Moscow/St. Petersburg
May 28, 2011 

Distance Traveled Today: 393

Distance traveled so far: 12, 410

Well this morning has been wall-to-wall fail.  My train to St. Petersburg isn’t until 1:30, so I got up early and zoomed down to Red Square with a double agenda:  See Lenin and go inside St. Basil’s.  Lenin’s Tomb is only open very limited hours, but I figured I’d have time today.  Alas, whatever the huge celebration they’ve been planning since before I got here and have blocked off most of Red Square for is actually happening TODAY.  So.  The Square was totally locked down, Lenin’s Tomb opens an hour later than normal, and St. Basil’s is completely closed.  Double damn.

This is a pity, because here’s the thing about when you go see Lenin:  you see Lenin  By that I mean, they preserved his body, and it’s under glass like a pheasant.  That would have been cool to see.  And it’s a shame about St. Basil’s.  I could console myself by saying I’ve already been in a bunch of Russian churches, but I know from what I have read and from what people have told me that, just like its exterior, the interior of St. Basil’s is like no other church.

Even more tragic, I showed up at the Upside Down Bakery right when they opened, hoping to score a couple of the bacon parmesan muffins for the train ride, but alas, they only had the salmon ones today.  Yuck.

I certainly hope my fail trajectory doesn’t extend to the train station.  I can get a little anxious in a big train station in an English speaking country, just because they can be so big and busy.  Where is my train?  Am I waiting on the right platform?  Is my ticket alright?

Double that in a country where I don’t know the language.  Triple is in a country where I don’t know the alphabet.  Happily I have an English and Russian version of my ticket, so hopefully I’ll be able to navigate myself to the proper track on time.    

///

So:  Who’s the most responsible for winning World War II?  Everyone knows it was the Americans, right? Not so fast.  The Russians think different, and they’re pretty sick of hearing how America beat Hitler all by themselves.  Consider a couple of sobering statistics:  Americans lost 418, 000 people in the war, a mere 0.32% of its population.  The Soviet Union lost 23, 000, 000, which was 13% of their total population.  The Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad made any action on the Western Front look like a cocktail party. 

Of course, any reasonably educated gay person my age or older could tell you the real  truth, which was  that it was a gay man – Alan Turing – who was the single person most responsible for beating the Nazis.  He did it by breaking the Enigma Code.  Take that, America and Russia.

A Few Memorable Travel Fail Moments

• Getting pulled off a ride in Brigton, England, because I was too fat to be safely secured in my seat. 
• Missing an excursion out of Rome (but not getting a refund for my ticket) when I couldn’t figure out where to wait for the bus (sound familiar?)
• Missing a train connection in Italy that would have cost me a whole day, prompting my one-and-only experiment with hitchhiking