A Russian offer that couldn't be refused

In the year before Christine started school, we passed several long and (usually) enjoyable weekends in various European cities. The list of desired destinations was, and still is, long. Moscow didn't make the first cut. But a Russian made us an offer we couldn't refuse.

I was excited to return to Moscow, having visited once before, in January 2004. While the president is the same, I'd heard that a lot else has changed. Namely, the Russian state became a lot wealthier after 2004 with the price of exported Russian oil reaching a long-sustained higher average price. We found that the Moscow mayor has invested a lot to enhance the city's livability. When I visited before, I stayed in a gigantic hotel next to the Kremlin designed to house thousands of partisans for the erstwhile party conferences of the 20th century. That brutal concrete hulk met the wrecking ball since then and is now a park with paths through planted native fauna up a hill that offers views of St. Basil's for obligatory selfies.

We stayed in a storied hotel next to the Kremlin: Hotel National. The hotel offered old-world luxury, even if the delivery could be at times a bit frumpy. Our room had high ceilings, heavy drapes, antique-looking furniture, wooden floors with rugs, and decorative moldings. Right next door was the Ritz Carlton, which was double the price. While you could say the Hotel National is a bit dowdy or tatty in places, we stopped in for a visit at the Ritz Carlton, and we'd describe that as ostentatious modern luxury. We were very happy with out choice. Nevertheless, the dollar is very strong against the ruble at the moment, so all of Moscow seemed refreshingly inexpensive.

And spend we did, mostly on food, as is our tradition, which is to say the tradition of looking for local food ingredients, recipes, and traditions, usually with varying success. Moscow is definitely cosmpolitain. This manifests itself in its similarity to other big cities: we ate at a farm to table restaurant (LavkaLavka), emphasizing their dishes' connections to local suppliers and even including on its website pictures of farmers that supply. We also went to a gourmet hamburger restaurant that we happened across, with excellent hamburgers (Russian beef, including steak, is suprisingly good! much better than British...), and a coffee and dessert cafe in a grand, gilded Art Deco setting (Coffeemania). The cosmpolitainness also manifests itself through diversity. We went to a sleek pan-Asian restaurant in the Ritz Carlton where we had some beef filets and fried Chinese noodles. We also ate at a Georgian restaurant (Elarji), which seemed to offer a fuller menu of Georgian classics, where the Georgian menus in London seem to focus on stews. Also, we ate at a Kazakh restaurant, which seemed to focus mostly on various meats -- makes sense that is what they eat in a landlocked country of plains and mountains.

During that 2004 visit, I visited the Tretyakov Gallery, where I discovered the Russian painting tradition. When we study art in school in the U.S., the curriculum centers around Western Europe, especially France. But the Russian tradition is diverse and abundant, presumably not getting much traction outside of Russia because no foreigners ever successfully invaded and looted Moscow or St. Petersburg like Napoleon did to Italy. Also, not many Western tourists got to visit Russia during the twentieth century, so the artistic tradition remains a secret. Nevertheless, the paintings often deal with depressing themes, like drowning princesses, scenes after a battle, or the beheading of Christians; I particularly liked the 19th century paintings of Central Asia -- scenes captured as Imperial Russia expanded its surface area. Bobby was a bit bored in the museum and the guards were watching him closely and scolding him as he ran his cars too close to the paintings in their view. Christine, however, found it just as fascinating as I did the first time.

During my visit before, Moscow seemed a big, grim-faced, burly, unfriendly city, cold in both temperature and personality, a bit hard to navigate, though with facades of charm. People were walking the streets drinking beer, while kiosks on sidewalks were selling bottles all around town. Bars advertised as being open 24 hours. Casinos with garish lights seemed to be everywhere. Now, the streets are still surprisingly wide for an old, European city -- all the better for the Army to roll tanks through or to prevent counter-revolutionaries from jamming flows with barricades -- but no one seemed to be drinking on the sidewalk (at least during the day when we were out), the sidewalk kiosks are gone, as are the 24 bar advertisements and casinos.

Anti-government protests were popping up around the city; city busses were commandeered as prisons or prisoner transport vehicles; riot police stood in gangs around town; and cellular service was suspended at times for the public. I guess it is still a bit unfriendly at times.

There does not seem to be as many restaurants on the streets as you'd find in London, implying that while capitalism seems almost natural there now, there are still legacies of the communist past.

For example, the impressive Moscow Metro. The communists hoped to win the Cold War, at least in part, by decorating subway stations for the people. The stations are artfully grand, built with polished stones and decorated with all of those throwback communist insignia (check out the photos here). I found the metro challenging to use in 2004 because the signs were all in the Russian alphabet (i.e., Cyrillic script). Now, all signs are in Latin and Cyrillic, the floors have helpful arrows, and announcements are in Russian and English, improvements made for the 2018 football World Cup. The trains are fast and run through the stations frequently. And trips cost less than a dollar apiece. I did get pulled aside by a police officer this time, but while last time the officer was clumsily trying to shake me down, this time the officer just wanted to x-ray my suitcase (on the way to the airport) and chat to me in charming, broken English about Chicago.

And while the train does go many places, it didn't go to the country hotel where we had a Friday afternoon engagement. You see, our London friends were getting married there: my Belgian friend from business school and his fiancee who he met while living in Moscow before moving to London.

The trip to and from the country hotel gave us some of those old-school Russian experiences. We used a local taxi app, Yandex (which is allied with Uber), and were overcharged on the way to the hotel. Luckily, Yandex refunded us the money -- god bless the convenience of phone app-based technology and fawning customer service of loss-making tech companies. On the way back to Moscow, our driver didn't speak English and was super angry at me when I couldn't understand her Russian. She even slammed the brakes and got out of the car in frustration because I didn't realize she needed me to give her a parking validation ticket to leave the hotel grounds. Ah yes, that's the Russia of 2004, back when a gypsy taxi driver tried to convince me to pay him more and I just got out of his cab and walked away. Visiting the outskirts of the city also show you the gritty industrial heart of the current city and the communist legacies: tracts of dirty block apartment buildings, rusting industrial infrastructure, abandoned concrete building husks -- not as beautiful as the center of the old imperial capital but interesting in its own right.

The timing of this wedding wasn't great for Christine because her dissertation was due just a week after returning to London. She stayed up late studying while Bobby and I slept. Bobby and I then had long, leisurely breakfasts at the hotel overlooking the Kremlin.

The boy was mostly well-behaved but sometimes stubbornly refused to listen to directions. We did manage to find some very high-quality and large scale playgrounds in Gorky Park. We also had just a bit of that famous Russian ice cream, on Red Square no less.

After five nights in this new Moscow, we jetted back to London, with less than two months left for us to wrap up our U.K. affairs before starting the next family adventure.

Red Square ice cream

Central Asian scenes at the Tretyakov Gallery. Throughout the trip, Bobby was clutching closely this advertisement in the shape of khachapuri (the Georgian proto-pizza bread) -- sort of funny.

Coffee Mania

There was high quality time spent at breakfast, where we ate a lot of food, looking out over Red Square and the Kremlin. We had chicken eggs, trout eggs, pancakes, fresh fruit, breads, pastries, cereal, and that's all I can remember. It was nice.

Lounging in our hotel room, trying to clean up a bit, I guess.

While he may have been asleep in this station, he was generally a big fan of the fast Moscow underground trains.

Friends getting married. The service was in Russian with everything also translated into English.

London friends

It's tradition at a Russian wedding that emcees narrate the entire ceremony. They also hosted games and told jokes.  We learned that usually these hosts are Georgians, and the role is called tamada.