Wandering the streets of Moscow on a warm summer afternoon I was feeling really thirsty. I’d arrived in the city just a few hours earlier and was still recovering from the stress of a bizarre taxi ride.
After getting off the plane I couldn’t work out how to catch the metro from the airport to my hotel. I asked for help at the ‘ground transport’ desk at the terminal. Help was refused.
I brandished my documents with the hotel’s address on them only to find the three ‘staff’ suspiciously uninformed about how transport from the airport worked. They could however put me in a taxi for some $US 100 – a heavily overpriced fare according to my travel guides.
With everyone playing dumb about how I could get into the city and me not knowing any better, I had little choice to follow a man to the ‘taxi.’
He led me right past the taxi rank with the line of cars that said ‘taxi’ on them and into an underground car park. I was led to very a plain, non taxi looking car. The man put my luggage in the boot. I was getting a bit anxious and started to imagine myself being kidnapped by the KGB before I even left the airport.
‘Hey, how come this car doesn’t say taxi on it?’ I demanded of the driver who spoke some English.
‘It can say taxi if you want,’ he replied pulling a taxi light that you would normally see on top of a taxi from the boot of his car and holding it up for my inspection. He offered to sit it on the roof. I told him not to bother and rather reluctantly got in.
I was most relieved to find this ‘taxi’ that I suspect was not at all legit, did in fact deposit me safely at my hotel – shaken but neither kidnapped nor robbed.
No wonder I was thirsty.
I walked into a small convenience store near my hotel to get some water. I used the international standard method of buying something where you don’t speak the language.
I selected a large bottle of water from a shelf, placed in on the counter in front of the lady shopkeeper and held out my hand with a palm full of local currency so she could take what I needed to pay. That shopping method has served me well the world over. But not here.
The woman’s face screwed up in fury and she shouted at me in Russian. I couldn’t understand what was wrong but I could tell she was seriously pissed with me. She made no move towards my money. She snatched the bottle of water off the counter and held it behind her back. She just kept shouting and gesturing at the door.
All I could understand was ‘nyet.’
Welcome to Moscow.
Twenty years after perestroika, welcoming foreign tourists to Russia, and western ideas of customer service appear foreign concepts in the former heartland of communism.
The favoured word of most people working near tourists is nyet; usually delivered along with a single English word to express that something is not allowed. For example, to indicate that photography is not permitted in this building it’s ‘Camera, nyet,’ or ‘Photo nyet. On my visit to Moscow I heard a lot of ‘nyet.’
There was ‘nyet’ at the Kremlin.
Professional tour guides are allowed to be with their group inside the main Kremlin museum (The Armoury chamber, which by the way is magnificent and worth any hassle that can be thrown at you) for exactly 90 minutes. One minute over that and he is fined and could possibly lose his accreditation.
Our guide was chastised for waiting for a member of our group to go the toilet at the end our tour. We had used our 90 minutes and we all had to leave, right now. ‘Toilet nyet.’ Forget about browsing in the gift shop too because ‘Stopping, nyet’ and ‘shop, nyet.’
There was nyet at the post office.
Again I tried the put what I want on the counter and hold out my money technique. I placed some post cards I’d written on the counter.
With my right hand I held out my money. With my left hand I pointed to the place on the cards where the stamp should go. The woman behind the counter pointed at the door and said ‘nyet.’
Then, as I left the city on board an overnight train to Novgorod, there was ‘nyet’ about the butter and salami.
A little brown paper bag was waiting for each of us containing a little pack of sliced salami, a portion of butter and a couple of bread rolls. We had the option of a hot dish, similar to something you might be served on a plane. However, if you opted for the hot dish you were required to forfeit your little pack of salami and portion of butter. You could keep the roll but not have any butter for it.
A uniformed woman who looked like she’d just walked off the set of Prisoner came around the carriage to recover butter and salami from anyone unentitled. Butter, nyet.
As the train raced away from Moscow into the night I though if I ever make a list of the world’s friendliest cities it might be Moscow, nyet.