Trip 3 - Mongolia to Eastern Europe

We went back to his apartment, where his parents, Masha and Anvar, and his cocker spaniel, Polina, greeted me. Shortly thereafter we had a dinner consisting of a meat-and-gelatin concoction (a quintessentially Russian staple), bread, salad, apple pie, and tea. Rustam and his parents live near Kiev Station, in the western part of the city center, in an apartment that has either two or three bedrooms, depending on what they're being used for and who's there. They recently acquired a washing machine, which Rustam and his brother (who now lives in the southwestern part of the city with his wife and child) gifted to their mother. Their apartment is on the fifth floor of a building carefully guarded by a 70-year-old babushka (the friendly face is more important than the security) and is reached by one of those neat elevators where you have to open the door yourself.

A long diversion is required to explain why, if I was staying with Rustam, I had to spend $67 for a night at the Ukraina Hotel. It comes down to Russian bureaucracy. In order to obtain a Russian visa, you must prove that you have accommodation booked for every night of your stay in Russia. A fax from a friend is not enough: You must either go through a visa-support agency (which involves booking a hotel room) or have a private invitation processed (which I'd have had Rustam do if I'd gotten my act together to plan this trip a couple of months earlier). Since all nights in Russia must be accounted for, multi-day train trips - such as the Trans-Mongolian - must also be pre-booked before a visa will be issued. Then, when you provide your proof of accommodation, your application form, and three passport photographs cut to precisely the required dimensions, they issue a visa. And once you enter Russia, you have to have your visa registered, which can be done only by the Russian organization associated with the visa-support agency that booked your hotel room. (This registration is usually handled by the hotel itself.) In other words, I had had to pre-book a few days at the Ukraina Hotel, as well as the Trans-Mongolian trip, in order to get a 10-day Russian visa.

All this may sound as if it could have been accomplished with a couple of phone calls, but it was a mind-boggling process. Everything had to be done in just the right order. There are not many places in the United States where one can buy a ticket on the Trans-Mongolian Railway; White Nights Travel is one of the few. After a series of phone calls, its friendly staff, in California and St. Petersburg, arranged for the ticket to be waiting for me at its partner agency's office in Mongolia. And I booked the Ukraina Hotel through Asla, a company based in England. First I booked three days at the Ukraina, which is how long I planned to spend in Moscow. Then, once Asla issued my letter of visa support (which I needed in order to obtain my visa), I had Asla cancel two nights at the Ukraina (leaving one night for the people at the Ukraina to register my visa). Asla was tremendously helpful through the whole process, and I didn't like putting it through all that rescheduling - but it was either that or fork over an extra $134 for the hotel room. Contacting Asla and White Nights during morning business hours in England and Russia involved waking up at 4:30 in the morning a couple of times in New York to make phone calls. And then, once I had all that visa support, I had the Russian Travel Bureau take it to the Russian consulate in New York (easier than dealing with the consulate directly). And thanks to Hurricane Floyd, the Russian Travel Bureau closed early on the day I was to pick up my visa, requiring me to rush over there during the storm.

But back to our travelogue. Rustam dropped me off at the Ukraina Hotel before going to his job at Moscow State University for the evening; he was finishing up a project involving computer sound files. I checked in to room 503, leaving my visa at reception to be registered so that I could pick it up the following morning. I went up to the room, even though I wasn't staying there. It was beautiful, with an imposingly high ceiling and a good view of the Moskva River. It felt like the library of some mansion. I took a brief rest on the soft bed, and when I left I took a bar of soap.

I walked along the Arbat, a pedestrian street, and marveled at how much the city had changed in the 10 years since I was first there. This was my third trip, and each time I'd come they'd had a different currency. They kept changing the street names and the names of subway stations as well. In 1990, the Soviet Union was just about to disintegrate, and the effects of an era of oppression were apparent, with nearly empty supermarkets, vacant restaurants that refused to accept customers without a bribe, and a devalued currency that made everything dirt-cheap for Americans. In 1994, the country was trying too hard to be western, with too much glitz and not enough prosperity. In 1999, I liked the place the best: The city retained all of its architectural and cultural charm dating from centuries ago, but it had emerged into a modern European city, with cafes spilling onto sidewalks and more friendly faces than in the past - they were even starting to build attractive apartment buildings.

I had some ice cream and watched a jazz nonette playing outside. It consisted of three saxophones, a trumpet, a trombone, a string bass, percussion, a banjo, and an accordion. I walked to Red Square, which looked the same as always: a vast area dominated by the illuminated St. Basil's Cathedral and the tomb of Lenin. Well, maybe almost the same as always - there were no longer hour-long queues to visit Lenin's mausoleum, and there was a pretty garden with a fountain (Aleksandrovsky Sad).

I walked beyond Red Square, not really knowing where I was going, and eventually I took a long walk along the Moskva River and then found the Taganskaya subway station. In 1990 a subway ride cost five kopeks (there were 100 kopeks in a ruble), and you just put your five-kopek coin (worth about a third of a penny) into the turnstile, or what looked like a turnstile except that nothing actually turned; if you tried to go through without paying, motion sensors would cause the gate to close, and if it closed on your leg, you'd get five kopeks' worth of pain. In 1994 a subway ride cost 150 rubles (kopeks were ancient history by then), and you had to buy green tokens. By 1999 they had upgraded to fancy magnetic cards, and rides cost five rubles, less if you bought multiple rides. (Rustam said that when they first came out with the cards, people figured out how to copy the magnetic strip from one card to another, and they enjoyed free trips.) And the battered machines that used to change 10-, 15-, and 25-kopek coins were still there, even though they'd been unused for years.

As in the past, Rustam's family fed me as soon as I awoke, and then they kept offering meals throughout the day. Rustam went to work, and I walked around the inner city, through an affluent area near Kropotkinskaya, reading about the historical buildings in my Blue Guide to Moscow and Leningrad and admiring the yellow-and-white architecture dating back two centuries. (Yes, Leningrad. The guide was the one I'd used on my first trip to Russia, and while much of it was outdated, the walking tours were still valid.) There was a new cathedral in the city center, the Cathedral of Christ, Our Savior. It was beautifully gilded on the outside but clearly aimed at tourists. Inside were pristinely modern religious art, a few old icons, and a choir that occasionally sang in tune. In the chapel, a smaller building in the cathedral's garden, women were kneeling and praying - one clutched my arm to balance herself as she stood up.

I went to the Archaeology Museum, which contained some interesting drawings of 19th- and 20th-century Moscow. There were also pretty paintings of Tobolsk (a Siberian city on the Ob River) by Vladimir Igrovnikov. I tried to have lunch at Praga, one of Moscow's nicest restaurants, but I was denied entry with sneakers on. So I went to the area around Kusnetsky Most, an area with expensive jewelry and clothing stores (except for the block in front of the Kusnetsky Most subway station itself, a seedy street smelling of urine). There was also a new pedestrian street, Theatre Row, lined with Tibetan, Italian, and other ethnic restaurants. I had lunch a few blocks away at the Orga Cafe, where I had the smoked fish and manti (meat dumplings) for RUB 230.

I met Rustam at the university, where he and a couple of co-workers were under the gun to finish a project in which they were synchronizing sound with film. It was not working, and while they tried to figure it out, I used their painstakingly slow Internet connection. After three hours, Rustam, eager to take a break, drove me home, and then he went back until the early-morning hours.

The next morning, with Anvar's help, I bought a train ticket for the Tisza Express, from Moscow to the Hungarian city of Nyíregyháza. The process of procuring the ticket brought me back to the Moscow of the past, as I had to stand in three queues - one to ask for the ticket, one to pay for it, and then the first one again to pick it up. Then, in Dom Knigi (a huge bookstore), I looked at Russian travel guides to Moscow and Russian travel guides to New York.

I visited the Museum of Moscow History, which had a large, fascinating exhibit on the city's 850-year existence. There were ancient tools, coins, city maps, and toys, and a poignant section on post-revolutionary Moscow displayed ration cards, photos with faces of then-revered and now-denounced characters removed, and a picture of a girl holding bullets, captioned "Souvenirs of 1993".

Then I met Rustam at the university, and he treated me to dinner in a café and took me home. He was too tired to go out for the evening, but I'd seen a piano bar in the Kusnetsky Most area and wanted to check it out. It was called Stary Royal (The Old Piano), and it was on the fifth floor of a building that didn't have much going on on the other floors. When I arrived, however, only a few people were there, and there was no music being played - a bartender explained that the music didn't start until November.

As is the case with many of the things I do, going to Stary Royal had a dual purpose. I also wanted to check out a place next door, a club called the Hungry Duck. My motive for going there was inspired by the colorful review the place got in the Time Out guide to Moscow - a review that mentioned, among other things, the people dancing on the bar and the tables; the fact that at least two patrons, whether by choice or under the influence, are likely to shack up each night; the pool of indistinguishable fluids that must be cleaned up after the place closes; and the periodic ladies' nights, on which women are served for free and admitted earlier than men, to give them a head start on the intoxication process. I didn't want to be there when it was at its rowdiest, but as a man who loves extremes, I had to - at least - go inside.

Cover for men that evening was RUB 100; cover for women was RUB 25. After I paid and underwent a search for weapons, I ascended a staircase that led to a large, dimly lit room. There was a central bar area surrounded by a dancing area, and along the walls were tables and seats. The back room was more brightly illuminated and had another bar and more seating. It was early, so there were only a few people there, but as if by decree, some of them were already atop the tables, and one man was easily coerced into taking his shirt off. I had a Heineken (RUB 90) and watched the place start to fill up.

The best aspect of the place was the music - the DJ played the most melodic disco tunes I'd ever heard (not that I am that well acquainted with disco tunes). Sadly, I couldn't stay long, because I had to return to Rustam's before the building was locked at midnight. But the brief visit was well worth the trip.

Masha made pancakes for breakfast the next morning, and she served us a delicious fruity kefir (yogurt drink). Then Rustam took me to the Novodevichy Convent, an attractive complex originally built in the early 1500s and reconstructed in the late 1700s. In its cemetery rest notable writers, artists, and political figures, including Gogol, Chekhov, Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Khrushchev. It was near the university, and Rustam liked to go there as a respite from the bustle of the city. Indeed, it was quite pleasant, with fortress-like buildings, a pretty chapel, attractive gardens and lawns, and a pond.

From there, we drove to Kolomenskoye, a country estate located in the southeastern outskirts of the city. It had one large, impressive church; a small, intimate church; an imposing gate; and sweeping views of the Moskva River. Rustam and I had some blini in the café before heading to the university.

That night was our big night out. Rustam and I met five of his friends near a centrally located subway station, bought some bottles of Stary Melnik - a Russian brand of beer - from a kiosk (I appreciated the ability to walk down the street legally chugging a brewsky), and headed to a club called Crisis Genre (no one could come up with an explanation of that name), leaving empty beer bottles on the street so that poor babushkas could collect them and turn them in for a refund.

Crisis Genre was packed, and the Crossroads blues band played for much of the evening. A few other friends joined us throughout the evening, and the pitchers of beer kept coming. I couldn't down much of it, as my stomach didn't feel like dealing with all that fizz that night. Much later on, a few friends came back to Rustam's place, where we had vodka (I didn't go for much of that either) and scraps of whatever food happened to be in the refrigerator. And because Rustam loves to play host, seven guests stayed in the apartment that night.

The next morning, while the others slept off their booze and vodka, I visited the Museum of Music, a place that had been closed when I'd tried to go in 1994 (many Russian museums close during the summer). There was a good exhibit featuring Arensky scores and a massive collection of instruments from all reaches of the world (especially the former Soviet republics). The two most bizarre, I thought, were the the duda (a Czechoslovak instrument that looked like a bagpipe, two horns, and a stringed instrument all connected somehow) and the chimta (a Pakistani instrument that resembled a giant pair of tweezers).

Since I'd be leaving for Hungary that night, I stocked up on snacks at a supermarket near Rustam's place. I got some nondescript cheese, deli meat, banana-apple juice, and salmon caviar - and I bought some osetra caviar to take back to the United States. When I returned to Rustam's apartment, I joined the others for lunch: Anvar had made plov (an Uzbek rice-and-meat stew). Then a bunch of us visited the botanical gardens at the university. They were closed to the public, and we had to scale a fence in order to get in, but it was worth it for the impressive display of trees from all over the world. A caretaker who came by didn't seem to care that we had somehow gotten in.

Rustam and I returned home for another meal, and Masha gave me some snacks for the train ride, including a veal-flavored soup mix that I never got around to using and that didn't make it past the agriculture check at the airport in Philadelphia. I exchanged a bunch of rubles back into dollars (for certain, the currency would change again by the time I'd next be in Russia) and, true to fashion, boarded the train at Kiev Station just three minutes before departure.

"Where is your Ukrainian visa?" asked the no-nonsense official in her shrill voice, after she leafed through my passport.

"I don't have one."

"You don't have one?"

"According to the Ukrainian consulate in New York, United States citizens don't need a transit visa to pass through Ukraine."

"Gather your things."

I'd been given out-of-date information: Since sometime in August, she explained, the rules had changed, and I'd not thought to call the Ukrainian consulate, um, er, every day while I was planning my trip.

(When I returned to the United States, my father suggested that perhaps she had been looking for a bribe. He referred to an article he'd read in which a group driving through Ukraine had had bribes extracted from them several times. The possibility of a bribe hadn't occurred to me in the heat of the moment, and even if it had, I'm not sure I'd have had the guts to offer a bribe to a customs official.)

Gathering my things did not take long, as I had only one bag. She and her companion took me into the customs building, where I sat in a room with a bunch of customs officials and watched one of them try to fill out whatever form it was that explained why I was there and what they were to do with me. Using a previously completed form with the word "Protocol" at the top as a template - perhaps the form completed for the last person escorted off the train - , this official (different from the first one I'd met) copiously filled in every detail and wrote paragraph-long explanations in her pristine handwriting. I was repeatedly asked where I worked, though I never actually gave the name of my company. And lest you think they had all the fun, I also got to complete a form - in Russian - explaining why I didn't have a visa. But the most fun of all was watching them try to spell "Massachusetts," which is where my passport was issued.

After about an hour of that, a relatively elderly man (most of the officials were young) collected a $25 fine from me, and then I talked with another official about life in New York. And he shared some information about his family.

"You see that woman over there?"

"Yes."

"That's my wife."

Ah, so that's what it's like to be married to a customs official. You've got to be one yourself.

Then another man escorted me to a dim hallway, where I would wait until the next train came to take me back to Russia - at 22:30 that night.

"Is there a bathroom?" I asked.

He showed me where it was. I used it; then I returned to the hallway and sat down.

"Is there light?"

He flicked a switch in the hallway, but the light didn't come on. He shrugged and walked away.

I did not stand up for the next ten hours. I wrote a letter to my girlfriend and read Riding the Iron Rooster. I ate deli meats and cheese and caviar and drank banana-apple juice. I perused my guide to Hungary and planned my days in Budapest and Eger. And I did not make a sound.

So I ran to the Ukrainian consulate to see whether I could get a same-day visa. I could, for $105, and I'd have to get the application in by 13:00. So I ran to a quickie-photo place to get a passport photo, and I turned in my application a few minutes before the deadline.

When I presented my application to the consular official, I explained that I needed a same-day visa and that I'd been turned away at the border even though the Ukrainian consulate in New York had indicated that I didn't need a transit visa.

He went away for a few seconds to investigate this pecularity. I was hoping he'd come back with some huge apology and an offer to somehow compensate me for two days' travel lost.

"Yes, you need one," he replied. Ah, how helpful.

Then there were two problems. First, I didn't actually have a ticket from Russia through Ukraine to Hungary, which I officially needed in order to get a transit visa - I had only the part from Ukraine to Hungary, as they'd lifted the first part. I explained that I would go to the ticket office to buy the ticket.

Second, I had no blank visa pages in my passport.

"What does this say?" he said, pointing to the only blank page.

"Amendments and endorsements."

"Where am I supposed to put the visa?"

"Please...."

Fortunately he overlooked both problems. He accepted my application and told me to come back that afternoon to pick up the visa.

I had a spectacular lunch at Aragvi, a Georgian restaurant. The place was beautiful, with marble walls, paintings, and a fountain; my lunch was black caviar, chanakhi (a wonderful-smelling meat-and-vegetable soup), amirani (pork with hot apples), and two Cokes, for RUB 780 (including a small charge for butter). Then I got some ice cream and looked at travel guides in a bookstore until it was time to pick up my visa.

The person who had the job of admitting people into the Ukrainian consulate was surprised to see me again - he thought I'd erred in thinking my visa would be ready the same day. I guess people don't fork over the cash for same-day visas very often. But the visa was ready for me, and though $105 was a lot to have spent on a visa, I must say that, with its silver hologram, it was the prettiest visa I had ever obtained.

At the train-ticket office, I replaced the Moscow–Konotop portion of my ticket (RUB 363.20), and then I took the subway to a random part of town (Krasnogvardeyskaya, if you're counting), just to see what was there, to pass the time until my train left. There was a large supermarket at Krasnogvardeyskaya, and I bought some more caviar, as well as nectarines, water, and peach juice. Then I returned to Kiev Station.