Small Shelly Fauna

Starving in the belly of a whale

Day 2: Actually going to the museum. Luck did not improve. Taking the Metro was easy enough, if rather cramped (and the escalators down to it are enormous; I have reason to believe the Russian Metro is actually well within the asthenosphere). But getting from the Metro stop to the Paleontological Institute? Ah, there was an adventure all right. So, from one of our guidebooks, we knew that the PIN, as it is called, had to be on the main road between two of the Metro stops. Yet we walked that road from stop to stop without finding it. The problems were twofold: one, the guidebook has no map for this far southern region of Moscow. Apparently, no one would ever want to visit here ever. I don’t blame them. Two, the signage in Moscow is nonexistent. Even on the lookout for the Cyrillic transliteration of “paleontology” we saw nothing. Heck, the main street we were on was completely unlabeled for the whole of its run, making us start to doubt that we were even on the right street. I saw through a wooded path an iron gate with odd flourishes, possibly dinosaurian in appearance, but it was locked, and we decided to move on. We also came upon a long dead-end road that led into the woods, but it was decided that we weren’t ready to be hunted down and killed like dogs in the taiga just yet. So we circled the station, passing the same kiosks three, four times before I said that the only logical place we hadn’t checked was the woods. NOW we were ready to be hunted down and killed. What’s more, we had followed a promising side road (that turned out to go nowhere) a good ways east, and if we wanted to return to the other road we would have to walk all the way back, south, and then out east again. After an hour and a half of walking, I was not keen on that prospect. So I made the bold, mad choice to cut through the woods. Come on, man, it’s full of sketchy, poorly trod trails! My colleague was less than enthusiastic about the prospect, but I ran off, necessitating that he follow. This park actually would have been quite lovely (it was, all things considered, a glorious day out) if not for the circumstances, as we blundered through them in the vague direction of a road potentially leading to a nigh-phantasmal museum, every moment believing werewolves or worse to be on our tails. We even clambered across some muddy logs put down across a river. Eventually we did make it to the other road (not without passing four large feral dogs, however), and followed it to the end, where we found a compound with the address of the museum but the façade of an Orthodox church. Certainly not the museum. Tired and out of options, we decided to go with the initial dinosaur-esque iron gate hunch and followed the road back to its source, where we discovered a path towards a quintessentially Soviet-style red brick building. Upon seeing the pterosaurs wrought into the doorway, we knew we were at last in the right place. We went in and met up with one of the curators, who took me to the head of the synapsid collections, who informed my that he had no idea who I was, that my contact at the PIN was “not employed here”, and that my presence was “a problem.” Russia: wacky!