early this week. (And by move in I mean move my one suitcase). My roommate is a friendly, mid-20s young professional Russian woman who works for the American consulting firm AT Kearney. I’m excited about the prospect of living with a Moscow native around my same age and the opportunity to explore the city through her knowledge and network. My boss’s place and our office are about fifteen minutes away from each other and are both in the center of the city. Neither is more than a 15 minute walk from the Kremlin, the Red Square, and St. Basil’s Cathedral. I took a nice leisurely, chilly stroll through the Red Square on Thursday night and got some good night time shots of the iconic cathedral.

Russian is a very dizzying language, but one which I am very eager to learn. They use the Cyrillic alphabet rather than the western one that we all know and love so every sign, every poster, every word I see is a game of Pictionary. The Russian alphabet has:

• Some letters that look and are pronounced exactly as they are in English (Ex: M is pronounced like an M).
• Some letters that look as exactly as do in English, but pronounced completely different (Ex: B is pronounced like a V. H is pronounced like an N.)
• Some letters that both look and are pronounced entirely different from English (Ex Ф is pronounced like an F. и is pronounced like an ee as in street)

It’s a code. It’s a puzzle that I have to crack. Trying to read any word is a multi-faceted mental callisthenic. First I have to recognize the letter(s). Then figure out its sound. Next pronounce the entire word coherently and finally translate that word to English. I am nowhere close to the translation step. My task for now is to master the alphabet. I consider it a crowning achievement if I get as far as pronouncing a word correctly. The task is tough but in all honesty, I think it’s do-able. The way my mind works, it’s not as difficult as Chinese or Japanese. Chinese to me is like Hieroglyphics…each character can stand for a word or a concept and you group together characters to make phrases, sentences or larger concepts. With Russian I am at least familiar with the idea of a single letter representing a single sound and having to piece together those sounds to make a word.

Moscow is a big city…in several senses. It is widely sprawled inside a large beltway, but it is also big in its appearance. Moscow is actually situated inside four concentric beltways and the city is essentially a network of highways of those belts and major roads connecting them. The landscape is dominated by huge, wide, 5 lane avenues on each side that function like highways despite being smack in the middle of downtown. The main streets in downtown Moscow don’t have cross walks. At almost every corner there are underground passages to get from one side of the street to the other. Aside from the immediate downtown area, Moscow is not really a walkable city. It is like Sao Paulo in that regard and very unlike Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, or Madrid. The city is very industrial and large streets and bustling highways separate section from section. Neighborhoods do not flow into each other and connect by parks, plazas, or pedestrian thoroughfares like in western Europe.

They like their cars big here. Looking around the streets of Moscow I could just as easily think that I were in Manalapan, NJ or Sarasota, Florida based on the types of cars they drive. It’s another world from the western European streets brimming with smart cars, Vespas, and fuel efficient compact vehicles. The Russians are “carbon copies” of Americans in that sense by driving big SUVs such as Chevys Tahoes, Hummers, and Dodge Durangoes. The Cold War is indeed over with the flood of American cars here! The metro system is pretty elaborate, clean, and efficient. Most of the stations I have been to have long, steep escalators like Woodley Park or Dupont Circle on the DC redline that feed deep down to the platform.

One of the most amazing things I have seen here amongst all the places I have been to is the city-wide system of hitchhiking. There is no taxi system in the city itself to get from point-to-point. To get a hired lift you stand on the street with your arm out and anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone, anyone can and will pull over to pick you up. You tell him/her where you are going, negotiate a price, and off you go. If the price or destination don’t work out, sayonara, shut the door and wait no more than a minute and half for the next car to pull over. It’s incredible. The trust, reliance, frequency, and efficiency of it all is mind boggling. I have done it numerous times and an average ride runs about 100 roubles which is a little more than $3. I have a chicken-and-egg curiosity about the hitchhiking method and the absence of a taxi system. I am not sure if the hitchhiking method is a cause or an effect of there being no taxis. My thinking is that the combination of the extremely cold weather and a socialist mindset of collectively helping each other out engendered the hitchhiking prevalence and that formal taxis never got a chance to develop. It is a great way to practice Russian, pick up some new words, and at the very least share some good laughs with your driver about the bewildering predicament you are both in because of an inability to communicate – as I did last night with my Kyrgyzstani cab driver.

Like many places in the world, I don’t feel that I stick out physically here. Ironic one might think for a short, dark haired Filipino guy to feel like a regular in a country commonly associated with blond hair and blue eyes. But the “colonial footprint” and sheer size of this country permeate the faces that you see in Moscow. Let’s restate the obvious: Russia is the largest country in the world. Just how large I learn in a different way everyday. The longest domestic flight in the world is 9 hours from Moscow to the far eastern islands that are north of Japan. Russia has 86 – count ‘em, 86 – states/territories (which are actually called “federal subjects.”) Moscow being in the very west, all of this country’s vastness obviously stretches east towards Mongolia, China, Siberia, and upwards towards the North Pole. “Asian” faces are a dime a dozen here. But the Asian faces are unlike any I have seen on Bowery or Mott Street in Chinatown NY. These are more exotic, more foreign, more indigenous, and for lack of a better term more Eskimo Asian faces. These are the faces from Siberia, northern Mongolia, and hell even the North Pole that have more distinct features that you don’t typically see in Koreatown in Manhattan’s mid 30s.

I had vodka a few days ago but to be honest it wasn’t that strong. You can’t walk 500 feet in this city without seeing an electric sign of the Ruble/Dollar and Ruble/Euro exchange rate. It makes sense for a country that has been punished by currency crisis over the past fifteen years. You can’t walk 50 feet without passing a machine to buy pre-paid cell phone credit. You can’t walk 5 feet without passing a street stand selling kartoshka – the unofficial national dish of Russia which is a baked potato stuffed with anything under the sun. Russians love to smoke and every public place gets real smoky real fast, which is annoying.

The city, the country, and the culture are an enigma that I am excited to crack over the next several months. I had an interesting conversation with a British “headmaster” of an international school over beers and a rugby match at an expat bar last night. He assessed Moscow as being ¼ Dubai (oligarchic and obviously oil and gas driven); ¼ London (international, expat, culturally diverse); ¼ Albania (centrally commanded where the law is a subject to the state, not the other way around); and after sipping Killian’s Irish Red pint #10, he fessed up that he couldn’t remember the last fourth. But I would say ¼ Ulan Bator (ethnically indigenous). So approaching Moscow from that angle, he believes, will put a lot of things in perspective. But he quickly followed up with even more poignant advice: that his Moscow is different from my Moscow which is different from Joe the Plumber’s Moscow. So like any city, it’s best to go out, explore, get lost, and carve out my own experience.

St. Basil's Cathedral

Landing on the frozen tundra

Lenin's mausoleum in the red square