4.12.2005: three down and "doing both"

Settle in, people. This is going to be a long one.

The week just gone saw me hit a small milestone here (as opposed to being hit by one, which is invariably more painful). The rock in question was this: as of last Monday, I've been in Moscow for three months.

Now that I'm a seasoned veteran, you may find yourself asking "So, Anthony, how's it all been grabbing you up to this point?"* Unfortunately, to answer that question properly in 5,000 words or less is quite difficult. And you know me ... if the chance to use 5,000 words comes along, me and Roget are usually right there with our synonyms at the ready. But I’ll try to give you the short, blonde version of things first. It basically goes like this:

Point #1: I’m really, really glad I came to Russia. It’s an experience I wouldn’t be without for anything.

Point #2: Unless some something dramatic happens between now and June (when my contract finishes), I'll be comfortable with the idea of leaving.

In the Lonely Planet guide to Russia and Belarus, the section on Moscow opens like this: "Some people love Moscow. Others hate it. Most do both." The first time I read those words was back in July this year, which seems like an awfully long time ago. Since then, I've begun to realise that being a born skeptic is quite handy when you're in a place like Russia and you find yourself relying on a travel guide for information. Still, those three sentences from the Lonely Planet have really stuck with me. I tend to fall back on them - as I'm doing now - whenever someone asks "So, how's Moscow treating you?". They sum up my feelings about the city at least as well as anything I've come up with myself.

On the hating it / not liking it side of things, I'll have to fill you in some other time. I've got a reasonably big day ahead of me tomorrow, and it would take too long to list the things that bother me about Moscow and dissect them all right here and now. Plus, you've already read some of my whinges, and you'll undoubtedly read more in future entries.

Just one thing I will say: my flatmate Reinhard left on Wednesday. He'd been here for six months, and had basically decided that Moscow wasn't for him, so he flew back to his home town of Freiburg to regroup and decide what to do next with his life. This definitely qualifies as a sucky turn of events for me. I've been extremely fortunate to have such a good flatmate (especially bearing in mind some of the stories I've heard from other teachers), and it's no exaggeration to say that I wouldn't have lasted this long without Reinhard's help, patience and humour. Plus, he's such a Douglas fan – who's going to help me see the funny side of my day-to-day hassles by relating them to events in Hitchhiker now?

So there's one entry for the "hating it" column. I'm hating the fact that, for the next six months, I'll have to cope with Moscow sans one of the people who have made it all worthwhile up to this point. I must admit I'm still a fair way from getting used to that idea.

The consolation is that I'll finally get a taste of what it's like to live alone. I've been wanting to do that for ages but haven't had the opportunity. Admittedly I may not have chosen to try it out for the first time while in Moscow, but in a way it's quite good timing - I can be very, very alone here if I choose to be! It probably won't be for long, though; the school will try to fill the spare room in my flat as soon as they can, I'd imagine. (Actually that's a scary thought, in the sense that I've had such a good run of flatmates in the last eighteen months or so and I'm surely due for a share-housing horror story any time now. Yay.)

Still, I'm grateful for the temporary solitude and I'm going to try and relish it while I can.

But anyhow, getting back to my pocket-sized milestone, and to loving Moscow vs. hating it: the problem is that it sort of depends when you ask. Some days my overwhelming feeling is "get me out of this rancid hole as soon as possible!", and on those occasions there isn't much here that escapes my loathing. But then at other times things just 'click' and I feel as though coming here was precisely the right thing to do at this point in my life, and that there's nowhere I'd rather be. I can wander between these two extremes in the space of 24 hours, and often do. It's really that kind of town.

I've definitely grown fond of the area where I'm living, though, so maybe I should start by talking about that for a bit.

My home here is a small flat in a 'classic' grey socialist tower block. I pretty much knew that's what the accommodation would be like, but what I didn't realise was this: in the phrase "socialist tower block", the last word should be understood to mean the same as it does in "city block". In other words, there aren't buildings, plural, in my street. There's just a single, enormous domesto-slab that goes from one end of the street right down to the other – a distance, I'd estimate, of over half a kilometre.

This may sound hideous, but living inside one of these megaliths has been a perspective-altering experience, and one I've really appreciated. The psychological aspect of it has been fascinating.

I still have vivid memories of how horrified I was on the day I arrived here. Literally all I could see was concrete and squalor. I sat on my bed that night just utterly unable to believe what I'd done, convinced that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life by coming to Russia (and an irreversible one at that). And the thing is, it was my immediate surrounds – the tower block, the streets of Prazhskaya – that were most responsible for this feeling. A few months later, I see a completely different place when I look out my window. I love the flat and the block, and I've had time to see past the concrete to what's between the towers. Most of the buildings are separated by little parks or wooded walks; there's a lot of green out there (or at least there was before the snows came). And there's a lot of life, too. At the moment, the dominant life form is groups of old men or babushkas who plant themselves on doorsteps, snuggle up inside their coats and settle in for a good chat. During autumn, when the evenings were warmer, it was quite a different crowd. The senior social clubs were outnumbered back then by young couples sitting on benches in the little square forecourts, just talking and smooching. It was a real perspective-shift for me when I first realised that the street which had initially filled me with horror was actually something of a lovers' lane!

Moving beyond the tower blocks themselves, I really quite enjoy my local 'hood. Overall, since I've been here I’ve probably spent more time exploring the environs of Prazhskaya than doing the sightseeing thing in the Big Parts of town. That was especially true during my first six weeks or so in Moscow; recently I've branched out a bit more to check out 'attractions' in other areas. But I do plan to fit in some more poking-around-Prazhskaya days on upcoming weekends, because I feel somehow compelled to get to know this neighbourhood. I'm not 100% sure why, but I suspect it's partly to do with a desire to establish some sense of place, to mark out a tiny sliver of Moscow that’s 'mine'.

I've wondered, too, whether there's something about Sydney life that has made me more inclined toward this kind of territorial behaviour. I mean, after living elsewhere for a little while I can look back and recognise just how much of a ‘culturally ghettoised’ city Sydney really is; nearly every kind of Sydney-sider has their stamping ground and their no-go zone(s), and they're pretty rigid. So has living in Sydney for so long intensified my need to stake out a patch, to invent imaginary lines like (for example) the one that runs through Ashfield and says "You are now entering the Deadlands; intelligent, culturally sensitive folk should not cross here"? I don't know. Quite possibly.

That said, I also think Prazhskaya offers quite a lot in the way of curiosity value to the newcomer (though probably no more so than a few dozen other neighbourhoods in which I could just as easily have landed). The day-to-day life here has most of the features of day-to-day life in Sydney, but it's just 'tweaked' around the edges. Around nearly every edge, in fact. If Sydney were, say, a meat pie (and what better way of looking at it, really?), then Moscow would be one of those mince pie things you get at christmas: full of sweet dried fruit and bitter rind, with strange crinkly folds all the way around, like buttery little pastry fjords, and ...

*ahem*

Sorry. I'll get off the Strained Analogy Express now, before I commit myself to some kind of Nelly Furtado-esque metaphor-making nightmare**. I was just trying to say that Moscow is more or less the same basic idea as Sydney, but in the details it's completely different.

Er, so what was I talking about before that ridiculous tangent? Oh yeah, that's right: I was saying that Prazhskaya is quite an interesting area to explore. I particularly like wandering down to the local market when I have the chance. It can be stressful sometimes – especially since haggling is one of the favourite local pastimes, and I've never been a haggling person – but the market really seems to be the epicentre of local life. It's an endless sprawl of tiny shops with oddly set-out displays, unfamiliar grocery items, some incredibly good raw produce (a lot of it imported from southern locáles like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where stuff actually grows), and most of the sounds and smells and rip-offs and bargains that you associate with markets everywhere. It's also the best place to gawp at the mystifying interactions that take place between Russian folk – much better than other crowded spots like the Metro or the supermarkets, since those are both places where scowling and shoving are de rigeur. At my market (unlike some others in Moscow), everyone except the clothing salesmen seems to be fairly well-behaved.

Another little bonus is that you never quite know what 'extra' stuff you might see at Prazhskaya market. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I strolled down to pick up some dried fruit (which is particularly plentiful and good here), and found three invalided servicemen bashing out a vigorous set of cheesy folk music outside the entrance. They were slightly ridiculous but also rather engaging, these three White Wounded Gypsy Kings. While I was watching them, though, I couldn't help thinking about how they might've sustained their injuries - had they been 'protecting' northern white Russians from evil Chechnyan 'terrorists' (i.e. people fighting for a cause with which the mass media doesn't empathise)? Was I seeing something like the Russian equivalent of those dumb Texans who, when they're not blowing the legs off Iraqi children, enjoy singing along to innocuous little country songs about life on the ranch? I really hope not ... but of course I had no way of knowing.

Still, the singing servicemen very kindly allowed me to take a photo, so – being the heartless, exploitative Westerner with the itchy shutter finger – I shelved the ethical questions and just snapped them. They made 20 roubles out of it, so I guess we all went home happy.

But here's the most unexpected thing about Prazhskaya: as well as being full of all the interesting fine detail, it's a place that can occasionally provide moments of surprising beauty. You have to see it at just the right angle and in just the right light, but when you do it can make you catch your breath. These sudden, almost blissful moments are more frequent now that the snows have arrived, too ('cause as we all know, everything looks better with snow on it). And Prazhskaya is actually a pretty huge area; I've still got plenty of it left to explore, including some of the best bits. For example, there are a whole bunch of 'nature corridors' that extend west from here and eventually merge with a forest. I haven't even been near those yet.

Perhaps more surprising in this regard is Butovo, where I teach. I mean, Prazhskaya is quite an old suburb by Moscow standards; it's had the necessary time to acquire grit and character and a kind of grim implacability that commands respect. The greenery is well-established, which breaks up the drab concrete grey with softer natural tones and dampens the ambient suburban noise. Butovo, on the other hand, is a new area right on Moscow's outer fringes, concept-planned to be a tower block paradise. All the teachers I know who've been there have had the same first reaction: the bottom has fallen out of their stomachs and they've thought "Oh my god, what a revolting, depressing eyesore of a place! How soon can I leave?" Which was pretty much my first thought, too.

You arrive in Butovo by train. It's underground for most of the way, but about 1km from Ulitsa Skobelevskaya Metro station the train emerges from a tunnel and climbs up onto a monorail-style overpass. The first time I made this journey, I thought I must be entering some kind of Buddhist hell ('cause their versions of hell are the most inventively sadistic I've yet come across). Strikingly ugly tower blocks line both sides of the railway overpass, painted in hideous pastel colours in a pathetic attempt to make this a cheery little townscape. Behind them: more tower blocks. Behind that ... er, more of the same, basically.

I didn't know it when I first saw them, but these buildings are only a few years old. Appearances are deceptive, though - several of the towers look as though they could topple at any moment, and most bear the scars of shoddy construction. So they really are monuments to suburban crappiness.

The only natural feature that's really noticeable amid this garish monotony is the occasional patch of scraggly brown grassland. These ugly little plots tend to gape like missing teeth in a concrete smile, and they really don't help matters much. In fact, they appear to function mainly as an invitation to Muscovites: "Throw your rubbish out of the car window here", say the invisible signs around their perimeters. To me, they look like perfect places to bury a body.

But strangely, for all of that, three months after my initial gag reaction I feel an odd affection for Butovo. I've even begun to appreciate it aesthetically in some ways. There are a few reasons for this. Here are two of them:

First, Butovo is extremely laidback by comparison to the centre of town (parts of which really are a kind of hell). At times it feels like there's actually a community out there. Between the towers you see people sitting around fountains in the evening, sharing a thermos of tea or a bottle of beer with friends. (Never mind that the fountains look like stage props from one of those 'wog humour' productions that run at the Enmore Theatre.) You see housewives pulling up in their cars and opening their boots, out of which pop fluffy pyjamas that they'd spring-loaded before leaving home. This is the signal for other housewives and babushkas to crowd 'round the car and haggle – but seemingly more for the joy of hanging out and gesticulating together than for any genuine need of pyjamas. And you see people loitering around their buildings, sitting in the little quadrangle courtyards that often link groups of towers together, slouching around beneath the futuristic Metro station, and even standing outside supermarkets just chatting with friends and neighbours. This kind of friendly, village-like behaviour, set against such a relentlessly inhuman backdrop, can be quite inspiring in its way.

The second reason for my Butovo appreciation: I love going home at night via the overpass. The buildings crowd in on all sides, but their outlines aren't really discernible – all you see are a million lit-up windows, sort of floating in mid-air as the train mooches along between them. And this part of the Moscow Metro is a new branch line, which means that instead of the supersonically fast and supersonically loud mainline Metro trains you get a slower but extremely quiet new carriage. So the window lights hover around you in near-silence (provided all your fellow passengers are sober), creating an eerie spectacle in the dark, almost like a Chinese lantern parade in space. It's kind of amazing, if you're in the right mood to appreciate it.

So yes, I've been Local Lad more than I've been Tourist Guy so far. It's changing, though, as I become more used to getting around in town and more impervious to Muscovite public etiquette (or rather to the lack of it). And I have managed to see quite a few interesting Moscow sights already, in spite of my tendency to cling to the 'hood at times.

More about that in the next entry ...

* Caution: if you're not asking that question, then you're going to find this entry rather dull.

** Canadian singer who, a few years back, wrote one of the stupidest lines in the history of pop music. It goes: "I'm like a bird/I don't know where my home is", and it's the main line in the chorus of her best-known song. You hear it every now and again on the radio, and it infuriates the heck out of me; I feel like ringing her up and saying "So, you actually live in frikkin' Canada and yet you've never heard of the world-renowned migratory journeys of Canada Geese, who travel over 12,000 miles each year and yet miraculously return to exactly the same field every spring? Hmmm ... yeah, good one Nelly. Tell us more about those poor little domestically aimless birds. You moron."

(Okay, so maybe that's just me ...)