Moscow - hiking about

It was my last day in Moscow.   I visited some churches then went on an adventure looking for St. Andrew’s Church of England. There was supposed to be an evening service and meeting there. The evening service turned out to be off because an opera recital was taking place.  I actually was sitting in a cafe, showing a girl the google internet map of the area, and street the cafe was actually on asking, where the church street was, showing her the names of the streets,   when it was only a couple of blocks away and she said she didn't recognize any of the streets.  They were in her language and alphabet but they were all Greek to me.
I eventually got a map which had both the cyrrilic and latin naming. Then I asked a young man and he pointed me to the very street the cafe was on. He used his Samsung gps and rudimentary English to make sure I was pointed down the street to the church a couple of blocks away. It was across from the Marriott Courtyard.  I’d already gone to the Marriott Moscow Grand.  This was beyond the great Russian writer Pushkin's statue. There a lovely Marriott trainee got me all sorted out finding the right Marriott and gave me the indispensable tourist map.
Up until now I’d not needed such a map because Barrett had been reading a regular Moscow map in cyrrilic code.I’m convinced the Soviets use the cyrrilic alphabet just to ensure that no invader will ever get through Moscow or anywhere in fact in Russia because it’s all Greek.
I finally found St. Andrews only to encounter a busy surly chaplain.  Travelling, I’ve enjoyed meeting priests around the world, but this one was the first rude one.  Later I told Barrett about this and she figured he’d probably osmosed the Russian brevity and abruptness and not to take it personally.  As his church was being turned into an operatic forum for the evening he was probably preoccupied and didn’t recognize a sweaty Harley Davidson t shirted sneaker wearing blue jeaned pot belly older sort of Canadian as a true Anglican of the faith.  A regular colonial, and here in Moscow, is probably what he thought, Brits being Brits. That said I’ve got the very best priest the British could have produced in my parish so it balances out.  The poor fellow is also probably mad with the alphabet.
I wandered a bit.  Walked down by the Kremlin.  Checked out some statues. Some a porcelain moose in a window so am convinced beyond doubt moose are in Russia.  I also saw my Harley with a different paint job.  Made me want to ride. Got back to the apartment where the washer wasn’t working, It had captured Barretts clothes holding them hostage. She’d arrived later to tell me she waited for a repairman to release her clothing but he’d not arrived.  She’d  gone off to the Gulag Museum but found it closed.  I’d had an hour nap and a snack of Riga sardines and the repairman hadn’t come.
I was off to the church again where the opera was in full swing and the meeting was the normal tragicomedy in foreign accents.  We laughed downstairs while the piano thumped upstairs.  It was a marvellous way to spend the last evening in Moscow. Later I’d walk and talk of walruses and things with an English fellow married to a beautiful Russian.
When I got back to the apartment the repairman had been. Barrett was pleased her clothing had been freed. “He simply broke the door with his knife,” she said.  I could see she’d taken vicarious pleasure in the ill fate of the offending laundry washer door.  Now her clothing is drying out on the balcony.
We’re on the 14th floor and the view is spectacular.  Last night I was having salmon in the cafe down the street and a delightful businessman joined me. He was drinking beer and I was drinking coffee, A Russian born Russian with a Texas accent. He said he’d represented American oil men here and travelled back and forth to Texas.  He said the district we were in had several embassies. He gave me a copy of the English Moscow Times which I read while I finished my dinner before he joined me again to chat some more while I had ice cream and he had another beer.  Being in the business of oil he knew Alberta as well and waxed poetic about the Calgary stampede.  I’d just been to the Bolshoi and he was glad I’d so enjoyed the opera.  He loved the city of Moscow with all the cultural achievements but loved the West and the oil business.
I confess I enjoyed speaking English.  Other than Barrett, that gentleman, and now the fellow tonight, I’d not spoken more than a few broken phrases with anyone the last two weeks. Probably that’s part of the maker’s plan. Give my voice and mind a rest since the spoken and heard word are so much a part of my work. I’ve enjoyed watching people , their gestures and expressions.  The young are so animated here whereas a lot of the old are suspicious and scowl, more than in the West, much more.
I saw a man wearing a catchy t shirt, which said, “EAT Your Enemy”.  He was built and looked just like a Hollywood Russian bad guy.   I smiled at the shirt and he didn’t smile back.  Best to keep moving.
We’re up at 4 in the morning.  Barrett’s a great traveller. I’m so glad she said she was only travelling with two bags.  We’ve done well, washing linen of course, but the light travelling has made everything so doable.  There was no room on the train for more suitcases and we’ve had to carry and wheel our bags all over trains and planes and metro. It's been a fast paced trip with lots of walking and hauling gear.  Totally unworkable without travelling light.  It’s really a great way to travel.
I travelled with just a pack sack in my 20’s and 30’s but with all the medical conference travel I’ve become fat and lazy with a big suitcase and a little bag. I pack enough underwear and socks for a week or two and multiples shirts and pairs of pants.
Barrett calls this ‘camping’ but it’s really been the very best way to travel.  I love my Eagle Creek wheeled and shoulder strapped luggage.  It’s done extremely well.
All that didn’t work this trip was the gps maps I downloaded for Russia. Also my Iridium satellite phone connects me with some Russian speaking woman rather than dialling through to home. Getting a cell phone card here was worked just fine along with internet email.  I really would have liked to have had my hand held gps. That would really would help in city travel.As it was Barrett has scouted and conversed and found our way wherever we’ve had to go.  A top notch tour guide.
She says I’ve been most helpful and as well as a pleasant sort of travel companion.  I'm fairly non plussed by changing plans and disruptions.  It's all an adventure.  Everything is so novel.  She does get into conversations with people about their cats and children though.  I’ve had to be patient as she’s learning that some lady’s son is in prison or some daughters husband drinks too much.  She delights in these conversations.  So while I’ve been enjoying architecture,  paintings, churches she’s been having a very different experience of language, stories and people.  She’s been so happy to be with her family and friends again too.  She really animated after spending time with them.
I can’t help but think that a lot of my personal journey here has been about ‘loving your enemy’ and ‘forgiving’.  My childhood was so impacted by the Kennedy Missile Crisis and the Cold War.  Sure we got great James Bond OO7 movies but really I lived in the fear of nuclear war and threat of the apocalypse.  It wasn’t until the SALT talks that I thought that we just might have another future than the Mel Gibson’s Road Warrior one. So I really was resentful, I’m sure, at the communists who no doubt were resentful at us and vice versa.  The Stalin era architecture are a sharp contrast to the beautiful onion and cross churches.
Here I’m seeing that the Russians  are much like the Russians I’ve known back home. I was telling Barrett about the Russians I scuba dived with.  They certainly were trustworthy. And here so many people have been so helpful.
The women are so beautiful too with their love of fashion and especially their devotion to high heeled shoes. I tried to take a few pictures of shoes then but it's not as easy as it might seem.  Besides I'd not want to be arrested as a photog with a foot fetish.  I couldn't do justice to the fashion moments that happen every few minutes on the downtown streets.  Women that really could have stepped right off the catwalk saunter by.  The culture overall  is so global it’s just a different world than at some level I expected. Really, I guess, I expected more drab.
I love the Orthodox Catholic church, the devotion and revival I see happening here.  It’s miraculous really.  A real revival.  So much hope too. Rebirth.
So again I face my fears, have faith and am rewarded.  God is good.

Moscow- last day

The swimming pool church was closed.  The Pushkin museum was closed.  It’s 9:30 am.  Tourism opens in Moscow 10 to 11 am.  I’d not had a morning coffee yet. Just yoghurt and Russian sparkling water.  I’ve already stood beside an enthusiastic Russian and genuflected three times before the icon outside the church.
Travelling for me is a time for writing. In Gr. 3 or 4, Mrs. Murray or Mrs. Cowrie assigned us the task of writing letters home from places we visited in ‘geography’.  I wrote epistles.  A psychiatrist might intuit a need for ‘attention’.  I was a day dreamer. Someone might say I needed antipsychotic medications then.  The flights of fancy to other planets of the galaxy would be no more.  I’d not astro project or have intuitions that proved true. I’d not heal wounded birds and gather hurt things to me.  I’d have no time for such nonsense.  I’d not sing because when I sang I didn’t sing on key for a very long time. I was good at defending myself and beating up gangs that attacked me or my friends.  If I’d not had a mother that made me a set of pyjamas for my teddy bear I’d have been a better killer. Perhaps taken that sense into the win or lose of business transaction.  Maybe I’d have gone further in athletics not sort of turned away from the group sports to pursue the lone pursuits with only myself as my main competitor.  Maybe I wouldn’t have danced.  I’ve a potpourri of skills that span the gender spectrum and spend too much time with under dogs, odd balls and outliers.  Maybe I could have just chosen friends from the rostrum social status.  Rejecting the ones who weren’t the flavour of the month.
I would have liked to ‘fit’. I envy those who have these neat collections of traits and behaviours that fit an acceptable mould. Those dancers who don’t ride motorcycles and hunt big game.  When I was a vegetarian and meditating cross legged all day, yoga was anathema to the main stream. Now I’m in churches genuflecting and praying to Jesus when Buddha is all the rage. I fancied Buddha in my 30’s. He’s still a pretty nice guy, like the Queen.  I still like Yogananda and for some reason reflected on meeting Bishop Tootoo recently, thinking that he like the Daliai Lama I’d also met, were very fine fellows.  But mostly I liked the doctor who shared a call room with me when the building flooded and   slept through the alarms only waking when his personal beeper went off.
I think of storms at sea and being knocked down in sailboats  going on through the eye of the storm.  I’ll never forget the pattern of the sea and eerie glow. There are some places I’ve been that no amount of money could buy. Only experience gets you in and out. Like the charging moose bent on killing me.  The rifle didn’t fail me that day despite the 30:06 bullets bouncing off the lowered horns.  He died feet from where I kneeled.
For some reason I’ve been remembering different patients , ones I’d not thought of for years.  With the Ukranian and Russian troubles I remembered the old Ukranian man whose life I saved by sacrificing the doctor bent on killing him through ignorance and arrogance.  Now I’m so honoured to know a Russian professor whose sense of style and flare is so original. I see where she gained this here in the streets of Moscow where fashion outshines Paris.  But how can these women walk all day in 4 inch heels on cobblestone?
I explained to another just the other day that the doctor we knew wasn’t dementing.  She’d said he was forgetting things and missing words.  I explained that dementia was only when you didn’t know the meaning of an automobile or tried to mop the floor with the dog.  Then she said ‘some kind of cognitive failure’ like the young will , with the naming of things, having meaning beyond the thing itself.  Then eventually we talk of talk of talk and seem so learned to ourselves when the garden is just a garden.
I am overwhelmed at times now with memories so vivid I’m living in the past again as if it were today. The woman who passed me in the Russian subway reminded me so strongly of the patient I knew who refused to leave 1969.  She was dressed as this modern woman was.  Transport her here from her room in the asylum and she’d be in vogue.
Young people in their 20’s dress like we did then.  I remember your body so sensuous and agile in the wheat field where we made love all day.  I thought our bodies were forever wedded.  I never lost love for your every movement. There was such grace in the way your eyelashes lifted as you looked through me and at me.  Your lips were so full. I was blessed in your love.  That was then and now they dress like we did.  The girl I just passéd wore her hair as you did, the same folksy beret.
If someone asked me the time at that moment I wouldn’t know what decade I was in.  I’ve a bliss of memories that bring tears to my eyes, I’m so blessed with who I’ve know. This journey and adventure has been such a wild and crazy passing. I didn’t know I was on a roller coaster even when I was taking a train,  bicycling or hitch hiking across the country with a beat up guitar.  I've  had a beard, a mustache, long hair, short hair. Looking back it's such a tapestry.
All I wanted was to know you God, in all your manifestation. I loved the Song of Songs best.    My fingertips tingled as lightning leapt through my body caressing the buttocks of the woman who knew me as her lover. It was a very big bed on the wintry night in a city where people only spoke French. I saw a horse drawn carriage and remembered our carriage ride that night, the fur robe lain over our legs.
I’m here. I’m in this present. I’m writing home from geography class. I’m walking around in a world where the language is as psychotic as the letters on the signs. I’m stopping at toilets,  churches and occasionally a museum. Museums indulge in the collective memory.  Some are obviously dementing. There’s coffee spots too.
Right now I’m looking for a meeting.  I spoke English with a Russian last night.  He was drinking and smoking cigarettes.  I was weary of the memory of the substances.  I just want to be awake. I want to be present.
Here I am in Moscow but already I’m thinking of my dog. I’ve dreamed of him these last three nights. I’ve remembered my office, my vehicles, my homes, faces of friends and thought again how an intense vacation can restore the joy of the mundane. Just as the tedium threatened to swallow me whole, I am relieved by this whirlpool of unknown, so much so that I long again for the everyday everyday.  And of course I need a vacation from my vacation.
I’ll never forget when Baiba and I, after bicycling Europe got off, the ferry in England and simply rejoiced in the known language.  That first English woman we talked to must have thought us batty as we hung on her every syllable.  We take understanding for granted. We take communication for granted.
The coffee is done. I’m refreshed.  Time to go look at this church that was closed when last I came this way.  Perhaps now I’m synchronized with tourist time.

Cathedral of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God, Moscow

The St. Alexis Convent of the Conception of St. Anna was founded in 1360 by the Metropolitan of Moscow. In 1547 the convent burnt down in the great fire of Moscow. It was rebuilt but laid to waste during the French invasion of 1812.  With the support of the state it was fully restored.  The miraculous icon of the Mother of God called the “Merciful’ was located in the cathedral.  1917 the Bolsheviks gained power and the convent and cathedral was closed.   The Cathedral and bell tower were blown up in 1934 and a  standard 4 story school built on the site.  The miraculous icon of the Mother of God called the “Merciful” survived by being transferred to another church. In 1991 the Sisterhood of the Icon of the Mother of God called the “Merciful” began work on revival of the convent.  With the blessing of his Holiness Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia and by decision of the Holy Synod of 1995, the ancient convent was revived.  1999 the miraculous icon of the Mother of God called “the Merciful” was carried in triumphant process back to the Convent of the Conception.  On Nov. 25, 2005, the feast day of the icon of the Mother of God called “The Merciful”, His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II laid the foundation stone of the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Most Holy Mother of God .  On Nov 25, 2010, the 650th anniversary of the Convent of the Conception - the great consecration of the convent and the first Divine Liturgy was headed by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia.
I came across this cathedral on two separate days. Each time I was looking for something else but the second time figured I’d best go in, accepting my lostness as more than geographical.  Nuns were there along with other devout worshippers. I felt guilty taking pictures but no one seemed to notice.  I bought a candle and lit it.  I prayed. It was a good place to pray. I bought an icon for a friend. I'd thought of him in the night.  

Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, Russia

Thanks to Barrett I found my way to the ticket office of the Bolshoi, got my ticket with the paper I’d printed off from ordering tickets on line, then got to the right entrance.
The theatre is magnificent. I’d passed it several times before walking around the Red Square Area.  I thought then it might be the Bolshoi but wasn’t sure. There are several grand theatres and many impressive buildings in the immediate vicinity.  The horses atop it make it unforgettable now for me.  Inside it was also truly elegant.
I had an expresso in the Beethoven Room cafe.  Then I took a seat for the opera.  It really was a thrill. I’d heard so much about this theatre, starting back in my 20’s.  When I danced I heard of it from other dancers.  I had the great honour of meeting Baryshnikov of White Nights fame when he danced at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.  To this day he remains the greatest male dancer I've ever seen.
Later I’d have patients from Russia who had performed in the Bolshoi.   I even knew someone who had played in the symphony.  Not only is it graced with the greatest performers the building has it's own intrinsic greatness.
At first I’d tried to get tickets to the Pushkin ballet playing right now. A time sensitive glych with Visa verification meant I missed the last ticket.  That was almost three months before the show too.  I remember my doctor friend who told me in Milan she’d had to order her opera tickets there three months in advance.  I was really fortunate to get one of the last tickets to this opera.
The opera was called “In the Mood for Opera” and seemed to be a selection of famous performances tied together in a delightful story that appealed as much to kids as adults. There were movies playing across the back drop and these tied in with the dialogue.  Obviously there was a love story. What would opera be without a love story.
The orchestra was superb too. The director even participated in the acting, all the while conducting.  It definitely had its funny moments. I loved that the father who sat beside me had brought his young son. There were dozens of older children with their parents. Lots of mother daughter combinations.  What wonderful parents.
When the soprano first sang I had tears well in my eyes. I didn’t understand a word she sang but her voice was simply angelic.  I loved all five singers  really. I loved the costume, the set, the orchestra's costume. I simply loved everything.  I couldn’t read the Russian script. I even had to ask Barrett later if a word meant soprano.  The bass was a delightful character as well as having the
 most powerful voice and funniest part.  The tenor and soprano duet was so beautifully touching. More tears too.  The little girl in front of me was wiping her eyes with her sleeve. But that’s opera. Mostly I just loved feeling those perfect voices wash over me.  Despite not knowing a word of what was going on, which isn’t unusual for opera, I couldn’t think of anything but the beauty of the voices.  There truly is something about mastery and greatness.  There in the Bolshoi Theatre I heard it and experienced it.  What a privilege?
God’s grace. Voices that came as close to the music of the spheres as humanly possible.