Have you ever seen Sheldon and Leonard on The Big Bang Theory play three-dimensional chess? Well, I feel like a live figure in a three-dimensional chess game when I go into the Moscow subway. You have to go down or up so many different levels and you have to walk long, long ways underground if you are at a station where more than one line meets and you have to transfer. Notice in the last picture of the previous blog that there are some metal barricades. These are to keep the crowds going up and down the escalators separated. Now imagine that a couple hundred people are getting off the train and all want to go up or down that single escalator. It’s like you’re being funneled into a cattle chute and you can only go with the flow (literally) and step on the escalator when you get pushed there with the rest of the crowd. This is not for the claustrophobic. The population of Moscow has just grown so much and it’s not like you can rebuild a subway station every couple of years. And today there were a lot of police hanging around in the subway because of the big holiday coming up. It happens to be the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution on Monday, even if they now call it Unity Day.
So, after eating a good breakfast again, I headed for the subway. I wanted to see a building that was supposedly built like a ship and is being restored, then I thought I’d jog over to checkhov’s house before heading up to the Jewish Center. I had a hard time finding the building. It turns out that Moscow addresses also mean the places could be in the back courtyard of the building in front of it. This was the case today for just about everything I visited today. So what I do is ask two or three different people where the place is. If two people out of three give me a similar answer, that’s the direction I go in.
It turns out that this “ship” is right next to the American Embassy. With all its buildings, the complex takes up must of the block. I asked one of the guards there about the “ship” and I understood where I had to go. Unfortunately, they were really doing a lot of renovation on it and it didn’t look much like a ship to me at all. So I moved on up the street towards Chekhov, but ran into Dostoevsky before that. Man, I think there’s a museum for Russian authors on every damn corner! So I figure, OK, you’ve read Dostoevsky too. Stop in there. Would have been great, except that it was 11 am and the place didn’t open until noon. Nope, ain’t doing that.
I headed back to the subway and rode to the stop from which I could walk to the Jewish Center. This was well out of the center of town and appeared to be in a Jewish neighborhood. I first went to the the Jewish Community Center which was guarded by two policemen with machine guns. One of them told me it was the wrong place but would only tell me, “One more.”when I stopped a little further and asked a lady, she sent me through a back alley, but I found it. It is an entire complex with all sorts of meeting rooms and this great museum and tolerance center, as it is called.
The museum helped me understand why Russia had had such a large Jewish population. (Russian conquests of other countries with large Jewish populations). It was a very interesting account and a great exhibit. Lenin came off pretty good. The had one positive quote from him about Judaism. But you will not find anyone here who says something negative about Lenin. And I swear, in one of the old historical news clips, I’m sure I saw Leon Trotsky. He was a revolutionary along with Lenin and had to escape the country because he and Stalin disagreed . Stalin had him murdered while he was living in Mexico in1940.
But Stalin was mentioned several times in this exhibit and he did not come out looking good. They did not even attempt to hide his anti-Semitism. In general, the man is not talked about here, but in this case, he was such an integral part of the Jews’history in Russia, they couldn’t avoid it.
After spending about two hours there, I took the subway in the other direction to the Trekiakov Art Gallery. What a wonderful collection of Russian paintings and icons. I’m always so amazed at how someone can just take different colors and make it look like something.
I spent three hour there before I took the subway home. The same street musicians were belting out tunes at the corner, but there was no drunk breakdancing. I stopped at the Italian place for a nice meal of cannelloni and tomato juice. (Did I already mention that tomato juice is a big item on menus here?)
So, tomorrow I fly out. On the way to the train station to go to the airport, I’ll make a quick stop at the mosque.
Sonia’s already got us booked up for a soccer game on Sunday. Monday’s a holiday so I don’t have to be crack to school until Tuesday. Hooray!
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