Don't Say the N-Word!

We were in the youth hostel in Moscow at 2AM yesterday morning, hanging with a guy and girl from Kentucky and some dude from Minneapolis. We were enjoying the opportunity to talk about TV and movies and silly things like that, since most of the people you meet on travels like these either fail to scratch the surface of a conversation, or spend the entire time you share together putting up a facade of the ultimate cool.

People seem incredibly scared of being seen as naive or trivial, and many end up coming off as very pretentious as they try to convince the world around them of just how worldly and knowledgeable they are. We had previously thought that these Americans fitted much the same model (the couple from Kentucky were drama students who'd jetted off to Moscow for a week-long spree of theatre and other such indulgences on their university's dime), but on their last night in the city we'd got chatting to them and discovered they were kind of alright.

The hostel we're staying in has a big flat-screen TV in the main living area, surrounded by dozens of unmarked pirate DVDs from the local markets and underground stalls. So, as The Pristine Marmott sat perched on the edge of one sofa, trying movie after movie in the player in search of anything vaguely watchable, we all got to talking. "Hey, do you guys like Dave Chapelle?", I asked them*

* To give a bit of backstory, when we were in Berlin I'd played The Marmott and The Hugless Stone some of Dave Chapelle's stand-up comedy on my iPod. It's pretty bad, as he spends most of the time screeching "I was high!" or "I was drunk!" to unprecedently large rounds of applause from the audience, and since I can do a somewhat credible impression of the guy he became a regular laughing-stock within our merry band of travelers.

So anyway, when I asked the Americans and they told us they thought he was pretty funny, it kicked off a decent discussion. We told them why we thought he was an idiot, and they conceded that maybe he kind of was. But then I reminded The Marmott of a sketch he did that we loved, called "The N##### Family". The Marmott asked if they'd seen it, prompting Kentucky Girl to squeel like a pig on a spit-roast, "Don't say the N-word!"

We looked at each other, my Marmott friend and I, and realised that if they got squeamish at that sketch (which is satirical, not remotely racist), there was only one thing we could do. You see, on our first morning in this hostel, I'd also explored the treasure-trove of pirate DVDs and turned up an almost-watchable copy of 'Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakstan', which we'd proceeded to watch. These Americans had never seen it before, so we felt it was our duty to educate them. We stuck on the movie, and pretty soon they were squirming even more than we'd expected. Two minutes in, between furious laughted and gasping for air, Kentucky Guy whispered guiltily, "I shouldn't be watching this! I have Jewish friends!"

But as the movie went on, they got into the groove. At one point, the guy from Minneapolis who was sitting next to me turned and mused, "I wonder what the f###in' Afghanis think of this movie.. you gotta think that someone snuck it into the country on the back of a f###in' mule or somethin', right?"

I smiled and nodded, unsure of the correct response.

It's funny, there's a few things that seem to have followed us all the way from England, cropping up in each different country when we least expect it. Regular readers of this blog will remember the French Foreign Legion guys we met in Paris, who told us that when they first came out of their boot-camp and went back into society, they didn't ask anyone what had happened about the execution of Saddam Hussein or even why suddenly the Crocodile Hunter guy was dead. The only thing they wanted to know was, "Dude, have you seen this new movie 'Borat'?!"

And last week, when we were with the other American guys in St Petersberg (the same guys who got us drunk and almost got The Disgusting Hippo killed), they couldn't stop talking about this Borat fella. "Did you know that in the movie when he speaks it's actually Hebrew not Kazakstani?", one of them had asked me. I feigned disbelief.

And there's other things, too..

The Disgusting Hippo is a musically gifted man. He can play a mean guitar and his singing voice is like silky perfection to the ears. One of his favourite songs is "Sweet Dreams", by The Eurythmics, a song which we've heard on the radio in every single city we've been in. In Berlin, the youth hostel offered a karaoke night in the midst of our stay, and at the top of the first page of songs available was none other than that sweet, sweet song.

Likewise, last week, we were in a cafe about an hour out of St Petersberg with Frizzly Man and her friend Blondie. They'd offered to show us some out-of-the-way parts of the area that we might not otherwise see, so we'd spent the morning at Catherine Palace, the one-time summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II. It was an interesting piece of history, although not as fun to explore as the snow-covered gardens outside where The Hugless Stone tried his hardest to break through the frozen streams and lakes by jumping up and down on weaker sections. He succeeded and became thoroughly drenched, but that's beside the point. We were in a cute little cafe with the girls, grabbing a bite to eat, when a certain song started playing on the radio. All heads turned to look at The Hippo, who went bright red. Sweet dreams are made of this.

I suppose I should fill you in on the rest of our St. Petersberg experience, although I must warn you there's not a great deal to be filled in on. After The Hippo returned from his night on the streets, we all felt we'd brushed a little too close to disaster for comfort and took things a little easier for the next few days.

Day 21, we went to the Winter Palace in the town centre (once upon a time the site of a bloody massacre), to check out the digs and sneak a peak at some of the art on display inside. On the way there, we ran into our American friends from the night before who expressed a delightfully insincere relief that The Hippo had made it back in one piece. I asked our friend Doofus why he was holding a gigantic pizza in one hand since we were in the middle of the road, and he croaked back "It'sss fer the trrraaaiiinnnn....."

The art gallery inside was nice, packing more big names than we could have possibly expected. Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso, Da Vinci, Monet.... they were all in there. Only Rembrandt lived up to expectations however, the others all provoking a slight "What's the big fuss here?" reaction from our gang, but it was a decent place. We nearly got kicked out at one point when I gave in to temptation and put my hand on the canvas of one of the massive paintings hanging in the main gallery when none of the guards were looking. It turns out they're all protected with lasers, so a piercing alarm went off instantly and suddenly we were the target of the whole gallery's collective gaze. I did my best to portray a sense of innocent confusion about the whole matter, and I can only assume I succeeded since I'm writing this here now nearly a week later having served no jail time.

The next day we went to the aforementioned Catherine Palace with the girls, the invitation being a nice enough gesture in itself, but they continued to out-do themselves as the day progressed, pulling out endless presents for us from their bags when we least expected. We felt bad, and spent a large part of Day 23 looking for something, anything we could get them as a goodbye present, to show our gratitude. They didn't drink, so Vodka was out. Frizzly Man was pretty fat so buying them clothes could only have turned out insulting them in the end. And the last thing they needed was a souvenir of Russia. Eventually we settled on a cake for them (at least we knew that fatty would like it), which we gave to them when we bid them farewell at the train station on our last night in St. Petersberg as we headed off to Moscow using tickets they'd helped us to buy.

So, we ended up in Moscow at 5AM on Friday morning. My suitcase had lost both it's wheels so I resorted to carrying it on my back with crude and mostly ineffective ingenuity. Unsurprisingly, when we finally reached the hostel (which is situation on the top floor of a building at the top of a hill) I was stinking like a good French cheese and jumped at the chance for a hot shower.

I won't recount our Moscow experience for you blow-by-blow, because for the most part our days have been spent visiting tourist-y places that don't make for interesting reporting. Red Square, The Kremlin, Lenin's Mausoleum.. all very nice in their own rights, but basically they're just places we walked to, in order to have an end point to our walking. What's been more interesting to be about Moscow was how different it feels to St Petersberg.

Everyone had told us that St. Petersberg was very European, but I personally felt the stark contrast to our European experience far more when we were there than I have here in Moscow. In St. Petersberg, there was a constant sense of a need to be checking over your shoulder, whether for criminals or the police (both seemed equally threatening). You couldn't walk down a single road without seeing a mafia car driving by, and the streets had a grimy feel. People walked in straight lines looking down at the ground, seemingly wary of getting on the wrong side of the wrong person. It was intimidating, which is why Moscow's been such a relief. We walked around the Kremlin by night on our first evening here, and I was immediately struck by how friendly everyone seemed. The streets are bigger and grander and brighter and more alive. There's a twinkle to every light and smiles on the faces of the people walking by, if you'll excuse a slight Louis Armstrong moment from me there. As we walked along the river, looking out over the city and up at the stars, it reminded me half of London and half of Montreal, where I lived for two months last year. The air smelled cleaner and the world seemed fresher and more full of hope. Maybe it was just by virtue of the fact that Moscow is a capital city, but maybe not. For whatever reason, it just had a great atmosphere.

Last night, we were invited to an 'Irish Pub' by one of the other guys in the hostel, an Englishman who's bizarrely and inexplicably taken on an almost South African accent over the past three years that he's spent traveling away from the motherland. We set off about an hour after him with the intention of meeting him there, but we got thoroughly lost and ended up walking for hours around Moscow, discovering broadways and back-alleys alike. I was really pleased to have done it, because I've often felt like our experiences on this trip so far have been limited to the tourist standards. There's nothing quite like wandering the streets of a city at night to get a true feel for what it's really like.

Philosophical musing aside, we returned back to the hostel after admitting defeat in our quest to find this pub. The Marmott and The Stone cracked open a bottle of vodka, and we invited our American roommate from Minneapolis to join us for some poker, if he wanted to. He did, and what started off as a plan to wind down for the evening turned into one of the greatest nights we've had on the whole trip. As I mentioned earlier, most people you meet on travels like these turn out to be inaccessible or not worth getting to know, but Minneapolis Dennis was not one of those types. He was a big, stocky American with a furry beard and a backwards baseball cap, but he turned out to be everything you wouldn't expect from his appearance. He was tee-total, having been told by his doctor that due to a family history of alcoholism, his first drink would be on his last day sober. He thought just as badly of his fellow Americans as the rest of the world does, and did his best to disassociate himself from them. And most importantly, he had a great sense of humour. He was cracking-wise left and right, all night long the jokes didn't stop coming. He was telling stories and doing impressions and tearing us up and knocking us down and all the while we were in hysterics. He was a sound fella, and when I realised it was 4AM and we had to be up in a few hours, it was with a real sadness that I shook his hand for the last time and told him how great it'd been to meet him.

It's our final evening in Moscow right now, and The Hugless Stone (with the able assistance of The Pristine Marmott) is cooking up a storm next door. I believe it's Chicken Paella on the menu tonight, and it's smelling great. In a few hours time, we hop on our first mega train ride: four days on the trot, which will take us all the way from Moscow to Irkutsk, a city near the Russian border with Mongolia. I'll be back with many more stories when we arrive I hope, but in the mean time stay well, dear readers. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some paella to eat..

Cheerio!