moscow day 1

moscow visa registration, the policy and the polizi are a real pain in the ass. but i'll save that for later.

the day we left novgorod for moscow (7/6), we woke up late and got our stuff ready to meet tanya, an english teacher teaching in a middle school in russia. we met her 15 yr old daughter and her after sitting around in the big square of novgorod reading/writing. after talking to tanya, we spent an admirable (for me, that is) 7 hours reading in 2 cafes to kill time before we boarded the train for moscow.

on the train, i had a fitful 2 hours of sleep as i thought of the various possibilities of getting thieved, and the different ways i could stop or not stop the thievery. obviously, there was a lot of fighting in those imagined situations, and that kept quite some adrenaline in my system. also, there was a not so nice smelling man (musty, a bit of stale beer and a little more of body odour, as well as the scent of oily unwashed hair) who slept next to me and kept on looking at me before he went to sleep, so that kept me alert as well.

russian life is pretty tough (seriously!!). the price of food is NOT cheap, cars are only for those with spare cash, bus stops are not as obvious as those in singapore and housing is really expensive. the good thing is, the government takes the burden off its people's backs by providing free medical treatment and education. education in private schools, according to her, does not show better results than education in public schools. and the surprising thing is, a normal class size in a private school is 10-15, while a normal class size in a public school is 20-25. (india, malaysia, singapore classes are almost twice the size). and if you go to university, you don't have to go to army too!

i find it strange that russia has such a high standard of living even though it is not really developed. and thus, that is how i nearly looked like a fool with a wide open mouth when the bill for last night's dinner came.

we were having dinner at cafe bilingua with xinying and meeshell, 2 singaporean girls, deric our host, steve, an american linguist, and anya, a polish graduate student working on her pHD in english in the us and happily married to each other. xinying is about to graduate from beijing university with a degree in international relations and a minor in japanese, and meeshell has just graduated with a degree in accountancy. both have been travelling a lot ( like a lot!)

i had a draught dark belgian beer, and it was really malty and pretty sweet too. and i had fried georgian cheese with it. superb. but when the bill came, my beer came up to 195 roubles, and the entire meal, 280 roubles, which is about 10+ usd. which, had i asked the price of the beer, meant that i could have actually had a bigger meat dish. naohiah. i'm not complaining, it's just that it's US prices in a place 2 notches below france. so i'm really surprised.

on our way to a pub later, we got stopped by a rather weighty puffy policeman in his policecar and man, was it a pain in the ass. we were asked for our passports, which we passed our photocopied ones to him. then he asked for our registration, and since we could not register that day, was asked to go to the police station with him. bloody hell. so we called deric, who talked to the policeman. the phone was passed back and forth between Puffy and i, and i learnt from deric that the policeman said indirectly that we had tried to bribe him (wth???) and that we had to pay a fine. good thing deric talked a little more and Puffy soon realised that going through 2 hours of paperwork to get enough money for some bliney was not worth it. so he told us yellow boys to scoot and go back home.

-l