People who park their cars in glass houses shouldn’t … build them in Russia

Over at the hilarifying blog English Russia, they’re raving in their endearing, barely grammatical English about how new “multistory automated parking garages” are going to save the commuter’s hell of Moscow from its dearth of available parking.

On paper, this idea makes sense.  Too much sense.  Nobody comes to Russia for convenient parking.  That’s like going to a biker bar for a Blueberry mojito.  Russia is supposed to be impenetrable, foreboding and crude, a kind of embodiment of shiny-happy American customer service’s worst nightmare.  It’s supposed to be illogical.

Needless to say, I was immediately against the idea the minute I heard it. Western capitalization of post-Soviet Russia almost turned Moscow into a McDonalds and may still yet, but its inexorable flow toward a smiley face-plastered future was luckily perverted by Russia’s prickly and brutal illogicality.

Of course, there’s still a good chance this sheer illogicality — I would say zaniness, if that didn’t bring to mind a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon instead of eternal, purposeless misery — may still wipe the pimple of this parking garage idea off Moscow’s greasy face.  Just looking at the complex gears required to raise and slot the cars into their parking spaces, it’s easy to imagine some drunken idiot jamming his Lada in like a well-placed wrench. Or figuring out how to overload the thing, bribing the supposedly competent “operator” to let him fit an extra car in, then another, until the whole “steklyashka” comes crashing down like a house of cards.  Or paying someone to shoot up a rival mob boss’s car on the third tier — I mean, the thing’s made out of glass for chrissakes!

In downtown London — wait, “Moscow-on-the-Thames” has already been overrun by the half-a-million Russians, let’s say somewhere a bit blander, like Toronto — this idea would undoubtedly take off, and probably earn some environmental credits from the government or something in the meantime.  But in Russia it’s just not meant to be, and I hope Moscow spits the first of these glass houses out like a rotten tooth.

Sorokin part 4: Vagankovskoye Cemetery

The much-derided grave of Soviet bard and actor Vladimir Vysotsky.

The Eros of Moscow (continued)
By Vladimir Sorokin

4.  Vagankovskoye Cemetery

Entering the cemetery grounds, steer right, to the most distant part of it, taking with you an unread book.  Finding nothing noticeable besides a tidy tomb with a small bench, sit and read the book until dusk, until the evening cool appears and the letters on the page start to run together and resemble soldiers sleeping side by side.  Close the book, carefully put it on the grave and quietly leave the cemetery.  I behaved in this exact manner in May 1980.  Having gone to the maternity clinic to visit my wife, who was preparing to cast out into our contradictory world two twins, I left to aimlessly wander Moscow, warm and reeking of gas and asphalt, with a Xeroxed copy of Nabokov’s novel King, Queen, Knave under my arm.  I don’t remember, how and why I ended up in Vagankovskoye Cemetery.  The cemetery, not yet ruined by the tasteless tomb for Vysotsky, humbly lay in the shade of the lindens and poplars, spots of sunlight dancing in unpretentious crosses, young grass pushing up on the mounds of the graves.  Having sat on a bench next to someone’s well-kept grave, I read Nabokov until dusk and, not having read to the end, all of a sudden stood and walked off between the graves, not really thinking about anything.  Why did I leave the book on the grave?  “It’s hard to explain,” as that same porter would say.  It’s still harder to convey the feeling that I left the gates of the cemetery with.

End of the water

The water, in the Russian parlance, “ended” this morning as a result of a recent plunge in temperatures, putting a number of interesting developments in motion. First thing, Vadim, the master of the apartment, set up next to the toilet a bucket of water with a pot floating in it. How exactly this would counteract the temporarily out-of-service flushing mechanism remains unclear.

Later on, I went to “Planeta Fitness,” thinking to take a shower there after a nice workout and a spell in the sauna, as is my custom. All went according to plan at first; I knocked about the weight room, then sweated ten times more in half the time trying to outsit the burly Russians in the sauna. But soon word reached us through the shimmering-asphalt heat: “Goryachoy vodi net,” or, “There’s no hot water.”

I guess the old pipes throughout the city had given out like so many overridden nags under the freeze. It’s a real problem here in Petersburg, where everything’s old and under constant stress from the brutally damp, cold climate. And so the facilities at the health club had undoubtedly been overtaxed, putting me in an interesting sort of dire straits: Sweaty, between a Russian (read: insanely hot) sauna and a shower so cold it gave me an ice cream-cone headache within 30 seconds.

I might describe the sounds emanating from that sauna while we jumped between two temperature extremes as a celebrity deathmatch between Marilyn Manson and Ren and Stimpy, in Russian.

When I arrived home late tonight, water had been restored thanks to a jury-rigged hose running from a manhole on Fontanka street to the back of the apartment building. I asked Vadim if water often cut out during the winter (a clear yes), and why.

“The machine (water heater) is new, but the pipes are all old,” he said.

I asked why they didn’t renovate the local system. After all, they’ve been merrily tearing up Kazanskaya Street all this fall and winter, leaving me to step over discarded sewage pipes on my daily walk to class.

Vadim said the money just isn’t there. It turns out that it costs more to build a kilometer of road in Petersburg or Moscow than it does anywhere else in the world, as a result of the Russian-sized (i.e. huge) amounts of corruption and bureaucracy. So infrastructure projects don’t come easy, however desperately they’re needed.

If tomorrow’s this cold, looks like I’ll be taking a shower out of the teapot.

Back in Nizhny Novgorod

And it’s reminded me that the farther away from urban centers you get, the nicer people are.  We Midwesterners have always said so, and it’s true.  Here in this provincial big city (over a million people, but spread out, giving rise to a little-city feel), I can already feel the difference from the Petersburg-Moscow idea of velkommen: Glare at you and spit out a one word answer, how dare you ask a question, especially if you’re a foreigner, and most likely one of those hedonistic Americans, to boot!?

To give you a concrete example, I simply asked the ticket collector today if this was the most direct tram line to the Belinskovo, and she made sure that the new ticket lady after the shift-change tell me when to get off.  Now I really feel bad for all those times I “rode rabbits” (a colloquialism that means “to use public transport without paying”).

Voga Boatman Episode 7: Moscow

Moscow (“Moskva” in Russian).  The onion-domed, haphazard old Russian counterpoint to St. Petersburg’s deliberate, neo-classical facades.  A constant, hectic race-for-survival, as contrasted with a haughty weekend stroll down Nevsky Prospekt.  The motherly homeland to the forward-looking father figure of Petersburg (much has been made of the automated voice on each city’s metro: Male in Petersburg, female in Moscow).

I saw (again) Lenin’s body still intact in his tomb, with Stalin, long since removed from embalmed glory, buried outside, next to the Kremlin wall.  It gave me a guilty thrill, but I have to say it’s time to knock Lenin down a peg or two.  Forget this nonsense about letting him “rest in peace”; it’s a pile of chemically preserved flesh.  Nonetheless, this pile of flesh is still far too revered.  Stalin was discredited in the ’60s and has at least become a controversial figure (the very least he should be after destroying millions of his countrymen), but Lenin still remains a goodly hero in the mass mentality.  It was this glittering golden god, however, who set the standard for ritualized destruction of innocent peasants, declaring “Merciless mass terror against the kulaks … Death to them!”

So I’m with Gorbachev on this one.  But now that my rant’s over, I can say it was a nice little trip, in all.

Old ladies (the more polite Russian term can be loosely translated as "well-lived") in Russia often wear their hair purple. This is on account of the cheap shampoo their pensions afford.

The Slava ("Glory") watch company, which used to sell parts to Swiss watchmakers.

A small bit of nature in the middle of the big city.

Volga Boatman Episode 4: Samara

And so it was back on the Volga, longest river in Europe, the Tigris and Euphrates of the North, the only place in Russia were flamingoes can be found.  Our course was set toward the most Eastern point of our journey, to the famed beaches of Samara.  We drank wine on the deck late into the night, played guitar and threw our voices against the river’s mute banks, only pausing when cries of “shlyoos, shlyoos!” warned us of another lock ahead.

Samara is famed for its fighter planes and chocolate, but we found something far more interesting: Stalin’s bunker.

Map of Stalin's bunker.

I’m normally annoyed by ignorant Soviet kitsch, by tourists shooting photos with no respect for the tens of millions Stalin killed, but even I succumbed to the allures of the bunker, which Stalin built nine stories below the Academy of Culture and Art in case of a Nazi invasion of Moscow.  Replete with conference tables, maps and telephones, and even false doors to give the illusion of space, the bunker was never used and has become one of the many ghosts of the Soviet era lingering in this country …

A mosaic to the leader inside the bunker.

What's this building? "Treasure Island," of course. Looks like a fun place.

A renovation worker takes a break.

"Ain't nothin' but a gangsta party" in Samara.

Sorry for the unexplained absence; went on a Volga adventure

Before I left for my boat trip down the Volga River a week ago Thursday, I tried to hit an Internet cafe to post an “On holiday, be back later” message.  Unfortunately, the electricity was out and there weren’t any live computers, let alone working Internet.  Explanation?  Renovations somewhere had renovated a hole in the power grid on Kazan’skaya Street.  Typical.

To make up for the absence, I’ll be posting photos from each of the cities I visited in the course of our cruise down the longest river in Europe.  Stay tuned for episodes in Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Saratov, Volgograd, Moscow.