Small Shelly Fauna

Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow

So Skull Tour ’06 has delivered me into the chilly embrace of Mother Russia. Comin’ at ya live (for now) from Moscow, wacktacular capital of a country formed out of the part of the brain that hates. Oh, wait, no, that’s my brain that’s doing the hating. (Haters gotta hate, what?) To say that this trip has gotten off to a rather inauspicious start would be, I’m afraid, an understatement. You could count the number of things that have gone right so far on a frostbitten ostrich’s toes. Let’s start with my arrival at Moscow’s fabulous Sheremetovo-2 airport (description in my Moscow guidebook: “hasn’t been upgraded since it was built for the 1980 Olympics.” DELICIOUS.) The escape from the plane was actually surprisingly easy—my time spent at passport control went far more smoothly than I had been led to believe. Ah, but that’s how they get you! They trick you into thinking that this sort of thing will be easy going, then they start increasing the red tape exponentially and, ah, but go on, dear reader. So, upon leaving the controlled area of the airport, I meet up with the other grad student with whom I am traveling, and he informs me that all of his luggage has been lost between Milan and Moscow (and given that it’s a long way from Milan to Minsk, you can imagine what the extra mileage to Moscow might incur). We probably should have recognized this as the evil omen it was, but no, blithely we sped onwards, paying the exorbitant fee of 1300 rubles for a cab to our hotel. It was here that our tale took its irrevocable turn towards Gogolian black comedy. Enter: the lines. Oh, the lines! The great Yakov once said, “In YOUR country, you wait in line for three hours to buy Michael Jackson tickets! In MY country, we wait in line for three hours to buy toilet paper! EH-HEH-HEH!” I believe this was an exaggeration. It would NOT have been an exaggeration, however, if he had replaced “buy toilet paper” with “check in to a Muscovite hotel”. So we get in line at the front office. There are a total of five parties in the line, with us at the end. It takes two hours to get to the receptionist. TWO HOURS. And once we finally do reach that brutally unhappy woman, it turns out that our waiting has only just begun. Yes, we are finally able to relieve ourselves of our all too burdensome money (for some bizarre reason, accomodations in Moscow are expensive as hell--believe me, I’ve looked around), but as part of the immigration arcana of the Russian government, we also had to relinquish our passports for registration purposes. Now, obviously we weren’t going to go anywhere until we got them back (both of us anticipating stepping outside and immediately being asked for our papers, seized, and sent to gulag), so we decided to ask her again following the “30 minutes” she claimed it would take for registration. And we asked again, whereupon we were told “ten more minutes”. And again, “eight minutes.” I was pushing pretty strongly for busting out the bribery at this point in the game, but unfortunately we didn’t have any denominations of rubles we felt was appropriate for the situation. So we sat back down, waiting an hour an a half. Having spent this time with no call of “Passports ready” to be heard, I decided to ask the receptionist just what was up, but this necessitated getting back in line. A full three people were in front of me in the line. After ANOTHER two hours waiting in this line, waiting for those three (3!) people to be checked in, I made it to the front and asked one last time for the passports (because if they weren’t ready this time, I was going to leap over the desk and draw some blood). Perhaps sensing the manic rage in me (I had begun giggling like a madman during the latter stages of the wait, as the ridiculosity of the situation reached its apogee), she managed to produce the registration-stamped passports. By now it was getting dark, so the previous plans of taking the Metro (Moscow subway) to go find the museum were out of the question. We did need to buy tickets for the morrow, though, and food. Happily, a Metro station was right next door, and a “Cybermarket” (initial hopes that this might include internet facilities were dashed when we realized that what appeared to be “cyber” was merely the Cyrillic transliteration of “super.” Incidentally: Cyril you tool. Couldn’t you have used the Latin alphabet, or even the Greek? Did you really need to create something with horrible Siamese-twin K’s that is completely inscrutable? Am I acting the ugly American by saying that? I don’t care anymore.) The ticket buying went well (I was inordinately proud of myself for figuring out how to say “20 ticket” in Russian and actually getting a 20-ride pass for my efforts), and although the pickings were meagre at the market, I managed to get vital water (tap water here is decidedly non-potable), a German chocolate bar, some juice, and a small loaf of bread for dinner. Returning to the room, we set into our meal, and I hungrily munched down the bread. After having ravenously (I had not eaten in I know not how long) devoured half of the loaf, I bit down on a long, hard object with a slight crunch. At first I thought this to represent a splinter of wood, but upon spitting the main chunk of it out and inspecting it I determined beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was an animal bone. That’s right, a bone in my bread. What, are ogres baking here? This was the breaking point after a long day of struggle, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I just lost it, and was rolling on the floor for minutes before I finally got up, spit out what was in my mouth, and washed it out real good with some Hoop (a local “juice” brand). I mean seriously! BONES IN THE BREAD. That’s frickin’ ridiculous. To get to sleep at night, I told myself that it was a stray chicken bone that fell into the wrong mixer at the food factory, instead of the far more probable live rat. I mean, dear God.