Good grief, Moscow is bonkers. I don’t know if I am a magnet for odd things happening, if I am dumb, or what, but I might end up needing a whole separate blog to recount the crazy things that seem to happen to me…. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Most of Saturday, I felt kind of punk. I think my bodacious little body finally got enough sleep Friday night and was like, “Oh, hai, yeah I like this sleepy feeling!” and never really snapped outof it. I felt exhausted and headachey all day, so I laid low and creeped around the Internet, mostly.
I ate some unpictured lavash for breakfast, and then snacked on a yellow apricot, apples+pb, and tea in the middle of the day.
After a while, I forced myself out of my apartment to find an ATM/currency exchange and to get a few groceries. I came home with a big bag of produce–peppers, plums, apples, onions, carrots, more carrot salad, then some yogurt, soy sauce, and rice. And a giant 5L jug of water. I am scared of the water here, and don’t want to drink it at all (even after boiling) so it is important to stock up, I guess.
I had big plans to make a stirfry for dinner, but sleepiness and laziness got the best of me. I fell asleep! When I woke up well after 8, I decided to make the last of my pelmeni/vegetable concoction instead. And some carrot salad, duh.
I ate it while watching a poorly dubbed version of It Takes Two on TV. Oh, the Olsen twins…. (Oh, Carlye…)
After that, I snacked on some vanilla wafer cookies and watched most of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which had much better dubbing. (Most American films are dubbed into Russian rather than subtitled; a lot have one female and one male voice for the whole movie, over the original dialogue, which can be hard to handle. They spent good $ on HP, though, because there were different actors for every character!) Ron is even cuter (can you imagine?!!) when he is speaking Russian.
When I got up today, Sunday, I ate two teacups full of Honey Nut Cheerios with milk.
For some bizarre reason, my apartment does not have any little bowls, only big huge ones (like for having soup as an entree, or a big bowl of pasta). And we don’t have any large plates, just saucers or side dishes! Hence the teacup. Also, I really dislike that cat on the milk bottle. I don’t know why.
For lunch, I scrambled 1/2 a pepper, a bit of chopped onion, and some eggs together. And, you guessed it, ate it with a plop of carrot salad.
A couple of the girls from the training program called me up to see if I would like to go shopping with them in the afternoon, and of course I jumped at the chance. (Thank heavens I had something to do other than sit in my apartment all day!) We went to Coffee House (which is a chain all over Europe, I think) and got some considerably overpriced snacks. I had a hot chocolate.
The waitress thought I was crazy when I was ordering it, though. Other times when I have ordered hot chocolate in Russia, I have been served a hot chocolate pudding. I do not like pudding. I wanted to make sure that it was a liquid beverage, so I asked the server if it was a drink or a pudding. She was so confused as to why I might ask that (and why I was talking to her in Russian, even though she addressed us in English…), and looked at me like I had 2 heads. All I have to say is, I sure am glad it wasn’t hot pudding!
Finally we went to nearby “Friendship Mall” (I kid you not). I didn’t buy anything, but Jenny sure did! She bought a new camera, a dress, a sweater, and shirt! Wow. We also spent a lot of time looking for hairdryers, but no such luck. How do Russian ladies dry their hair, I wonder?
After a bit, we returned to my neighborhood for another stop at good old “SPAR” grocery store. We picked up an assortment of afternoon snacks and made a veritable feast!
We had apples+pb, carrot salad (I turned the other girls onto it. It’s so good!), and these funny ice cream snacks called “Mini Bikini.”
They were creme brulee-flavored, with a crunchy chocolate coating and a little bit of caramel. We liked them a whole lot.
Heather compared them to a Twix bar. I would agree–if you made the cookie part yummy ice cream but maintained the cookie flavor, you would have something like this.
Later, we headed out to see another of our “colleagues” perform at an underground hip hop show in northern Moscow. We had quite a time getting there, as we only knew that it was very close to the Metro station and that it was in a club called “Master Ee Fagot” (accent on the second syllable, there–it means “master and the bassoon”). We wandered all over the freaking place trying to find the club, and asked a few people where it might be located. No one had heard of this place. Frustrated, we tried to call some Russians who we knew were going, but the pay phone wouldn’t work. Meanwhile, while we were trying to make the call, the police were doing a shakedown of some immigrants. I did not want to be their next target, so I suggested we skedaddle. We asked a pharmacist where we could find another phone; she pointed us to a hotel; the hotel receptionist knew the club and pointed us in the right direction; there were about 8 building #8s where she told us to go… After wandering around in a sketchy apartment building complex for 10 minutes, I looked up, and whaddya know, Master Ee Fagot! So we went in.
When we walked through the door, we were in a completely deserted restaurant excepting the two guys in military uniforms sitting at the front table with a clipboard. In broken Russian (word to the wise, always use broken Russian with people in uniforms, or people asking you questions you don’t want to answer. Feign innocence, and you can usually avoid hassle) we asked where the club was–it was right there. “But where is the music?” we said. The great, big military men were like, “Oh! You’re here for the concert! 100 roubles and your names, please.” We kind of looked at each other like, “uhmmm….” and finally the one guy was like, whatever you dumb Americans are not worth my time, and he led us through the labyrinth of a building to the hip hop show.
I am 86% certain that this “club” was a whorehouse. As we went back to the music area, we passed about 8 closed doors in a red hallway. Each of the doors said No Smoking. Then there were a few others that said Do Not Enter/ Employees Only. When we turned the corner, there was just a whole wall of pictures of naked women. It was honestly the sketchiest place I have ever been to in my whole entire life. When we finally got into the concert area, it was all blacklights and stripper poles (which actually wasn’t that unusual, but didn’t make the place seem any better). But, thank gawd, our other friends were there, so we weren’t going to be held as sex slaves or anything bad like that.
We watched Chris perform in a freestyle battle, and then he rapped two of his own songs:
please notice the stripper pole in the above photo. see it? see it?
Chris did a good job (although not as good at freestyling as I’ve seen my friend Fran do), and I was glad that we went to see him perform, despite the sketchtastic surroundings. As soon as he was done, I asked if we could jet. I wasn’t going to stick around to get hepatitis, syphilis, and who knows what else. Good freaking grief. I am so glad I lived to tell that tale. (Semi-funny/ adding to the creepiness side note: the word for “rapper” in Russian is pronounced “raper.” Ha. Ish.)
By the time I made it back to my Metro stop, it was well past 9:30, and seemed a bit late for me to think up a creative dinner on my own. I almost went back to McD’s for a $3 salad, but decided to go to a chain restaurant, Yolki-Palki, instead. It is not especially expensive, maybe comparable to Olive Garden or something… This waitress thought I was cuckoo, too. Something tells me that single gals don’t wander into the restaurant for dinner at 10pm too often.
Whatevs.
I ordered pumpkin creme soup to start:
It was very good, and an exciting find. It is part of their special Fall menu, I guess. I haven’t seen pumpkin soup before in a restaurant, but I know that pumpkin is common enough to eat in autumn.
In traditional Russian meals, you usually have a salad, a soup, and then an entree. I would have probably been fine on just the soup, but I decided to get an actual entree anyways. I ordered chicken kotlety and mashed potatoes.
I dunno how I felt about this part of the meal. The whole thing was pretty greasy–see all the butter on the potatoes?! The kotlety (which are basically like flattened chicken meatballs) tasted a bit porky to me, but what do I know. It was all right, but heavier than I wanted. And cost about 4X as much as my stupid McDonald’s salad would have. Oh, well. At least you get a little glimpse of Russian cooking!
Now I am back home, ready to take a shower to wash the club cooties off me and get the darned smell of smoke out of my hair.
Good night!
Random Qs:
1. Do you like pickles? Salty or sweet ones?
2. What’s the longest you’ve ever been lost?
3. Have you ever been to a brothel? (lol. j/k!)
1. I LOVE pickles. I like salty ones; my favorites are kosher dill, but Russian pickles taste pretty good, too.
2. Once my friends and I tried to drive to a bowling alley 2 towns over–what should have been a 20 minute drive. It took us nearly 2 hours and stopping for directions multiple times before we got there. Sheesh! In my own hometown region!
3. Yes, I am 86% sure I have.
pretty sure the best part is seeing the crazy packaging of food there! but oh my gosh, i was in stitches reading about your journey to get to the show and all that. it wouldnt let me view the vid though. hooray for national snack a pickle day today! even though you are in russia it is ok to celebrate. i love bread and butter pickles. and i was lost in lake powell for a few hours. oh and also on my way to paris from amsterdam we accidentally ended up in belgium. never been to a brothel but yes to many strip clubs in my day!
I think you know the story about my family leaving me on Key Largo when we were visiting my cousins in Miami when I was just a wee lad of 11. I guess I wasn’t really “lost” per se, but it was still a few hours.
And I’ve never made it a brothel or strip club. Hmmm. Remember Mike’s strip club “experience?”
I’m going to have “It Takes Two” in my head all day now!
Look at you going to a brothel in the name of “hip hop”! Naughty girl. Did you not have to pay at all?
I like those ice cream sticks. They look sort of like those Edy’s “Dibs” or “Nibs” or whatever the heck they are.
I always laugh when things are dubbed and it’s SO NOT anywhere near the actor’s voice.
Oh my goodness – what a saga with the concert!! Hah!
1. Dill pickles!
2. If I’m lost I immediately get directions so I don’t end up lost that long.
3. Can’t say that I have 😉
overpriced hot chocolate, ‘It Takes Two’, desserty treats, pumpkin soup.
Geez!!! This is my kind of day!
HAHAHAHAHA AWESOME STORY. i also have been in a brothel in Thailand. scary shit, no joke. i knew we were somehow soul sisters.
yay for more Russia – love the HNC box and chocolate treats. my fave part of traveling is shopping at the grocery store and seeing what fun things i can find!
have a fabulous week!
Dubbed movies are the funniest thing ever. Love reading about all your crazy adventures!! 🙂
SALTY PICKLES ALL THE WAY… sweet pickles are just… wrong. :p I’ve been lost most of my life, and so far as I know, I’ve never been to a brothel, but hey… I could be wrong. 😉
❤ ❤
LOVE this post! So many cool things all at once! And the pelmeni/vegetable concoction looks so good! makes me crave dumplings and raviolis…
Um, no I have never been to a brothel, lol. I would be so out-of-place there…and SALTY pickles of course!
SARAH! Yikes. I am scared for you! Lol.. I always forget how big the cultural differences are when I am travelling. Please be safe! Gah. K. I’ll stop turning into my mom… 😉 Sounds exciting. The ice cream looks great, as does the soup…the club and scary police? Not so much. Congrats to your friend though!
1. Do you like pickles? Salty or sweet ones? I like ‘sweet’ but the Eastern European sweet, not like the sweet I got in the US.
2. What’s the longest you’ve ever been lost? Well, I’m 27…so about 9 years? Kidding. A few hours- I get lost a lot. I have NO sense of direction!
3. Have you ever been to a brothel? (lol. j/k!) Not that I know of, but definitely some sketchy clubs!
I am kinda jealous you are in Moscow! I have Russian roots and have always wanted to go!
Hurray for sketchy clubs!! I went to one of those last weekend. It was basically strippers with clothes on……well cow girl shoes and hats and chaps. Kinda creeps!
Those cookies look gooooooooooooooooooooood.
Yes, I like pickles. No, I have not been to a brothel.
HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY SARAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i love pickles. all pickles!