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MOCKBA, CCCP
Jul. 12th, 2003 03:57 amAnother world. There was people and buildings and taxis and sky and sidewalks, but the Soviet Union was another world.
Not at all like Japan, and not much like the US. Inside the common areas of the Moscow and Leningrad hotels were high ceilings and signs that it was meant to be grand from the days before it was a bad thing. There were strawberries in the water pitchers iin the Moscow one.
Almost every place we visited had these signs stating very sternly that taking photos was forbidden. Despite the colorfulness in the hotel and some places we visited, my overall impression - Russia was GREY, very grey. I had next to no understanding of why it was so different, but it was, and you could feel the difference.
One very strange thing about the hotel was it had a little shop, which was called the berioska. Usually you think you are supposed to pay in the currency of where you are right? Not in the berioski, these only sold items for foreign currencies. I got an Italian coin in with my change one time. There was a table full of books, kids books. Well book, it was all the same book, but in different languages. There wasn't one in English, so my mother got the French one and translated it for us.
"Quand Papa Etait Petit" ( "When Daddy Was Little" ) was a bunch of stories about when the author was a little boy in the small town of Pavlovo Possad. Each one was about something bad happening to him, usually as punishment for something he did. He didn't seem to have a name. They just referred to him as Papa in the stories. Line illustrations showed us that Papa was a somewhat awkward, yet cute, looking boy about 6 years old with big thick glasses and dark hair. Papa's world looked old-fashioned, like from the twenties or perhaps even earlier. It often seemed rather cruel so it was easy to feel sorry for him.
In the first story he had a brand new ball, with 4 panels each a different color: red, blue, yellow, and white. He was very taken with it, and would not let anyone else play with it, but it ends up being run over by a car and flattened.
In another he is getting his tonsils removed, while wide awake and unanaesthetized. The doctor puts his hand in Papa's mouth so that he can pull out the tonsils. Papa bit him. They punish him for this by not giving him any icecream afterwards like they had promised. Ouch!
The candy wrappers were fascinating. Their wrappers had fairy tale illustrations . We got a few, but they were also fun just to look at through the glass case. My mother commented on how candy was expensive in Russia because the government decided the prices instead of business. She said that what they wanted people to buy, things that were good for them, they made cheap and the bad things were more expensive. I was not yet completely clear on how prices were determined anywhere else yet, so I didn't quite grasp what exactly was so broken about this.
My mother bought each of us a moving hand-carved wooden toy, of which there were many types to choose from. They all had a button ( rod ) you pushed in that caused another part to move and then sprung back into place. JB got a woodpecker pecking a tree trunk one. I got one that was two goats on a seesaw. The goats were only attached by their hind feet so as they rode the seesaw their front feet would lift up. It was cute.
My own special purchase was a traveling chess/checker board that cost about one dollar in the berioska. It was a deepish black plastic case, about 6 inches to a side, with the board built inside, and little tiny pegs for the checkers and chess pieces. Since you can't stack the checkers to 'King' them, they had a couple of special pegs in red and yellow to serve as checker kings. If you need more than two kings of the same color, then you can use the chess people. Although the pegs are quite tiny, the chess piece ones are all still obviously shaped like whichever piece they are.
The subways in Moscow were deep, very deep, underground. I've never seen another so deep, even since then. My mother speculated that it might be for better hiding from bombs, but I didn't really understand.
We were walking and my mother pointed out onion domed roofs peeking above a wall. She said something about the Kremlin and Red Square and that we couldn't go there because that is where the Russian government was and that we were from an enemy country to them.
We went to a ballet, Swan Lake. We had seen ballet before in San Francisco, so this seemed relatively normal, except for the applause. People didn't just applaud at the end and make a wall of noise like here. It was a rhythmic clap that they all did in unison. I both liked it and was a bit weirded out by it. I wondered how they could all end up doing that, but my mother said that was just how people in Russia normally clapped. That they did it on purpose. I wondered who gets to start the beat off and how.
And then we finally got to ride a train to Leningrad, formerly St Petersburg.
Not at all like Japan, and not much like the US. Inside the common areas of the Moscow and Leningrad hotels were high ceilings and signs that it was meant to be grand from the days before it was a bad thing. There were strawberries in the water pitchers iin the Moscow one.
Almost every place we visited had these signs stating very sternly that taking photos was forbidden. Despite the colorfulness in the hotel and some places we visited, my overall impression - Russia was GREY, very grey. I had next to no understanding of why it was so different, but it was, and you could feel the difference.
One very strange thing about the hotel was it had a little shop, which was called the berioska. Usually you think you are supposed to pay in the currency of where you are right? Not in the berioski, these only sold items for foreign currencies. I got an Italian coin in with my change one time. There was a table full of books, kids books. Well book, it was all the same book, but in different languages. There wasn't one in English, so my mother got the French one and translated it for us.
"Quand Papa Etait Petit" ( "When Daddy Was Little" ) was a bunch of stories about when the author was a little boy in the small town of Pavlovo Possad. Each one was about something bad happening to him, usually as punishment for something he did. He didn't seem to have a name. They just referred to him as Papa in the stories. Line illustrations showed us that Papa was a somewhat awkward, yet cute, looking boy about 6 years old with big thick glasses and dark hair. Papa's world looked old-fashioned, like from the twenties or perhaps even earlier. It often seemed rather cruel so it was easy to feel sorry for him.
In the first story he had a brand new ball, with 4 panels each a different color: red, blue, yellow, and white. He was very taken with it, and would not let anyone else play with it, but it ends up being run over by a car and flattened.
In another he is getting his tonsils removed, while wide awake and unanaesthetized. The doctor puts his hand in Papa's mouth so that he can pull out the tonsils. Papa bit him. They punish him for this by not giving him any icecream afterwards like they had promised. Ouch!
The candy wrappers were fascinating. Their wrappers had fairy tale illustrations . We got a few, but they were also fun just to look at through the glass case. My mother commented on how candy was expensive in Russia because the government decided the prices instead of business. She said that what they wanted people to buy, things that were good for them, they made cheap and the bad things were more expensive. I was not yet completely clear on how prices were determined anywhere else yet, so I didn't quite grasp what exactly was so broken about this.
My mother bought each of us a moving hand-carved wooden toy, of which there were many types to choose from. They all had a button ( rod ) you pushed in that caused another part to move and then sprung back into place. JB got a woodpecker pecking a tree trunk one. I got one that was two goats on a seesaw. The goats were only attached by their hind feet so as they rode the seesaw their front feet would lift up. It was cute.
My own special purchase was a traveling chess/checker board that cost about one dollar in the berioska. It was a deepish black plastic case, about 6 inches to a side, with the board built inside, and little tiny pegs for the checkers and chess pieces. Since you can't stack the checkers to 'King' them, they had a couple of special pegs in red and yellow to serve as checker kings. If you need more than two kings of the same color, then you can use the chess people. Although the pegs are quite tiny, the chess piece ones are all still obviously shaped like whichever piece they are.
The subways in Moscow were deep, very deep, underground. I've never seen another so deep, even since then. My mother speculated that it might be for better hiding from bombs, but I didn't really understand.
We were walking and my mother pointed out onion domed roofs peeking above a wall. She said something about the Kremlin and Red Square and that we couldn't go there because that is where the Russian government was and that we were from an enemy country to them.
We went to a ballet, Swan Lake. We had seen ballet before in San Francisco, so this seemed relatively normal, except for the applause. People didn't just applaud at the end and make a wall of noise like here. It was a rhythmic clap that they all did in unison. I both liked it and was a bit weirded out by it. I wondered how they could all end up doing that, but my mother said that was just how people in Russia normally clapped. That they did it on purpose. I wondered who gets to start the beat off and how.
And then we finally got to ride a train to Leningrad, formerly St Petersburg.
