Russia By River

Several years ago I was stupid enough to try to bring back a bunch of cute, four inch long bananas from Puerto Rico. I didn't succeed. They were ripped from my bag and thrown onto a tall pile of fruit as big as your dad and I was sent inside to board my plane with nothing edible. Did anyone offer to buy them from me? No. Who ate them? I don't know. Were they given to poor children and shut-ins? I could only assume. But I didn't want the same thing to happen with my bottles of booze. I couldn't bear to see them swiped from my suitcase and thrown onto a clattering pile of shimmering bottles then promptly delivered to Moscow's poor children and shut-ins.

My plan, along with John, was to bring over lots of booze so we wouldn't have to buy all of our drinks from the ship's bar. And there would be a lot of them to buy. So I brought the gin and Kahlua; he brought the vodka. If we landed in jail, would they look more leniently on me or him?

Suddenly on the plane, this whole BYOB idea seemed too risky. Daring, even. But still, as tired as we were, we thumbed our noses at the prospect of imprisonment or banishment to Siberia at the chance that what were doing was considered illegal. Or tacky.

But no. No one gave a damn. No one opened our suitcases. No one asked what we had. They just waved us through. All fifty seven of us. No drama at all. They didn't even look at our Customs Declarations that we had labored over filling out on the plane. The queue for passports and visa verification was slow and tedious and thorough but the Customs thing was just a wave of some bureaucrat's hand as we all swept through without opening anything. The booze was safe. We should have brought more.

At about 11:00 pm we boarded our bus and drove through Moscow on the way to the hotel. We would stay in the Russia Hotel for one night until we got to our ship the next afternoon.

The Russia Hotel was built in 1960 on Khrushchev's command. He wanted a snazzy spot right next to the Kremlin so that government officials and dignitaries wouldn't have to trek to offices and meetings from hotels scattered all over God knows where.

But when the plans were being finalized, people complained that a big ol' hotel rising up above the ancient Kremlin walls would be an eyesore. They said it would ruin the city's look. These people were sent away and not heard from again.

And Khrushchev did locate it in a convenient spot. When I opened the curtains to gaze out at my view from the ninth floor, the illuminated onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral poked me right in the eyes. I sat down on the corner of my bed and said aloud to myself, "Oh, my God. I'm in fuckin' Russia."

Like the hour and a half wait to get my visa stamped wasn't a big enough hint. Most of us went out at midnight and listened to our new friend Debbie (our travel agent) tell us about what we were seeing. The buildings are all illuminated at night and not much compares to standing there gazing up at these buildings with your mouth dangling open.

in Red Square, St. Basil's in back.

The name "Red Square" has nothing to do with Soviet politics. Red means "beautiful" actually but I don't know if I would use that word to describe it. It is grand. It is astounding and breathtaking. But I don't know if it is beautiful any longer. Probably a long time ago....

We learned that Ivan the Terrible didn't mind being called "the Terrible". He wasn't insulted. But the word in Russian didn't mean quite the same thing then as it does now. It meant something more akin to "Formidable" in Ivan's time.

Not that he wasn't terrible. He pretty much was. For one thing, when St. Basil's Cathedral was completed in the sixteenth century, Ivan liked it so much he asked the architects who built it if they thought it was possible to make another one. They considered it for a minute and said, "Yes. Certainly." Then Ivan had his guards blind the architects so that they couldn't build another one.

The museum in the Kremlin contains ten Fabergθ eggs. Most of the eggs are gone from Russia and these are the ones that still remain. (I didn't want to rub it in but the Forbes museum in New York has dozens.) One of the many memorable artifacts within the Kremlin is a big, glass enclosed sledge used by Catherine The Great to travel to and from St. Petersburg in the winter. It holds about six people and has one rectangular table in the middle where they all must have played cards or Monopoly or something while 22 horses pulled them over the snow and ice.

An interesting event happened at the Pushkin Museum. We went there to see two things, a display of golden artifacts dug up from the City of Troy excavation and in another room they have a collection of Impressionist paintings with all the great names represented, Van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne, Monet, Manet, Picasso and I don't remember who else.

One of the men in our group, Jay, carries a little water bottle that he sips out of every couple of minutes because he's had an operation and his throat tissues dry out so he must keep his throat constantly damp. Well, inside the entrance to the museum, a pudgy woman was letting us pass by her single file. She saw Jay's bottle of water and wouldn't let him enter.

People came to Jay's defense and explained in perfectly good Russian that he needs to have it because he sips from it all the time for medical reasons. She would have none of it. At one point Jay said, "What do they think I've got in here? Acid?" The bottle was taken from him and set on a table at the entrance. One of our guides, Olga, continued arguing with the woman and while doing so, slipped the bottle of water behind her back and passed it off to John. John passed it off to Jay and they hurried upstairs to the exhibit. The crowd dispersed and I don't know what the guard eventually thought when she saw that the bottle had disappeared. But no-one ever came around looking for Jay and his bottle.

Afterward, Debbie told us of an incident at the Hermitage Museum several years ago. Someone walked up to the woman standing guard in the Rembrandt room and asked her what was the most expensive painting in the collection. She proudly took him over to it. Then the man pulled out a vial of acid and threw it onto the canvas, ruining it beyond repair. That's why so many paintings in the Hermitage and elsewhere are now positioned behind glass. The pudgy woman is a good example of the Muscovites' general attitude of being conditioned to follow the rules even if there are obvious times when they should be broken. Or bent. A more cosmopolitan, with-it city like St. Petersburg doesn't have the dower, left­over Soviet attitude of blindly following orders that seems to be so prevalent in Moscow.

The name of our cruise ship is the m/s Vladimir Mayakovsky. It was built about 1980 to cruise these rivers and lakes of inland Russia, the Moscow River, the Volga, the Neva, Lake Ladoga and others. Because of the shallowness of some of the waters and the system of locks that the ships must navigate, they cannot be as big and deep as ocean-going vessels.

The ship's crew is on a maritime work day of four hours sleeping followed by four hours on duty. Can't see that being very much fun.

My bed is too small for me to lie down without my legs bent upwards or to the side. Either I sleep in the fetal position or sleep on the floor. I opt for the floor. To sleep most comfortably, I removed the pad from on top of the mattress and spread out my bed on the floor in front of the bathroom each night. And I sleep wonderfully. And John has to do whatever he has to do in the bathroom before I go to bed.

Debbie replenishing our supply of champange.

Aside from the smallness of our beds, the cabin that John and I share is the biggest of any that I see. It's a cabin for four that we have to ourselves. There's a refrigerator in it and nobody else has one of those. Our place becomes a party room on several occasions and one night, five of us stay up till 3:30 in the morning drinking bottles of champagne for about $3.00 a pop. The bathrooms in the cabins have a peculiar feature. There is a sink and a toilet. How exactly does one take a shower or bath?

Well, one doesn't take a bath. But with a little dexterity, a shower can be had. To get one, you draw open the plastic curtain to section off the toilet and toilet paper and towels. This leaves you alone with the sink and a drain in the floor. Pull up the faucet which is on a flexible pipe like a shower massage and place it in the hook on the wall. The faucet is now a showerhead and you can turn on the water at the sink and give yourself a proper cleaning and watch the water drain out underneath your feet.

When you're done, put the shower back in place in the sink, draw the curtain back against the corner and grab a towel that you have just protected from water damage.

In Europe, there's a "one key per room policy" in many hotels that seems a bit odd to my way of thinking. No matter how many of you there are in a room, all you get is one key to juggle between you. No exceptions. It makes for a more intense social experience.

The ship operates the same way.

So if you are not sharing a cabin with someone, life pretty much goes along fairly naturally. But if you do have a roommate on board the m/s Mayakovsky, your life will become a constant series of manhunts as you try to track down your roommate who forgot to leave the key at the key desk on the second deck. After the ship set sail from Moscow, the first stop was the next afternoon when we pulled into a small patch of land along the shore to have a barbeque (called a shashlik) and a game of volleyball. There was nothing there except woods, mosquitoes, a swamp, and a couple of clearings between clumps of trees. At some point in time, someone amazingly thought to name the spot and it is called Sosenki.

I very much wanted to change into shorts to play volleyball but I didn't have my cabin key. It wasn't at the key desk. It must be with John but I couldn't find him. First off, I checked the bar. (Rule # 1 - the rear bar is always the first spot to pop into when anyone is looking for Debbie, Patrick, John or myself.) And then I checked the office. At this point it was anybody's guess where he could be. (Most likely tromping through the woods avoiding our group of tourists who keep asking if we can get them good theater tickets when we get back to New York.)

Time is running out. The game is beginning and there's just not going to be any short pants for me. I'm pissed off as I head for the volleyball court.

The game progresses in a normal fashion, by which I mean that the team I am on is losing. I take my anger out on the ball. At one point, I give it one decent spike over the net and people applaud as we get the point. It feels great but I never again get another good spike. I try... but the thing flies off in any other direction than the one I'm hoping for. At some point I see John standing with the spectators holding his video camera. I wonder two things.... Did he bring the key so I can go change after the first game? And did he record my one decent spike on videotape?

Other people had worse key problems than I did. I could have been Bernarda. Poor Bernarda was locked in her room by her cabinmate, Doris. She struggled to climb out of her cabin window but couldn't fit through. She was reduced to screaming in her nearly incomprehensible Dominican Republic accent, "Help me! I'm locked in here!" and a crew member passed by and rescued her. After twenty minutes.

Olga gave a lecture on Life in Modern Russia. It was spellbinding and I should have taken notes but, like an idiot, I didn't. She said because of the wacky economy that Russia has always had, people must scramble to obtain items they need. They use connections or friends or favors and make little deals with this person or that person for even the simplest items. It's unfathomable that you can just walk into a store, purchase what you need and leave.

They rarely use the word "buy" when speaking. They'll say "get" when talking about things like, "Where did you get the television?" or "I need to get some new batteries." because there's always some story about how goods are obtained. Nothing is as simple as an ordinary purchase.

By the fifth day of the trip, I can hold this little conversation with myself in Russian,

A- Hello.

B- Good morning.

A- Excuse me, what is your name?

B- My name is .

A- Two, please.

B- Thank you.

A- How much is that?

B- I am from America.

A- Yes.

B- Goodbye.

A- Good night.

But few people want to hear such a thing.