Postcards From Russia - July 2, 2003

Well I made it back to Russia again after all. I guess I didn’t burn my bridges back with the boys in Houston – lol. I’m typing this email with the Moscow River and cityscape as a backdrop, coming to life (and to light) with the promise of a beautiful day that is to come. The traffic noise from the street already is increasing (its 4:00am) and rises to my eighth floor windows. It is a beautiful city for one so large; steeped in a mystic history hundreds of years old, yet embracing modernism with a distinctly European flavor, allowing the two to coexist together harmoniously. It’s also a city of contrasts; Mercedes and BMWs compete for space on the roads next to miled out Ladas. Since the fall of communism, many people have embraced the free enterprise system with a passion and have made incredible wealth from it, although not all of it made from what we would consider legal ways. It’s rumored that there are as many Mercedes in Moscow alone as there are in all of Germany.

My journeys this time, will take me to the south of central Russia (Orenberg) as well as West Siberia (Surgut) and above the Arctic Circle (Novi Urenguoy). Incredibly, when you look at these places on a map, they are not even half way across this immense country. I’ll have a day in Moscow before I go and hope to explore more of its treasures. On subsequent trips, I was able to visit Red Square, Lenin’s tomb, the cathedral of St Basil and Noviy Arbat, a trendy open air market . The Metro, their subway system, is impressive in itself. Accessed at many points throughout the inner city, you make the descent seemingly forever on as many as three steeply pitched escalators, to the train platforms below the city. I was once told that it was designed and built to act as a massive fallout shelter after the Second World War. Some stations have incredible works of art: sculptures, bas-reliefs as well as paintings, adorning their walls.

And so, the adventure begins anew……..