Kreml and Moscow in general
Irina led us to a guide who got the ticket for our group and took us for a four-hour long walk around the Kreml. We went around the governmental buildings, the Orthodox cathedral of Consumption (beautifully painted from floor to celeing), the pops' palace and the armory. The armory was probably the most interesting of them all as it has many works of art created in Russia and given to it as presents from around the world but mostly European countries. We also saw the coronation dress of Catherine the Great (and her high-healed shoes), many crowns of Czars, their carragies and jewelerly. During the tour we also learned a lot of spicy gossip and anectodes about the courtly life, among them the story of "Bistro": when the Napoleon lost its campain againt Russia many Kozacks went to France and as many French ladies preferred the big, strong and macho Kozacks to feminine, delicate, perfumed and wigged Frenchmen of the time, when the Kozacks left France they left behing many half-Kozack babies and "Bistro" i.e. the type of a fast snack place taking its name from the Russian "bystro" meaning "quick." In the evening we went to the Kreml theater to see "The Nutcracker" and it was by far the worst ballet performance I saw... there was nothing good about it. The theater itself was a nice building but the choreography, the dance, costumes and scenery was really bad. I had to leave, unregrettably, as my train was due at 9:30, during the intermission. I parted with the vodka train group, took a subway to the Beloruskij trainstation where I bought the ticket for the Transsiberian train the day before and started looking for information about the departure of my train. I didn't find it on the light board and looked for an information office. I wondered and wondered around, people were not really willing to help me find it and gave me mixed direction and finally I come across a Russian man living in Amsterdam who was also looking for info about his train to Belgium. We finally found it and it turned out that my train was to leave from a different train station - the Jaroslawski. It was 9:05. The Russian/Amsterdanian man started running with me out the station and got me a taxi and told the driver to speed up. I am eternally grateful to him. I got to the station at 9:25. I left the taxi and I started running toward to entrance, I found myself in an enormous train station hall, I asked a man where the entrance to the tracks where and told him I had 5 minutes to catch the train, he started running, I followed him, we got to the entrance, I shook his hand really hard, spasiba! spasiba! spasiba!, I ran along the tracks looking for the train to Beijing, I found it, I ran along the train to find the Chinese part of it, I found my car, number 6, I presented my ticket panting heavily, I got into the car, I found my compartment, number 8, and my bed, number 29, I closed the door, put my backpack down, sat on the bed, and the wheels of the train started turning... I started laughing histerically... I have this strange luck sometimes...
A few more thoughts regarding my stay in Moscow. The thing I was happy about was that I could still read Russian and understood most of what people were saying to me. I studied Russian long time ago but I found out that even if you loose touch with the language the information is stored in the mind and it is easy to recall it. I think that I could speak Russian well if I stayed in Russia for a few months. But I don't think I would want to... Moscow looks to me like a city built for giants: the buildings are humongous, there are six-line streets running throught the middle of the city, to get to the subway station you have to ride on the escalator for 10 minutes to get down to the bottom of the earth... I have heard so much about Moscow that I expected a city bustling with life but in reality it is like a ghost town: nothing happens there. It seems the city is dead. There are cafes and restaurants but they are expensive and not many people can afford them. Everybody apparently stays at work or at home. There is no part of the city like San Telmo in Buenos Aires, East Village in New York, Barranco in Lima or Coyacan in Mexico City: a place where people would enjoy themselves just walking, enjoying cheap cafes and street art. Moscow is sterile. The people seem sad... They are nice but very reserved. During the train trip we passed many towns and cities (usually we had 10 or 20 minutes to get out of the train, get some air and buy things from the women who were selling products at the stations). The people seemed equally sad in these places... Often they are very poor, it's true, but it must be connected with the outlook on life and also perhaps with the fact that people who live in Siberia were displaced people, moved by force from other places... not as hostle to live in as Siberian climate and landscape. I was thinking about this when we got to Mongolia and later to China. In Mongolia and China people are even poorer than in Russia. In Mongolia the land is really dry and unproductive, yet there was this feel of "contentment no matter what." Many Mongolians and Chinese waved to us when they saw the train passing and smiled when they saw us wave back to them. In Russia nobody did that...
At this point I stopped writing yesterday. I would like to say that I can't access my blog because blogs are not accessible from China. My dear friend Marcin agreed to post my entries which I will be sending to him over e-mail. So please don't send me any comments on the blog because I won't be able to read them; only e-mails please for the time being.
Continuing my story from yesterday... The first few days on the train I had the whole compartment to myself and I was basically sleeping day and night and enjoying it. In Ulan-Dar two women joined me and there was more talking and exchange of ideas. The women (who lived in Ukraine but worked in Ulan-Baator) got off at Ulan-Baator and two Mongolian men joined me and also a family of three: Maggie, Jummy and their 11-year old daughter Toya. We all got very friendly and spent the remaining time in a very pleasant atmosphere. The entire trip was really pleasant except the wait on the border: every time we were waiting three to four hours for the documents to be checked. The scenery behind the window was interesting: the first few days after we left Moscow it was the typical Siberian landscape with vast open spaces and big birch forests. From Irkutsk we went around the south end of the Bajkal lake, a really huge lake - like an ocean. We passed by all these tiny one-room wooden houses with windows painted blue. When we got to Mongolia the houses were replaced by yurt - the kind of tipi made out of dense wool. Around the wooden houses in Russia there was a lot of all kinds of junk. Around yurts there was nothing. Sometimes clothes were just drying on a line and that was it. It always amazes me how little people can have and still feel happy. In the Ecuadorian jungle life is easy: first it is warm all the time and second food grows on trees and is ready to be picked at any minute. In Mongolia the land is bare steppe or desert so it must be hard to survive in such conditions... yet the people do enjoy their lifes. According to what I heard from them, they would like to change it to a more comfortable life but if they can't, they are not miserable and make the most of life they have. They depend on their family and community ties. The Chinese countryside looked less dusty and dry and there were many fields cultivated by the farmers. In China also the farmers and the track workers waved to us smiling.
The people on the train were of mixed nationality: some Russians, some Chinese, Mongolians and a group of Europeans. The Europeans spent evenings in the restaurant car, talking, playing cards and games and drinking vodka and beer, and I joined them for one evening and it was fun. I would have joined them for more evenings but I basically was left with $10 for the trip because the hasty taxi ride to the Jaroslawsky train station drained me off money (I boycot taxis and don't use them unless I absolutely have to since they are always a rip off and it was a rip off this time as well...) and couldn't spent much on beer. The stops at the stations were too little time to search for an ATM or a money exchange place. $10 was enough for the food though. I especially liked the Russian "pierozki" which are like soft big donoughts with a filling inside. The ones with cabbage are the best (drozdzowe placuszki z mloda kapustka zasmazana, mniam). Of the Europeans I especially got friendly with Kevin who is from France and whose cabin was next to mine, and also Henrik from Sweden, and Katrin, Jon, and Michael from Germany. Katrin, Jon and Michael had reservation at one of the hostels and since Kevin, Henrik and I didn't we went with a person who approached us at the Beijing train station to his hostel.
We got to Leo's and liked it immediately: the atmosphere of the place (there's a restaurant, loundry, movies and a really great crowd of people) and the location (it's in an old part of the city full of narrow streets and old buildings and it's close to Tienamen Square and the Forbidden City). Guys took the shower and I just relaxed since being dirty stopped bothering me so much and we went to search for a vegetarian restaurant which prooved to be good and cheap. Henrik left us to retire to his quarter to rest since he was really tired and Kevin and I went slowly back to the hostel and enjoyed all the stores with traditional Chinese clothing, jade jewerly, kites and Tibetan artwork. When we got back to the hostel Jon, Karin and Michael were waiting for us and we spent a nice evening talking and drinking beer. We decided to rent bikes the next morning and go for a ride around Beijing. We followed a route outlined in the Lonely Planet and it took us around the Tienamen Square, past the Mao Mausoleum, in the back streets of the Forbidden City, along the narrow streets of Hutong and back through bussier and larger streets of more modern part of the city. It was a really great bike ride. We had a lot of fun riding in the crowds of other bikers. On the roads of Beijing anarchy rules: everybody is on the road making sudden turns, bikes and pedestrians cross the streets on red light and nobody seems to care. There are no tickets given. We encountered a few policemen on the bikes (as old and rusted as ours) who observed the same rules, or rather lack of rules, as everybody else. We got back to the hostel cold but happy and went to a type of Chinese fast food. It was a really good meal for about 60 cents. Afterwards we went to a sauna and stayed there until 11 pm. Boys and girls were separated so Karin and I spent time together steaming in the steam room and sweating in the dry sauna. We wanted to have a beer in our hostel after the sauna and it turned into a long conversation and mingling with people until 3 am. Yesterday we visited the Forbidden City. It is an amazing place, a city really, which was a house to many of the Chinese emperors. It consists of a few big "palaces" in which the emperors saw advisers and officials, many smallers "houses" where the emperors lived, even smaller where their concubines lived, many streets and narrow passages, a garden... In some of the houses there is original furniture and art. We walked through the city and I was thinking of two movies I saw on the life and intrigues of the empirial court: Farwell to My Concubine and Raise the Red Lantern and tried to imagine the emperors sitting on their thrones, dressing for the day, greeting guests, deciding on the fate of their people... ordinary life of an emperor and his servants since to an emperor all were servants, even his wifes. A Chinese emperor must have been a very lonely person... We walked in the city until closing time at 4:30. The temperature drops radically in Beijing after the sunset. We went fast into the warmth of a really nice restaurant where we eat a very good meal and decided to go to bed early this time...
Today guys went for a trip to see the Chinese Wall and I decided to split and see if I can get some information on the med schools and going to Tibet. I ran around the city like mad - it really is a big city. The subway system works very well. There are not many lines but it is very well designed and I had no problem getting where I wanted. I first went to the Polish embassy and met with really nice people who work there. I got most of the information I needed. I went to the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and talked to a very nice doctor who works there. He also gave me information which I may use later. I decided that first I will go to Tibet. Later I will go to Shanghai to see the med school there. Shanghai is less polluted than Beijing: pollution is a problem for me still. So tomorrow I will get the ticket for the train closer to the Tibetan border and from there I will have to take the bus. I will try to leave as soon as I can, Saturday or Sunday.
In general I like Beijing a lot. Chinese seem to me the most spontaneous people I have seen so far. They do absolutely what they feel like doing (they look at tourists with great interest). They are very friendly people and willing to help at all times. Whenever I looked lost today they stopped and asked me if I needed help. It was hard sometimes to communicate - I will have to learn some basic Chinese words - but we both tried. The only things which I will have to get used to is the dog and cat on the menu (so far I find the idea depressing...) and people clearing their air passages... In Europe you can be woken up by coocoododleing roosters, in Beijing you are woken up by people spitting as if they wanted to throw up their lungs. Guys got used to it and are even trying to master the technigue but as for me I will have to first learn to hold my peacock inside and then maybe I can try.
And I will end this part of the story with this delicious bit of info on Beijing. I am being roasted in the internet place since everybody smokes here, even more than in Buenos Aires, so the next part will appear when I get to Llasa.
Buenas noches todos mi amigos o buenas dias, but in any case muchos abrazos y un beso.
A few more thoughts regarding my stay in Moscow. The thing I was happy about was that I could still read Russian and understood most of what people were saying to me. I studied Russian long time ago but I found out that even if you loose touch with the language the information is stored in the mind and it is easy to recall it. I think that I could speak Russian well if I stayed in Russia for a few months. But I don't think I would want to... Moscow looks to me like a city built for giants: the buildings are humongous, there are six-line streets running throught the middle of the city, to get to the subway station you have to ride on the escalator for 10 minutes to get down to the bottom of the earth... I have heard so much about Moscow that I expected a city bustling with life but in reality it is like a ghost town: nothing happens there. It seems the city is dead. There are cafes and restaurants but they are expensive and not many people can afford them. Everybody apparently stays at work or at home. There is no part of the city like San Telmo in Buenos Aires, East Village in New York, Barranco in Lima or Coyacan in Mexico City: a place where people would enjoy themselves just walking, enjoying cheap cafes and street art. Moscow is sterile. The people seem sad... They are nice but very reserved. During the train trip we passed many towns and cities (usually we had 10 or 20 minutes to get out of the train, get some air and buy things from the women who were selling products at the stations). The people seemed equally sad in these places... Often they are very poor, it's true, but it must be connected with the outlook on life and also perhaps with the fact that people who live in Siberia were displaced people, moved by force from other places... not as hostle to live in as Siberian climate and landscape. I was thinking about this when we got to Mongolia and later to China. In Mongolia and China people are even poorer than in Russia. In Mongolia the land is really dry and unproductive, yet there was this feel of "contentment no matter what." Many Mongolians and Chinese waved to us when they saw the train passing and smiled when they saw us wave back to them. In Russia nobody did that...
At this point I stopped writing yesterday. I would like to say that I can't access my blog because blogs are not accessible from China. My dear friend Marcin agreed to post my entries which I will be sending to him over e-mail. So please don't send me any comments on the blog because I won't be able to read them; only e-mails please for the time being.
Continuing my story from yesterday... The first few days on the train I had the whole compartment to myself and I was basically sleeping day and night and enjoying it. In Ulan-Dar two women joined me and there was more talking and exchange of ideas. The women (who lived in Ukraine but worked in Ulan-Baator) got off at Ulan-Baator and two Mongolian men joined me and also a family of three: Maggie, Jummy and their 11-year old daughter Toya. We all got very friendly and spent the remaining time in a very pleasant atmosphere. The entire trip was really pleasant except the wait on the border: every time we were waiting three to four hours for the documents to be checked. The scenery behind the window was interesting: the first few days after we left Moscow it was the typical Siberian landscape with vast open spaces and big birch forests. From Irkutsk we went around the south end of the Bajkal lake, a really huge lake - like an ocean. We passed by all these tiny one-room wooden houses with windows painted blue. When we got to Mongolia the houses were replaced by yurt - the kind of tipi made out of dense wool. Around the wooden houses in Russia there was a lot of all kinds of junk. Around yurts there was nothing. Sometimes clothes were just drying on a line and that was it. It always amazes me how little people can have and still feel happy. In the Ecuadorian jungle life is easy: first it is warm all the time and second food grows on trees and is ready to be picked at any minute. In Mongolia the land is bare steppe or desert so it must be hard to survive in such conditions... yet the people do enjoy their lifes. According to what I heard from them, they would like to change it to a more comfortable life but if they can't, they are not miserable and make the most of life they have. They depend on their family and community ties. The Chinese countryside looked less dusty and dry and there were many fields cultivated by the farmers. In China also the farmers and the track workers waved to us smiling.
The people on the train were of mixed nationality: some Russians, some Chinese, Mongolians and a group of Europeans. The Europeans spent evenings in the restaurant car, talking, playing cards and games and drinking vodka and beer, and I joined them for one evening and it was fun. I would have joined them for more evenings but I basically was left with $10 for the trip because the hasty taxi ride to the Jaroslawsky train station drained me off money (I boycot taxis and don't use them unless I absolutely have to since they are always a rip off and it was a rip off this time as well...) and couldn't spent much on beer. The stops at the stations were too little time to search for an ATM or a money exchange place. $10 was enough for the food though. I especially liked the Russian "pierozki" which are like soft big donoughts with a filling inside. The ones with cabbage are the best (drozdzowe placuszki z mloda kapustka zasmazana, mniam). Of the Europeans I especially got friendly with Kevin who is from France and whose cabin was next to mine, and also Henrik from Sweden, and Katrin, Jon, and Michael from Germany. Katrin, Jon and Michael had reservation at one of the hostels and since Kevin, Henrik and I didn't we went with a person who approached us at the Beijing train station to his hostel.
We got to Leo's and liked it immediately: the atmosphere of the place (there's a restaurant, loundry, movies and a really great crowd of people) and the location (it's in an old part of the city full of narrow streets and old buildings and it's close to Tienamen Square and the Forbidden City). Guys took the shower and I just relaxed since being dirty stopped bothering me so much and we went to search for a vegetarian restaurant which prooved to be good and cheap. Henrik left us to retire to his quarter to rest since he was really tired and Kevin and I went slowly back to the hostel and enjoyed all the stores with traditional Chinese clothing, jade jewerly, kites and Tibetan artwork. When we got back to the hostel Jon, Karin and Michael were waiting for us and we spent a nice evening talking and drinking beer. We decided to rent bikes the next morning and go for a ride around Beijing. We followed a route outlined in the Lonely Planet and it took us around the Tienamen Square, past the Mao Mausoleum, in the back streets of the Forbidden City, along the narrow streets of Hutong and back through bussier and larger streets of more modern part of the city. It was a really great bike ride. We had a lot of fun riding in the crowds of other bikers. On the roads of Beijing anarchy rules: everybody is on the road making sudden turns, bikes and pedestrians cross the streets on red light and nobody seems to care. There are no tickets given. We encountered a few policemen on the bikes (as old and rusted as ours) who observed the same rules, or rather lack of rules, as everybody else. We got back to the hostel cold but happy and went to a type of Chinese fast food. It was a really good meal for about 60 cents. Afterwards we went to a sauna and stayed there until 11 pm. Boys and girls were separated so Karin and I spent time together steaming in the steam room and sweating in the dry sauna. We wanted to have a beer in our hostel after the sauna and it turned into a long conversation and mingling with people until 3 am. Yesterday we visited the Forbidden City. It is an amazing place, a city really, which was a house to many of the Chinese emperors. It consists of a few big "palaces" in which the emperors saw advisers and officials, many smallers "houses" where the emperors lived, even smaller where their concubines lived, many streets and narrow passages, a garden... In some of the houses there is original furniture and art. We walked through the city and I was thinking of two movies I saw on the life and intrigues of the empirial court: Farwell to My Concubine and Raise the Red Lantern and tried to imagine the emperors sitting on their thrones, dressing for the day, greeting guests, deciding on the fate of their people... ordinary life of an emperor and his servants since to an emperor all were servants, even his wifes. A Chinese emperor must have been a very lonely person... We walked in the city until closing time at 4:30. The temperature drops radically in Beijing after the sunset. We went fast into the warmth of a really nice restaurant where we eat a very good meal and decided to go to bed early this time...
Today guys went for a trip to see the Chinese Wall and I decided to split and see if I can get some information on the med schools and going to Tibet. I ran around the city like mad - it really is a big city. The subway system works very well. There are not many lines but it is very well designed and I had no problem getting where I wanted. I first went to the Polish embassy and met with really nice people who work there. I got most of the information I needed. I went to the College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and talked to a very nice doctor who works there. He also gave me information which I may use later. I decided that first I will go to Tibet. Later I will go to Shanghai to see the med school there. Shanghai is less polluted than Beijing: pollution is a problem for me still. So tomorrow I will get the ticket for the train closer to the Tibetan border and from there I will have to take the bus. I will try to leave as soon as I can, Saturday or Sunday.
In general I like Beijing a lot. Chinese seem to me the most spontaneous people I have seen so far. They do absolutely what they feel like doing (they look at tourists with great interest). They are very friendly people and willing to help at all times. Whenever I looked lost today they stopped and asked me if I needed help. It was hard sometimes to communicate - I will have to learn some basic Chinese words - but we both tried. The only things which I will have to get used to is the dog and cat on the menu (so far I find the idea depressing...) and people clearing their air passages... In Europe you can be woken up by coocoododleing roosters, in Beijing you are woken up by people spitting as if they wanted to throw up their lungs. Guys got used to it and are even trying to master the technigue but as for me I will have to first learn to hold my peacock inside and then maybe I can try.
And I will end this part of the story with this delicious bit of info on Beijing. I am being roasted in the internet place since everybody smokes here, even more than in Buenos Aires, so the next part will appear when I get to Llasa.
Buenas noches todos mi amigos o buenas dias, but in any case muchos abrazos y un beso.
posted by Asia Kabat at 4:29 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home