Massive ladies of Russia

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. Cesare Pavese

Dad was a Ballarat man, born and bred. A town, like most in Victoria, of grid-like parallel roads in the city centre. Moscow has a round structure: it was built around the Kremlin first, then it expanded further in all directions.

The Kremlin is the oldest historical part of Moscow, and its core, the original wall, was built in 1156 and rebuilt several times during its existence, the red walls it is famous for were built by the end of 15th century. Such an amazing history.

According to the 1914 Baedeker guide – the Lonely Planet of the pre 1970’s – the train journey from London via Berlin and Warsaw to Moscow takes about 3 days.

It seems after several days of train travel, and negotiating the finer points of Eastern European bureaucracy, dad’s patience was a little testy. So forgive his impatience with the ‘massive’ ladies of Russia. He is usually such a jovial fellow…

A Journey behind the Iron Curtain by Christopher Davidson of Ballarat – Part 2 – First published in The Courier (Ballarat) April 1967

My journey from Warsaw to Moscow was very pleasant. I was in a modern Russian train, very comfortable and I was lucky enough to have two charming Scots in the same compartment and an old babushka (granny, or old woman) who couldn’t speak any English but was very friendly, all the way to Moscow.

The people in the other compartments of the carriage, Poles and Russians in the main, came to talk by any means they could and share their picnic meals.

They made you feel that they were extremely interested in you and what you were doing. The carriage attendant periodically brought in hot chocolate or Russian tea in the familiar glass and silver mugs.

Through Poland one saw the women in the fields and also in the railway gangs by the tracks doing men’s work.

At the Russian frontier all went very easily and courteously; the only jarring note came when each carriage body was lifted from the European bogeys to the Russian bogeys by means of a hydraulic lift. This had been made necessary by the wider Russian gauge. It meant a smoother ride further on.

As we progressed towards Moscow I was more and more amused by the grand proportions by the railway stations, built in such strange, bad taste. Huge marble pillars clashed with ghastly statues of Russian heroes, all painted silver.

We passed miles and miles of forests with picturesque log cabins dotted here and there. When we finally reached Moscow there was an ‘Intourist’ representative waiting to take us to our hotels. (‘Intourist’ is the only travel agency in USSR).

The hotel I was taken to was called The Ostankino, a vast affair which had been called by some “tourist prison” and by others more generously, “an army barracks”.

The room I was given was plain but clean and spacious and like all hotel rooms in the Soviet Union had no plugs for the basins. Yet there were many clothes brushes in the wardrobe.

Each room was furnished with a reading lamp, a writing desk and a one station radio.

Massive lady

Like every other hotel in Russia there was every floor, a massive lady sitting at a desk at the head of the stairs or just outside the lift.

From her desk she would command maids, keys, linen, laundry, trays, messengers and no doubt the floor’s morals. There was always one of them on every floor of every hotel I visited.

What I objected to about The Ostankino was that the Service Bureau clerks would not speak any English and that the hotel was a good hour’s bus ride from the centre of Moscow.

The Service Bureau, there is one in every hotel, differs according to the character of the hotel. In the tourist hotels they attempt to have multi-lingual staff which arrange your tours, theatre tickets, railway and air transportation, local visas, automobiles, interpreter and so on.

The Service Bureau will arrange special trips at your request; if you wish to meet a Russian artist or visit a hospital or a school for the blind for example. It is your chief means of contact with the Russian public.

On my arrival at The Ostankino, I presented my voucher which was made out in London before I left and in return received a coupon for my accommodation, coupons for meals and coupons for excursions.

The meal coupons were marked breakfast, lunch and dinner and were different and were of different values, were interchangeable but not refundable. You chose your meal from a menu , written in English, based on what coupons you wished to use up.

If you didn’t eat you could use them elsewhere in Russia, on the trains or buy bottles of drink or tins of food from restaurants. You soon settled in and got to know the restaurants.

They varied considerably in their standards, generally they were very poor. Borsch was always a safe dish to order, it was always very good. So was caviar.

Meat and fish dishes were atrociously bad, potentially good food was ruined by indifferent cooking and poor presentation. The overall impression was nobody seemed to care.

Russian wine was very expensive so I avoided ordering it. The little I had was very poor quality.

When ordering a meal you soon learned to do it in stages otherwise you would get it all at once and the remainder of the meal was stone cold before you had finished the first course.

I ate most of my Moscow meals at the Hotel Berlin which had an excellent restaurant and a beautiful setting. In the centre of the dining room was an ornate fountain which cascaded water into a small fish pond which held the omuls (fresh water fish from Lake Baikal) until chosen for the table by diners. Overhead was a magnificent ceiling of gilt framed mirrors and Italian frescoes.

My first contact with the Russian people in Moscow was a violent argument over my bill at a restaurant in the Hotel Ostankino. The waitress insisted I had not paid her and I ignored her until she got someone who could speak English and all was settled satisfactorily.

My first full day in Moscow was a very busy one. I managed somehow to find my way into the centre of the city by a local bus. (The fare was a fixed 5 kopeks or 4c AUD per ride regardless of distance and paid on the ‘honour system’) and walked from the terminus to the Hotel National near the Kremlin, from where all excursions left, and booked myself on a tour round the Exhibition of Economic Achievements.

The particularly observant amongst you will notice a steadfast focus on the food and beverages on offer. The focal point of dad’s travels – as well as his whole life – have always been of both a culinary as well as a cultural nature. That is to say, dad is of the ‘live to eat’ not the ‘eat to live’ variety of the homo sapien.

The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive. William Ralph Inge

The in-joke in our family is asking dad if he’d like say, tea or coffee, cake or biscuit, and he’ll reply “Yes please”. Matched with his mischievous grin, I believe if you look up ‘incorrigible’ in the Oxford dictionary, there will be a photo of my dad.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food. George Bernard Shaw

‘Yes please’ is dad’s philosophy of life.

Food is our common ground, a universal experience. James Beard

I love his description  of the lavish hotel restaurant with a fountain in the centre. And all the silver train  stations – I rather fancy that idea.

Moscow is the western terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which traverses nearly 9,300 kilometres of Russian territory to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Which means dad still has a long journey ahead of him.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. Lao Tzu

 

Source: Wikipedia.com

Tittle photo courtesy of: globespots.com

Baedeker image courtesy of: liveauctiongroup.net

Photo of Kremlin and restaurant courtesy of: englishrussia.com

Additional article photos courtesy of: meridian103.com

Food photo courtesy of: 56thparallel.com