On the second and last day in Moscow we all had a bit of a sleep-in and a slow morning, even though we knew we were supposed to leave by 9am to join the queue for Lenin’s mausoleum, for those who were so inclined. The mausoleum opens at 10, but there are security and bag checks, and it’s common in Russia for people in the line to be saving spaces for several others.
We formed a loose group of people who might be interested to wait for Lenin if when we got there the line wasn’t too long and was moving sufficiently quickly, given that we didn’t really want to miss our train in order to see a stuffed dead waxy short red-haired Communist former leader-of-Russia. But the line wasn’t that long and it was moving quickly, so Alice ducked off to buy some Russian dolls (in accordance with regulations) and we actually got into the mausoleum by 11.00 having joined the line just after 10.30.
You can’t take cameras, or even moderately sized bags in there with you, so I have no photos of actual real dead people on public display to add to the growing collection on our website, but I can tell you that compared to the Popes in St. Peters, Lenin has no glass or anything like that around him, and because everything inside the Mausoleum is black marble, and you go down some nearly impossible to see black marble steps, you could just as easily be in the tomb with him.
He looks dead, no mistaking that, but he doesn’t look ‘preserved’, if that makes any sense. He looks like he might have just died before you came in. He is arranged with his right arm laying to one side and the left arm bent up at the elbow across his waist; I had forgotten from year 11 history just how orange the man’s beard actually is, and so that caught my eye as well; and other than that all I can say is it was a far more profound moment than most of the other memorials so far.
Goodbye Lenin indeed.
Moving out of the Mausoleum, which the Russian green-jackets encourage you to do, there are quite a few other Communist heavyweights entombed in more regular graves on a small grassy section behind Lenin’s Mausoleum and in front of the walls of the Kremlin. They all have busts of their heads on the top of the tombstones, which was handy; those that could be recognised immediately saved me from painstakingly spelling out the Cyrillic characters, although I could do with the practice. Standing in front of Stalin’s grave it did occur to me to wonder why someone who killed at least 10 million of his own people and packed many more off to Siberia should receive any kind of public recognition whatsoever other than the occasional spitting-on, but there you have it. Also the bust of Yury Andropov has glasses on.
On the short walk back to the hostel we stopped for more pancakes (mmm cheese and mushroom…Alice had cottage cheese, bacon and mushroom), as well as more Kvass which is slowly becoming addictive. Then we packed our bags, assembled our 13 people, and got the metro over to the train station. The train looked kind of functional and boring but on-board, compared to the 64-in-one cabin we had on our previous train, which turned out to fairly comfortable anyway, we were all surprised by how decent the cabins and the bunk space were. And because we had 12 people in the group we got to share 3 cabins amongst ourselves, while the tour guide went in another cabin with some apparently uncommunicative Russkies.
To describe briefly the carriages, there is a corridor on one side just under a metre wide, about 10 cabins all along in a row with sliding doors, and in the cabins there is one upper and one lower bunk on each side, with a half metre in between, a small table, and space below the lower seats and in a compartment above the doorway for baggage. In other words, it’s quite reasonable; many people on the tour were pleased to see just how reasonable, after they discovered we would be spending four nights on the train, not three! Although the train (and all that stations in Russia) stay on Moscow time for convenience, if you discount the differences it’s a total of 88 hours on the train.
After settling in we all started visiting each other’s cabins, and somebody decided it would be a good idea to visit the dining car and see how much beer costs. Turns out it ‘s cheap, and this proved all-in-all to be too tempting. We passed that first afternoon having a bit of a party until Adam’s laptop ran out of power and we discovered (due to Steve having bought a multimetre with him from Perth, along with many other useful tools) that the power on the train is 50v. People with really good transformers could charge their phones or iPods or whatever. People with transformers requiring 100v-240v were very much out of luck. And in that 100v group were myself and Alice, and anyone else with a laptop.
When the music died we were most of the way to Yaroslavl anyway, where we came upon, for the first and not the last time in the trip, the joy of buying pastry, sweets (or even bottles of water) from the Babushkas on the station platforms. At good prices too. Thereafter whenever the train stopped for longer than 2 minutes there came many joyful cries of ‘Ah Babushka babushka!’, and a general flurry of wallet and sandal-gathering, followed by scurrying out onto the platform to get the best pastries first.
It pains me to mention it so early, but the one bad thing about our trip was that of the two providnitsas (conductors) assigned to look after out carriage in shifts, one was young and new to the job and nice enough; the other was older and significantly more crabby. When she was not on duty she would pop out of her room occasionally in a bright blue dragon pattern dressing gown (that went only half way down her thigh) and green curlers in her red hair. And she was referred to thereafter as either ‘the older grumpy one’ or ‘the dragon lady’.
After a late evening stop at Danilov for yet more Babushka-brand goods, we went and played cards with British-Indians Sharnika, Preshant and Dinesh in their cabin. Vodka is technically illegal on the Trans-Siberian, unless you buy it and drink it in the dining carriage, but even our Intrepid guide had word from her supervisor that such things need only remain hidden. So we definitely did not drink and ‘water’ while we were playing cards. Also the Russian word for water sounds like ‘Vohda’, so we figure the reason Russians are able to drink the tap water in Russia is because is because they’re actually drinking vodka all the time. Meanwhile, says British Andy who-was-born-in-and-is-returning-to-New-Zealand-the-long way, ‘the whole world knows that everyone drinks Vodka on this train.Isn’t it called the Vodka train?’
Greg
