Wonderland

A winter one, that is! As much as it’s hard to get excited about snow in Kirksville from the beginning of November until (seemingly) the end of March, Moscow snow will always get a thumbs-up from me. Primarily because the resulting blanket of white is a nice change of scenery for what is otherwise an intensely dirty and endlessly gray city. Not to say that it’s never beautiful, but it’s been two weeks since a cloud broke around this place. I’m beginning to forget what the sun looks like. Or at least how it makes everything else look. The best part about getting snow every few days though:  walking off of the sidewalks so you can hear that squeaky-crunchy noise it makes against the soles of your sneakers. You know, it’s the simple things in life.

That being said, the simple things are really the ones we can count on at this point in the trip. We’ve hit a wall it seems, the “grab the guidebook so we can figure out what to do today–uhhh, we’ve already done all of these things” wall. Which means being satisfied with walks around certain parts of the city, including the Novodevichy Convent I visited about a week and a half ago. We couldn’t access more than one building (the Smolensk Cathedral’s being renovated until May), but perusing the slushy grounds and taking a lot of photos of buildings I couldn’t even begin to say anything intelligent about turned out to be activities worthy of the day. Even though our days here appear to be getting shorter and shorter–no real light after about 5 p.m. Of course, now I know why Russians write such long novels. It has everything to do with the 7-hour evenings.

Along with the Russian winter come any number of things: babushkas selling shawls and rabbit fur muffs, dogs sleeping on newspapers in the metro, kids looking like marshmallow monsters in Dr. Seuss-esque hats. What still baffles me is how early Muscovites don heavy winter coats, hats, and scarves. Anytime the temperature drops below 50 fahrenheit, these people get out their Siberian gear. And, they think you’re totally nuts if you don’t do the same. I’m thinking, “Really. Doesn’t it get down to the negative double digits here in January?” Sadly, I will not be around long enough to figure out how they dress for subzero temperatures. Maybe they wear moose skins. One could only hope.

When we went to look at the convent a week or so ago, we also stopped by the adjacent cemetery, mostly because a few super-famous authors are buried there, including Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. Trust me, Americans don’t do monuments like the Russians do monuments; they go the whole nine yards for every Soviet war commissar, ex-dictator, and sports coach. This set of flowers adorned the grave of a man I assume was once a celebrity coach for the Spartaks. The fake flowers had aged quite a bit and turned strange shades of fuchsia and purple, making the assortment look sort of morbid and beautiful at the same time.

Speaking of death, I recently listened to a superb episode of This American Life entitled “Fear of Sleep” that, in its final minutes, addressed people citing fear of death as the cause of their insomnia, something I’ve thought of at least a dozen times in the past few years. The episodes runs through different scenarios of sleep deprivation: scary movies, disorders, etc. As a kid, I couldn’t sleep for days after seeing the least terrifying episode of The X-Files at Stephanie’s house. I would highly recommend it (TAL not X-Files), and it’s quite free on iTunes.