The Metro Code

MOSCOW – At the Sweet Moscow Hostel, one amenity that seems to come with check-in is a comfortable familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet. A Swedish couple staying on a queen mattress on the floor in the next floor said they figured out how to use Cyrillic in two days. A Brit on winter university holidays says he could do the basics in one. The hostel manager, also a Swede, who arrive three months ago from managing a property in Thailand, can read whole chunks of text. Perhaps someone will check in tomorrow will memorize it in the taxi from the airport or from a podcast they will listen to in REM sleep the first night in the six bedroom dorm.

Taking Cyrillic and turning it into normal letters is essentially a Cryptogram, those switching puzzles that some pale eight-year-old boys love to solve instead playing of contact sports, or at least they used to before World of Warcraft. The Cyrillic letter "р" – written the same as the Roman/English letter "p" – is actually the same as the letter "r." Their "c" is the same as our "s," our "n" the same their "h," and so on.

Using substitution, the mysterious and impossible Russian looking "ресторан," becomes something near and dear to every American: a R-E-S-T- O-R-A-N. In Russian, it doesn't even have the crazy French verb "au." Here it's simply "o," just the way it sounds.

It sounds so easy, but alas, I still don't have it down.

If only Cyrillic was just about taking the letters and mixing them up, some strange equation to memorize in 26 parts (If P = R then R = T and C = P). The reality – that it's much more complicated – arrives in three stages: б, я and Г. Here's a more detailed look at each individual stage:

Stage б: Apparently there are some characters in Cyrillic there aren't the same as English. But that one kinda looks the as a "b" so it's not too bad.
Stage я: Eh, not only is this character backward, which is pretty freaky, someone at the hostel told me that it's a vowel. Whoa.
Stage Г: Holy fuck! What is the hell is that? Put down the Russian dictionary and spend $7 on the International Herald Tribune at nearest Western supply store. Read about Paris Hilton over a Big Mac at nearest McDonald's.

Yes, Cyrillic has crazy bonus letters that don't correspond to a single English letter or sound. There's my personal least-favorite: Ж.

My restaurant example makes it sound like a simple substitution process, but a single letter can represent any number of sounds, depending on the letters grouped around. With my non-existent Russian, I have no way of knowing whether an "O" is an O or a U, for instance.

Oh, and even if I was able translate these words into Roman letters, they would still be in Russian, with its complicated grammar, unfamiliar verb forms and random diacritical marks in the middle of words. The only reason I want to convert is so that I can attempt to pronounce them to people on the street, or see if the word is a cognate. There's a fair number of English words in use, so there's always a chance that I can convert and figure it out. As a bonus, Russian, thanks to the Francophile Catherine the Great, uses tons of French. "Restaurant" isn't originally English, you know.

As a political scientist, I might be interested in the word "самиздат," if it appeared somewhere on the streets of Moscow. If by some miracle I could convert it to letters, I would get "samizdat," which doesn't help much. Wikipedia says this refers to "the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries," but again, how would I know that just by taking the Cyrillic letters and making them into Roman ones?

But I don't have time to find glasnost-era relics (or more appropriately I should say Гла́сность-era relics). I'm too busy trying to use the subway. Moscow isn't the most tourist friendly city in the world, especially if you're traveling on a budget that doesn't allow for a private helicopter rental. The metro system is labyrinthine, with more than a dozen lines snaking around the city in pixelated lines. Destinations are labeled only in Russian-Cyrillic.

The biggest problem for the Cyrillic-challenged on the metro is deciding which direction to go. After descending 15 or 20 stories underground (these stations were designed to serve as fallout shelters), I, the rider am faced with parallel tracks a couple of hundred meters apart. They are quite wide, as Russian metro stations are Baroque masterpieces, the most beautiful example of Soviet public art.

The distance makes even the tiniest, most insignificant outpost appear to rival New York's Grand Central Station, but also complicates choosing your destination, as the list of stops is listed only on the wall past where the train stops. The current station is shown as a large white circle, and then all the remaining stations are listed in order.

In order to make a decision, first I must pull out the name of my destination, which inevitably is one incredibly long word, something like, "Замоскворе́цкая." I have to look at this word slyly, as more than a glance will be a tip-off to police in the station that I'm a tourist and they should start concocting some sort off "offense" and issue me a "fine," and then I have to determine if that station is on this side of the track.

Замоскворе́цкая. There's that one that looks the backwards three, and then an "a" and then I forgot. Another glance, and a check to the left and right for police. So there's an "m" and about halfway through there's an apostrophe. I go back to the list of stations - there's so many of them. Moscow is huge, and some lines have over 40 stops, and over half of them appear to start with the backwards three.

Whoosh! A train arrives. Moscow is the opposite of every other metro system in the world in that trains come far too often. They arrive every 90 seconds at most stations, which between passengers embarking and disembarking, doesn't leave much time for scanning the wall for station names. So most of the time, I'm racing against the arrival of an oncoming train. If I don't see the station name, or what I think is the name, I start dashing (not running, that might attract the police) to the other side to catch the train.

All this trouble just because I'm not functional in Ж and those other strange letters. Since everybody at the hostel claims to be so good at using these stupid things, tomorrow I should bring someone along on the metro, as my personal decoder.

Falling Off the Map

PSKOV, Russia – I take my seat on the express bus to Moscow and already I'm nervous. My pre-assigned seat is next to a middle-aged man with several boils on his cheek (suspicious) who is wearing a long, gray overcoat despite already having taken his seat. From my high school days in the aftermath of the Columbine school shooting, I associate long coats with terrorists, and considering I'm about to enter Vladimir Putin's Russia alone, I don't need any suspicious seat mates.

The bus takes a circuitous route out of Vilnius, the prosperous capital of Lithuania: one last chance to admire the comfortable surrounds I am leaving. Here I made friends easily, and slept first in a comfortable country estate and then a cozy urban hostel. Now I must embark on the most uncertain part of my journey. Russia dwarfs the Eastern European countries where my journey to China begins. It sprawls around a globe, refusing to be taken in by just one glance, as if the territory of a much smaller country leaked out of the sides to the far eastern and western periphery of the globe. One man can't be found in all that space.

As the bus reaches the outskirts of the developed world, I know that if something goes wrong on this trip, there isn't a familiar face for eight thousand miles. I don't have a cell phone or the address of the American embassy. And I can't be comforted by the fact that I'm traveling somewhere particularly safe. Russia's international reputation is plunging, with plutonium assassinations and fuel lines shut-off at the slightest criticism of the Kremlin. Gangsters and oligarchs run amok and public services are extremely corrupt. I'm not sure if these things are true, but this is the Russia I have heard about in America, from friends and acquaintances, from people I ran into over the past few days in Eastern Europe, and from newspapers and magazines. This is all I have.

Tickets and passports are checked as we near the Latvian border. The vast majority of people on the bus are Russian, a few are Lithuanian, and there is exactly one non-Slav – me. When we arrive, my passport is passed around for special examination among the half-dozen assembled police and security forces outside the bus, I don't believe for security reasons. Rather it seems the young guards want a glimpse at a Chinese visa and the gold lettering Americans use on the front of their passports. Each time the small book is passed to another eager set of hands I imagine it slipping into their owner's pockets, never coming out. Somehow it makes it back to me, and I stuff it deep into my jeans.

We stop again sometime after dark. The men get out and smoke cigarettes. I urinate on the concrete wall of a shuttered convenience store. Just before the rest area I saw a sign for the border: 60 kilometers. Under an hour. There won't be another chance to leave. My iPod is on the bus, so is my passport. My bladder is empty. I retake my seat next to the man with the long overcoat.

I miss the signs that announce our exit from the European Union: they are obscured by the trucks. The line of trucks starts five miles before we exit Latvia. Commercial traffic must only be allowed to cross at certain hours, so these carriers of plastics and cheeses and consumer goods wait on the right side of the road for a few hours, with sleeping drivers, waiting for the checkpoint to open in the morning. The Latvian border guard stamps directly underneath my Latvian entry stamp; he must be used to foreign tourists using his country as a shortcut on the way to somewhere else. He is neat in his stamping.

The frontier is a disappointment. I am expecting rows and rows of razor wire, or perhaps high fences alternating with moats filled with acid. Instead it is just more "Latvia" – a field. Parked on the side of the road are a military truck or two, but these wouldn't stop the adjacent village from invading, let alone the forces of the European Union.

My nerves kick in again as I see the outpost come into view. It's a full-on Soviet establishment: bright fluorescent lights, slabs of concrete and depressing Modernist flourishes thrown together at the worst possible angles. Imagine the Jetsons as designed by a fax machine working in the mail room of a middling 1968 Detroit paper company. I don't know what that means: it looked ugly and imposing in the way Russian things built in the last half-century do. Across the top, in large, evenly spaced letters reads, "Russian Federation." That would be intimidating, but it actually says something much worse:

Росси́йская Федера́ция

The Cyrillic alphabet is a strange and frightening beast.

Now if I could separate into halves, the person experiencing this event a complete neutral, rational observer - the Vulcan - would point out that procedures at this border checkpoint are nearly identical to those at the Canadian checkpoint between Albany and Montreal, which I used to cross while riding on Greyhound Buses when I was in high school, going to visit friends at McGill University. We filed off the bus– in silence – and into the station. We passed through two queues. At each my passport was examined and at the second, it was also stamped. No one asked me any questions; in fact, no one said anything. I kept waiting for something to happen to break the tension, but nothing did.

Through immigration, I converted $50 into rubles and went back on the bus. By now it was almost midnight and there had been no dinner stop, so we pulled into a small store a few hundred meters into Russian space. The parking lot was filled with trucks waiting for morning and Latvia. I could see why we didn't stop before: gas and food is much cheaper in Russia. The store was overly lit and hours of being on edge left me with a headache and feeling drained, so I wandered the narrow aisles of the store in a dazed shuffle. I crossed the threshold, I went over the horizon.

After a few minutes inside the store, I settled on a pack of Skittles, a piece of sausage and a Gin and Tonic in a can. Two months ago in a Washington bar, I spoke with an English woman about her trip through Russia. She and her girlfriends just drank these mixers as they cruised around Moscow. As my coach headed deeper into the Russian night, I tried to think such comforting thoughts. But instead I could only nervously sip my slightly alcoholic beverage, which brought me toward restless dreams of me as a tiny green blip, fading from a view on a gigantic radar screen.

What's This?

ALBANY, N.Y. — Regular readers of the blog, or those following along in chronological order, will notice a large gap between the last China entry and this one with no explanation. I'm here, after a break, to provide one.

I had to leave China unexpectedly due to health reasons. My headaches started in Hong Kong last summer. They came and went through the fall, forcing me cut short my road trip back from Kansas. This meant no Mount Rushmore or car camping in Wyoming. I went on a medication early in the winter, and was still tapering up as I traveled through the Russian taiga. The pain seemed stable for several months, until it wasn't. By the summer I also had chest pain and a ball of worries. I wasn't sure what was wrong with me, and my scatter-shot visits to the doctor had been inconclusive. On vacation in South Asia, I went to a couple of dingy clinics and modern hospitals - experiences that one day I plan to share here - with little results. Back in Beijing, with a new semester looming and no pain relief, I made the decision to come home.

Examinations continued here at a steady clip. I had my blood drawn, spinal fluid examined and brain cut into tiny slices on an MRI. After several months of investigation, a bevy of specialists have concluded that I am quite healthy, and have no major system failures, neurological damage or cardiac problems. What's causing the consistent pain, tingling and dizziness apparently is a misaligned jaw, which has thrown other muscles off-balance. Correcting this is possible but it will take time. I'm getting physical therapy and will have strange things done to my jaw. The good news is that I can and probably will feel completely better someday.

In the meantime I will be home in Albany, resting up and being thankful I have a roof to come back to in times of crisis. I want to keep writing. I could blog about Albany, but I'm not sure if the entries I produced last fall at home were my strongest. This time, I'm going to start by doing something different. I'm going to blog about past experiences that didn't make it to my blog. In truth, I've been doing some of this all along. Occasionally I'll write an entry a couple of months after the fact, and then pre-date to the date that it actually happened. Sometimes I can't finish an entry on the day I started it and it will remain a draft for over a year before I finish it. For now I'm going to publish the new entries when they are finished, so they will appear on the main page as new material. Some day I might decide to put these in chronological order, but that's a decision for down the line. I also might eventually return to writing about Albany, as interesting things develop and my well of untapped stories begins to run dry.

Who knows? You'll just have to keep reading to find out.