Your Hit-or-Miss Parade

Well, the Victory Day Parade was not all I had hoped it would be. I got to the place on Tverskaya Ulitsa I had been told was the best spot to see the parade around 7:30. By 11:30, it had not even begun! Crowds of eager Russians, and not a few tourists, lined both sides of the streets and craned their necks upward anytime a rumbling (usually a police car) seemed to indicate something was about to happen. But nothing. Then nothing. Then nothing again.

All I got to see, after all of that time, was a quick flyover by a few military planes, followed in short order by some tanks and missile trucks heading what would usually be the wrong way up Tverskaya Ulitsa.

Nonetheless, the experience of going wasn't a total bust. I got to snap a couple photos of an old-timer dressed up in his wartime Soviet military uniform. When I asked in Russian to take his photograph, he started off on what I could only guess was a half-baked bit of communist propaganda before I told him I spoke very little Russian. But when I told him I was an American, he responded, very enthusiastically, "USA, Good! Good!" in what I gathered was probably about all the English he knew.

All over the city yesterday, I saw old men dressed up in their military duds, just as I remember seeing them on PBS and History Channel retrospectives of the Second World War. Maybe the Communist times aren't so far gone after all.

About the time the parade ended, a nice fellow who looked to be about in his late thirties or early forties came up and introduced himself to me--in English. When he asked if I were I tourist, I told him I was in Moscow to teach English and had just arrived a couple of days ago. He said his name was George and that he too was an English teacher, at a different language school.

We ended up having lunch together at what he told me was the first McDonald's in Russia. I would have preferred to go nearly anywhere else, as I have had McDonald's for breakfast every day I have been in Russia so far (nothing else really being open when I get up at 6:00 in the morning...curse this jet lag!). George told me he had been in Russia about a year and a half and had come after a short stint in Japan. He gave me a bit of the low-down on where to buy things like housewares.

After we ate, we walked down toward the Arbat, the pre-revolutionary center of Moscow's bohemian life but now a basic tourist trap. Before we parted, he gave me his e-mail address, which I somehow managed to lose in the course of the day. But since I know which school he teaches with, I should be able to find him again, one way or another.

The rest of the day I tried to do more of the tourist bit. I went back to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, this time venturing into the museum. None of what was on display had any descriptions in English, but I got to see some of the artwork from the original, pre-Stalin cathedral, as well as pictures of the planned Palace of the Soviets.

After that, I had a quick blini with salmon from a street stall and made my way into the Beliy Gorod, the area surrounding the Kremlin and Red Square. My plan was to find the Grand Choral Synagogue for Friday night services, but between getting lost and my feet making clear they wanted to go no further, I decided it was time to head home.