Moscow Spring (worse than Seoul Spring could ever be)

Moscow Spring is a teenage girl! Three days fairly decent weather, and then many days of snow and freaking cold! Yesterday was beautiful! It was cold, but the sun was shining. Today, grey, snowing, windy, and freezing! I’m not so white any more, but wind burned pink.

So the week in review:
I had to eat in front of the students at the kindergarten. Monkey see, monkey do. The children ate whatever I ate. So when the cook put a large plate of boiled liver, mashed potatoes, and beets in front of me, everyone cringed. We all ate the beets and the mashed potatoes first. There was no way I was touching that liver. That is, until the teacher scolded me because none of the students were eating their liver either. So, down the hatch went the liver. I thought for sure I was going to lose my lunch on the way to the metro. 

I had some time to kill, and an upset stomach, so I stopped at Metro Arbatskaya. I had no idea what was there and just decided to see. I got out of the metro and followed the mass of people down the street, across some ice, and onto an amazingly beautiful Neo-Classical cobbled street. There were tourist shops, coffee shops, restaurants, and a torture museum housed in the mint green, candy pink, and light blue buildings. 

Despite the freezing cold temperatures, artists were on the car-less street selling amazing works of art and book sellers had heaps of used books for sale. I grabbed a coffee and wandered up and down the street enjoying the atmosphere, and truthfully spent way too much time petting and admiring the really old books.

Wednesday, a coworker I never see called me out of the blue and said “You need a visa run and I want to go to Kiev, let’s go!” so we met up and bought our train tickets to Kiev. I am really excited for this trip because this guy lived in Kiev for two years and knows it inside and out. 

After buying tickets, I hurried up to my ten-year old student. I waited until the end of the lesson to give him his birthday present of Pringles and Mars Bars. He was so excited that he ran out to tell his dad. His dad ran in with tears in his eyes, spouting a German/Russian mix and kissed me on the lips. He was so grateful that I had remembered his son’s birthday. 

Thursday I had a nightmare lesson with my kindergarten class. I remembered why I don’t like teaching the little ones. After my client at Gorky 2, the driver took me to the bus stop to catch the marshrutka . Thankfully he stuck around to make sure I got on the bus, because just as we got there, traffic stopped for forty five minutes while we waited for the president to go by. Despite having to wait to put me on the bus, the driver was quite cheerful (showing his silver teeth) and we attempted to chat about various things and rocked out to ABBA. He then put me on the marshrutka and waved to me as the bus went by.


After the drama class on Friday, I met my co-workers at a Chinese restaurant to celebrate my manager’s birthday. We wound up staying quite late and headed back to my manger’s apartment to continue the festivities. After one co-worker started to cry and another co-worker went insane, I made the executive decision it was time to go home. We took a cab back to our apartment. However, the driver got lost and I had to help guide him via metro stops. I am lucky to have a sense of direction in this city. 

Today we got up and headed to the WWII Museum. It was interesting to see yet another perspective. The first thing you see when you walk out of the metro is the Victory Arch to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon. Then you see a large empty square. At the top of the square is the Victory Monument for WWII, the eternal flame (a great place to get wedding photos, apparently), and the museum. 

Once you get into the actual museum there a long hall of weighty tomes. These books contain the names of all the USSR soldiers who died in the four years they were in the war. At the end of the hall is a large statue of a woman holding the body of a dead man. This is lit up by bronze chains with crystal tear drops-each drop represents a life lost. There are millions (estimated totally death from WWII for all of Soviet Union is between 26-27 million).

The dioramas of various battles and sieges were amazing and heart wrenching—especially the siege of Leningrad which lasted 900 days. Of course those years had really long, cold winters (-30 degrees C) and people were reduced to eating frozen dirt to stay alive—among other things.

On the second floor is the Hall of Victory. Here you begin to cheer up a bit, until you go around the bend and see the Holocaust exhibit. My mood did not cheer as I visited the art gallery. Here you see paintings of ghosts and sad corpse-like people from the war era at the opposite wing of the victorious portraits of leaders and generals. But at the end of all of this is a large painting depicting The Idiot bound and chained and Don Quixote being held by a masked crowd and forced to look on as young men burn books in a mass bonfire. Malraux would have been intrigued.