Нью-Йорк

This will be our last post for a while, likely...

In seven hours, we'll be boarding the Trans-Siberian, on our way to our first stop at Lake Baikal, in Siberia. Between us and this first stop lie 5189 km and 84 hours of uninterrupted train tracks. From there, we'll make a right-hand turn and cross the Russian-Mongolian border to Ulaan-Baatar, where we'll alight for a couple of days. That's followed by three days in the Gobi Desert around Sainshand, near the Mongolian-Chinese border, and then a relatively quick jaunt from Sainshand into Beijing, hopefully arriving by mid-afternoon on the 23rd of September. Fourteen days from today.

So, despite a lack of pictures of Moscow to share with you (mainly because it's been raining cats and dogs since we got here, making us ill-disposed toward doing anything besides finding random street vendors and buying rotisseried chicken for $2), a bit about this city:

(If travel writing is about generalizations, this post will be its quintessence.)

I know Peggy has mentioned its warmth in her last post. It's true, and it's surprising, given the hard-edged, Mafia-run reputation this city has (or, maybe that's just me). But really, it reminds us of New York. Except in Cyrillic.

Whereas St. Petersburg was beautiful, and filled with beautiful people, and in-your-face fashion (though someone's got to tell them that high-waisted jeans and the hose-and-open-toed-shoes look both need to go), Moscow's fashion is much more understated, but no less real. In St. Petersburg, our smiles were brightened by the single person who was actually kind to us in three days there (a babushka who collected our tickets on a random city bus, found us—and our large backpacks—a seat, and signalled us before our upcoming stop), people here in Moscow are brusque but amazingly helpful.

Ask a New Yorker directions, and they'll pride themselves in knowing their way around the confusing mass that is Manhattan. The same seems to be true here. People have gone out of their way to help us. So, yes...not as many leggy, platinum blondes, but give me NYC over LA any day.

And then there's the subways. They're just like home—old, dirty, crowded, un-airconditioned, and full of people trying very hard to look at nothing (what's not to like?). It's actually allayed a bit of our homesickness. The system itself...well, the MTA could learn a thing or two. It's definitely big and overwhelming, and supposedly carries seven million people. A day. But it's well-signed and, more importantly, reliable. We have yet to wait more than three minutes for a train. Even early on a Sunday morning. There's a clock that resets itself when the last train leaves and times the wait between trains. This is not to mention the escalators, which are dizzyingly fast and long. The Roosevelt Island station has nothing on the depth underground that this subway system inhabits.

We started today with a Russian Orthodox church service, at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (we can't take credit for that picture), which has likely the best interiors we've seen yet. Too bad photographs weren't allowed during the service. The differences between Mass there and church at home are huge. Viz:

1. There are no chairs. Everyone stands. And crosses themselves and bows, quite literally, once every thirty seconds.

2. The usual liturgical interchange between the celebrant and the congregation doesn't exist. It's replaced by an interchange between the celebrant and a (beautiful) choir. In fact, besides the incessant crossing, the congregation only spoke up at the creed and one other time which we couldn't quite figure out.

3. Everything is sung. I mean, everything. Now, I know that exists in a lot of high-church services, but it was pretty impressive.

4. There is a very palpable sense of transcendence that we in Western traditions seem to have lost. The fact that the most holy portions of the service occurred within the iconostasis, with its doors closed, highlighted this. Yes, it strikes my egalitarian, reform-theology Weltanschauung as a bit exclusionary, and pushes the divine away from humanity, but, I tell you, the first time the doors of the iconostasis closed, my psychic gut was punched. In a good way.

This is neither the time nor the place to descend into transcendence vs. imminence theological ramblings (nor will the 9 minutes left on my internet cafe subscription allow it), but it struck me that despite the strict, almost incomprehensible liturgy of this service (which I've been inculcated to revolt against), it moved more than a few people around us to tears, and a bigger number to their knees. On hard marble floors. There's something to be said for that.

And with that, we leave the New York of Russia... We'll see you on the other side of Asia.

French fries but no ketchup...

We finally feel like we are in a foreign country.

We have been spoiled travelling in Iceland and Finland, where everyone spoke English and you could (sometimes) read the signs. Russia is a little different. The writing is all in Cyrillic, which means that unless you recognize the letters you can't spell out a thing. Even the most touristy areas are manned by people who do not speak much English. This has led to much gesticulating on our part and some rather humorous misunderstandings. Truthfully, it's been more than a little stressful because during medical training, we are misled to believe that we can accomplish tasks successfully on the very first try. Yet yesterday we spent over and hour going to 5 different banks trying to withdraw money with our ATM card. We were mostly unsuccessful. It felt like, well, rejection.

Desipte these hiccups, we just spent 3 days in St. Petersburg. It was dominated by leggy blonde models and beautiful archictecture. We spent our second day wandering the Hermitage, arguably the most amazing museum in the world (if you don't go for the artwork, which is almost exclusively European, at least go for the building itself). The beautiful objects housed in what used to be Catherine the Great's winter palace made us forget we were hungry and thirsty until closing time. Mark found his favorite room in the Winter Palace, a room completely gilded with gold leaf, from the walls and ceiling to the chandeliers and clocks. Peggy spent a lot of time staring at the 2 Madonna and Child paintings by Leonardo da Vinci.

From St. Petersburg we started the first leg of our Trans-Siberian trip to arrive in Moscow. While St. Petersberg was splendid but brusque, Moscow seems downright warm. The people we have accosted for directions on the street have all had a smile and the patience to spend time explaining things to us. We were pleasantly surprised; Moscow, at least as we had seen it through the eyes of Western media, has always seemed a bit dangerous and wild.

Mark has a tradition whereby whenever he visits Moscow, he goes to the first McDonald's to open in a communist country. It was packed, and the menu was full of familiar favorites such as big macs and flurries. However, for the life of us we could not find anyone with a ketchup packet. I guess fries are best eaten plain in Russia. (Our Moscow pictures are not yet uploaded. We'll try to post them soon)

The World Press Photo Exhibit is currently being exhibited in St. Petersburg at the Peter and Paul Fortress. Click here to look at some pictures by Spanish photographer Pep Bonet on members of the Single Leg Amputee Sports Club in Sierra Leone.

We board a train tomorrow night for Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Ulaan Baatar, the Gobi Desert, and finally Beijing. We may be out of e-mail contact for a while. Wish us luck!

Just like Korean...

It's hard, honestly, not to feel a bit of a let-down going from the rugged, unsurpassed beauty of a country like Iceland to the man-made beauty of the northern European capitals. From lava, sulfur, and steam, we've transitioned to manicured streets, H&M, and the ubiquitous sushi bar. Or суши-бар. But I'll leave Peggy to write more about Russia.

On to Helsinki. An extraordinarily turbulent Icelandair flight landed us in Europe's second-northern-most capital (I didn't make that up. They pride themselvs in that). Helsinki is, objectively, a very pretty city. Because the country has changed hands many times—the indigenous Sami people were conqured by Vikings, who were then subjected to Swede rule in 1155, after which the country was ceded to the Russians in 1809, who held it until Finnish independence was declared in 1917 (follow?)—there is a slightly disjointed nature to the city, as if each part of its history is vying for prominence. Viz: the Uspensky cathedral was the tallest building in Helsinki until 1852, when the Lutheran cathedral, the Tuomiokirkko, was built.

And that brings up another point about Helsinki...we had a bear of a time trying to pronounce anything. The language is a member of the Uralic family of languages, to which Hungarian and (controversially, of course) Korean also belong. Explain that one. It has fifteen cases, multiple doubled letters and very few cognates with English. This is because it's not of Indo-European descent, making trying to figure out what signs meant pretty difficult.

No problem. To help us along, all signs were bilingual...in Swedish.* It took us a while to figure out that Helsinki and Helsingfors were the same thing.

We left Helsinki on the 5th by train for St. Petersburg. More on that later. Meanwhile, some pictures...

*Not that we're implying that signage should be in English. It's just an observation...