I went to Moscow with my program CIEE on an excursion and it was really great. It was really good to get away from my host family and my routine in Petersburg. Did some souvenir shopping, saw a lot of museums, did some clothes shopping, and ate good food!
Our hotel was not the nicest in Moscow, but still expensive and okay-nice -the hotel itself was just massive and had 3000 rooms, it had a huge casino, and also strip-shows at night, which my friends and I did NOT attend even though a lady came up to us and gave us flyer and told us to see the "pretty Russian dancing."
I left the group program a day earlier than everybody so I could participate in my orchestra concert. It was much more of an ordeal than I expected. They had hired a brass section to play with our chamber orchestra and we played Strauss, Offenbach, Dostal, and Kalman. They also hired opera singers, who just like solo performers in America, put on ridiculous and distracting dresses. But unlike in America, these dresses looked like they came from a 1970s discount Halloween store for the colorblind. The visions of hot pink flowers oddly placed on a wedding-dress-gone-wrong still dance in my head.
I took my camera, but didn’t manage to photograph during the performance (obviously) or even during the intermission, while the 2 primadonnas were putting on their even more ridiculous costumes. The conductor, nor more drunk than usual, approached me at the end of the show as I was leaving and told me that “these kind of performances in England, or in America, only ‘right here, in Saint Petersburg.’” I wholeheartedly agree. At one point the conductor stopped conducting and started walzing with one of the opera singers! We played to a full house of enthusiastic Russian octogenarians in the Maly Zal of the Filharmonia on Nevsky – Petersburg’s main street. That itself was a treat.
Then I went back to Moscow with Beatrice. Another British girl was going to go with us, but she didn’t have her visa extended in time so she couldn’t go. I tried to persuade Bea to venture out somewhere to the East or to the South, as I was afraid that Moscow wasn’t going to be interesting enough for another 5 days. But she had never been to Moscow, and we had already made reservations in a hostel, and I didn’t really have any sort of concrete plan, so we both agreed that it would be best and safest to just stay in Moscow.
Luckily, I did have enough to see and do in Moscow for another five days. I went to a bunch of the smaller, literary and historical museums that don’t make the top 10 lists of what to see in Moscow, but it was still exciting. The little hostel that my friends and I had discovered last November two weeks after it had opened was sort of disappointing this time around, though – it was completely full of tourists and the staff, while still very friendly and helpful, were just not as full of excitement. The owner did remember me though, said my Russian had greatly improved, and said that my return visit was a great complement to him.
I also visited Sujin, my friend from Hockaday who is studying at Moscow State University. We saw Mamma Mia together – almost completely translated into Russian, including the Abba songs. It was quite a spectacle. They had a live rock orchestra, fancy lighting, great dancing, and a talented, young, lively cast. They gave three encores at the end – something that I have never seen in America – and before they would do the final encore they demanded that all of the audience members get up and dance. I was one of the first ones on my feet I was so into it at that point.
I met some really cool people at the hostel. Beatrice and I were staying in a room with a bunch of Norwegians and Dutch people. The Norwegians, of course, spoke perfect English, and were very surprised by my knowledge (or is it a kind of an obsession) with Norway. I would say that the majority of people I met there, however, were planning on going on the Trans Siberian Railroad and just in Moscow for a few days before taking off. I had no idea that the Trans Siberian Railroad was such a big tourist destination, and have a feeling that those people there are going to be terribly disappointed – 10 days of monotonous scenery in an uncomfortable train and instead of running into interesting people from Siberia running into other British or American tourists.
