The weekend before last I went to Moscow with a young Russian employee of mine*, to do what is sometimes known as “business development”.\u00a0 The purpose of the trip was to meet representatives of Gazprom and Rosneft, and see if they were interested in the services we offer.<\/p>\n
I had not been to Moscow properly since August 2004, and in the three and a half years that have passed I have noticed a huge change in the place.\u00a0 Everything looks much newer, cleaner, smarter, and more modern.\u00a0 Or maybe everywhere looks like this after 15 months in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 Partly out of convenience, partly out of interest, I stayed in the Belgrad Hotel on Smolenskaya Ploschad’, where I stayed\u00a0during my first ever trip to Moscow in February 2004.\u00a0 The first change in the hotel was observed from my desk in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, which was the price: the rate had\u00a0gone from $120 per night to $250 per night, for an unrefurbished room.\u00a0 Yeah, knocking down the Moskva and the Rossiya and depriving central Moscow of a couple of thousand hotel rooms was a really smart idea.\u00a0 The room itself hadn’t changed a bit from the one I stayed in almost four years ago: very narrow bed, inch-thick mattress,\u00a0furniture which would interest a\u00a0curator from a\u00a0museum of Soviet\u00a0interior styling, and TV which worked, but you had to adjust the aerial yourself to get a picture.\u00a0 But\u00a0it was warm, and there was plenty of hot water, and they had upgraded the towels so you could no longer watch yourself in the mirror as you dried your face.\u00a0 They’d\u00a0also decorated the front of the lifts with purple velvet padding, making it look as though you were entering a brothel instead of, erm, a high-class central Moscow\u00a0sleeping establishment.\u00a0 The service\u00a0had improved\u00a0greatly, I think I even spotted one of the staff smile for a fraction of a second, although they did the usual Russian hotel trick of closing the\u00a0only hotel restaurant for a private party on a\u00a0Saturday night and putting\u00a0a notice on the door politely telling the guests to sod off and eat elsewhere.\u00a0 Room service was available, cash only, and the bloke who brought it didn’t have any change.\u00a0 Still, for $250 per night, who can complain?<\/p>\n
So that was the hotel.\u00a0 The rest of Moscow seemed to have followed suit in refurbishing itself, becoming more expensive, but still falling hopelessly short in areas.\u00a0 Unlike four years ago, Moscow was obviously undergoing a building boom.\u00a0 New buildings were either going up or had gone up everywhere, and most buildings looked as though they had been refurbished.\u00a0 In many places it looked like any modern, western city.\u00a0 Looking around Smolenskaya Ploschad’, there were far more places to eat than there used to be, but sadly the Italian place where I once got a decent pizza has now become a sushi restaurant.\u00a0 The little window which sells the kebabs is still going though, and the McDonalds** over on the Starii Arbat is still doing a roaring trade and can provide you with a reliable breakfast, lunch, or dinner.\u00a0 However, any such progress Moscow has seen was marred by the type of things which always have and always will hold Russia back: the woman behind the counter at the Domodedovo Express terminal deliberately short changed me, my friend had a load of stuff nicked from his check-in baggage, and there is still in place the idiotic requirement that all visitors must register their presence with the local authorities within three days of arrival.<\/p>\n
The Moscow traffic has turned from very bad to unbelievably awful.\u00a0 It took us three hours to get from Domodedovo airport to the hotel.\u00a0 The entire city now seems to each own a car,\u00a0and they all\u00a0drive it at once.\u00a0 Until you get on the Metro, where you find what is really the entire city all using it at the same time.\u00a0 You walk from your hotel in a down jacket to stave off the cold (which is warm compared to Sakhalin), then find yourself crushed into a Metro packed with eleven million people generating enough heat to power half the city lights.\u00a0 You want a cause for global warming?\u00a0 Consider mass immigration into Moscow.\u00a0 Sweating heavily, you get ejaculated onto the street at the exit doors, and instantly freeze.\u00a0 Yet it’s not cold enough to freeze everything underfoot and keep the ground nice and clean like in Sakhalin, the city generates enough heat to melt the snow and provide four inches of brown, oily, slush to stand in.\u00a0 I spoke to some friends about the Moscow commute, and 2 hours each way is the norm regardless of which mode of transport you take.\u00a0 As a way of life, I don’t fancy it much.\u00a0 I think I’ll stay on my small, frozen little island for a while yet.<\/p>\n
*Of course, no trip from Sakhalin to Moscow would be\u00a0complete for a local without him being lumbered with half a dozen bags belonging to friends and friends of friends containing\u00a0Japanese imports and local delicacies to be passed to relatives in Moscow; and the return journey would not be complete without being lumbered with half a dozen orders for electronics and other items which can be bought at half the Sakhalin price in Moscow.\u00a0 So it was\u00a0this time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
**Incidentally, McDonalds is so highly thought of in Sakhalin that a few people we know there asked us to bring back a few McDonalds meals for them.\u00a0 At first I thought they were joking, but it turned out they genuinely wanted us to stick a load of McDonalds in the overhead locker for nine hours so they could reheat it and eat it on arrival.\u00a0 Madness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The weekend before last I went to Moscow with a young Russian employee of mine*, to do what is sometimes known as “business development”.\u00a0 The purpose of the trip was to meet representatives of Gazprom and Rosneft, and see if … Continue reading