Jessica Prinner Cycling

I would love to be able to start this post with some fancy sounding Russain phrase to somehow justify my stay in Moscow.  Unfortunately, the Russains use a seriously backward alphabet called cyrillic, which as far as I know isn’t available on Today.com.  Apart from being almost completely unreadable, cyrillic also has sounds that don’t exist in the human language, leaving me to believe that Russains are aliens.  Not only do they have letters that look like backwards “R”s and “N”s, but they also have one that looks very much like a “*”, a symbol that is utterly unexplainable.  Someone once even tried to explain to me that they even have letters that make no specific sound at all, but instead signal to other letters to make a different sound then they were created for, and I think it was about that point in the explaination that my eyes glazed over and I went into a coma.  As an American I am at a complete disadvantage with my ignorance for foreign languages.  Perhaps I wouldn’t think that Russains were aliens if I had grown up in Lithuania, or Ukraine, or Siberia, and were required to know Russain.  But instead I grew up another stupid American knowing only one language. 

And that is the first reason why I discovered living in Russia would be difficult for me.  The second reason occured to me in an elevator.  But first I should probably explain how I ended up in Moscow, Russia to begin with.  If you guessed it had anything to do with cycling, you’d be right, because pretty much anything substantial that happens in my life usually has to do with cycling.  In fact, if I weren’t a cyclist, I’d be the most boring, uninteresting person in the world.

Anyway, as you probably already guessed again,  I was flown to Moscow to compete in the Junior World Cycling Championships as a representative of the United States.  I was accompanied by two teammates, both from California, named Kendall Ryan and Coryn Rivera on the Junior National Team.  Upon arrival, we immediately resorted to looking like lost Americans wandering around the airport looking for our transportation. 

Fortunately, our Russian transportation guy could find us easily due to our extremely oversized luggage (most of us had to travel with two bikes along with the usual suitcase and carry-on).  In fact, we were sort of creating a large blockade in the midst of a traffic of people, who insisted on staring at us like we were zoo animals and passing as close as possible as if we weren’t matter taking up space.  It was then that I discovered Major Difference #2 between Russians and Americans (the first was the language thing): Americans tend to have a lot more personal space than Russians.  

So after finally collecting the Canadian National Team, who incidentally flew on the same horrendous 10 hour flight from D.C. with us, we headed towards the exit doors, where we would see the magnificent city of Moscow, Russia for the very first time.  As we burst through the doors with about 11 million other people jammed between us (remember Major Difference #2), I was immediately suffocated by a large fume of smoke that I at first mistakenly thought was the airport on fire, and then realized it was just a crowd of smokers standing outside, doing what they do best.  And that was Major Difference #3:  Russians smoke like no tomorrow, and I was to later learn that they consumed vodka at the same rate.  It took me a bit of adjusting during my stay to get used to that, because where I live, Illinois, it recently became illegal to smoke in or around any public building. 

We were transported to our hotel via coach bus, which was to be our only mode of travel during the week we stayed in Moscow.  As we travelled the 45-minute route to the city, we passed through a more rural setting, with red brick houses (literally, ALL the houses were completely made of brick) mixed with thick forest.  I was surprised to find how flat Moscow and its surrounding lands were, and how similar most of it looked to that of the U.S.  If I had been randomly dropped in Moscow without any knowledge of where I was, I would probably assume I was in Iowa or something.  Until, of course, I saw the gas stations’ signs posting numbers like 21, 23 and 26.  Then I would just be really confused.   One might assume that by that point I would get the hint that I was in another country, but then again I would probably just conclude that the earth had run out of fossil fuels and that gas had simply skyrocketed to ridiculous prices. 

Which then leads me to Major Difference #4: Russians use a currency called rubles, which is roughly at an exchange rate of 30 rubles to every U.S. dollar.  The actual currency itself does not look so different from our own, except that I did notice how much more colorful it was.  Oh, and speaking of colorful, I discovered Major Difference #5: Russians prefer their nuclear plant smoke stacks painted in pastel colors.  I think this is a fantastic idea.  All six of them seemed much less scary that way.  Perhaps they should even try adding smiley faces on them for the kids.

Anyway, we eventually arrived at our hotel, which I will only describe as looking “questionable”.  I suppose, though, as the old saying goes “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”.  The name of the hotel I cannot include in this post, not for political reasons, but simply because I never really knew what it was called. 

By the time we finally made it to the 26^th floor and into our rooms, I was exhausted, not to mention my internal clock was 8 hours off from the clock on the hotel lobby wall.  My room, which I was to share with Kendall, was a small space (about half the size of an American hotel room) with two slim, one person beds.  There was no clock within the room, and no heating or air conditioning (only a window that opened without a screen), but there WAS a super cool heated metal bar in the bathroom, which we used to dry our cycling clothes on ultra fast.  Also, there was a radio with large speakers built into the walls, so we could listen to all the radio in Russian we wanted.  Plus there was a T.V. (which I was overjoyed to find that CNN was the only channel in English) and a mini fridge that we never used since the food downstairs was questionable enough, and didn’t need to be incubated for another day for the fear that it might morph into something scary that would come out and devour us in our beds at night.

That night I was so exhausted from jet lag that I slept the soundest I ever have without any sort of sleep aid, leaving the window open to let in a cool breeze since it was soon discovered our room was like a tiny oven, even when the weather eventually dropped into the 60s.  A pigeon probably could have flown in, flapped around for a while, pooping and cooing all over the place, and I wouldn’t have woken up.

And that’s was day 1 of Russia.  Day 2’s report will be twice as long, and Day 3’s will be four times as long.  They grow exponentially.