Friends Forever Moscow
Maitane Roderiques
My eyes fill up with tears as I say goodbye to Anna who is also crying. We clasp hands and promise to stay in touch: she, inviting me to her family home by the Black Sea: me, inviting her to Toronto for a Canadian experience. We hug and reluctantly let each other go. As I walk through the doors I turn around and we give each other a final wave, smiling and blowing kisses.
It was the trip of the lifetime. I fell in love with Moscow; its culture and its people, and I made many new international connections and friends. As I sit at the Moscow airport ready to board my flight home, I reflect on how magical this Russian experience was.
Moscow is, beyond a doubt, one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. There is breathtaking architecture, huge boulevards, many statues and parks, the Moskva River which winds its way through the city, the magnificent Moscow Kremlin and Red Square, and many charming pedestrian-only cobblestones streets like the famous Arbat Street.
The city is great for walking, with many underground tunnels that go under the wide boulevards which allows for the traffic to flow more freely throughout the city. Even so, the traffic jams in Moscow are epic and I was surprised to see so few cyclists. I saw a beautiful bicycle path along the river, but in general there seems to be a shortage of bicycle paths in the city. However, the subway system is one of the best in the world, with 200 stations bringing millions of Muscovites in and out of the city every day.
Russian food includes much smoked fish and meat, fresh vegetables and fruit, hearty bread and delicious cheeses. I particularly like the traditional dishes like borscht, dumplings, and caviar with pancakes and sour cream. The Russians serve many courses in a formal meal and we had to learn to pace ourselves so as to leave room for all of the courses. Our hosts told us that in Russia, it is considered polite to leave food on your plate because it indicates to your host that they served a sufficient amount of food. This was certainly not a problem for us as every meal we were served was humongous! (Click here to learn more about food etiquette in Russia.)
The inaugural Moscow Global Forum was one of the best organized conferences I have ever attended, with 20,000 delegates. The highlight of for me was participating in a Question and Answer session where we were able to share our areas of expertise with the audience in mini-sessions of 10 minutes. The moderator had prepared many excellent questions to keep the discussion moving at a fast pace. These sessions gave us a chance to get to know the other presenters and to ask them questions about their outstanding work. Another highlight for me was getting to meet Luis Von Ahn (creator of Recaptcha and Duolingo) after his keynote. Read more here about his brilliant idea to help digitize books through crowd-sourcing the word recognition feature in Recaptcha.
Our hosts treated us like royalty as soon as we arrived in Moscow, greeting us at the airport and organizing and accompanying us on many excursions during our stay. We were each assigned a personal guide to facilitate our trip and to make us feel welcome in Moscow. These guides were delightful young students or recent graduates who were hired for the conference.
My first excursion was to School No. 627. I had missed seeing the full school day in action but was able to visit the after school program: small classes engaged in various after school activities. It was a happy, welcoming atmosphere and the students were excited to try out their English on me.
Over the next two days our group had two walking tours: one of central Moscow and the other one of The Kremlin. It was obvious that our guides had tremendous pride in their city and they were extremely knowledgeable about the history of Moscow, spanning 870 years. The information was a little overwhelming, but I was glad to learn about the many wars, fires, and religious and political transformations the city has been through.
One of my favourite excursions was the glamorous dinner cruise on the Moscva River. The food was exquisite and seemed to never end (I counted 9 courses!) accompanied by a live band that played traditional Russian music.
The police, security guards and army presence was significant and buses were set up at the ends of busy streets to prevent terrorist attacks. All citizens had to go through security screens before entering the city centre.
The security forces were very thorough and it was obvious that they took their jobs very seriously as they rarely cracked a smile. The civilians seemed to take this all in stride, but even our guides said that they had never seen this level of security for an event in Moscow before.
I was impressed with the level of organization and coordination required set up all the checkpoints which reinforced my sense that Russians have a highly developed command system and infra-structure to pull off security in this grand scale.
Moscow has a population of 12 million and it seemed to me like most were in the city Saturday night. By the time we got back to our hotel (the Ritz-Carlton), we were a little frazzled so a night-cap on the roof-top terrace seemed in order. Sipping on Moscow Mules while watching a magnificent display of fireworks was just what we needed to end the night in a magical way.
On our last day in Moscow after the Kremlin tour some presenters and I decided to go for a walk around the city. To our immense surprise and delight, our hosts asked to join us, even off-duty! Later in the day we had a delicious dinner at the famous Ukrainian restaurant, Tarus Bulba, (across from the magnificent Russian State Library) and were again regaled with live music.
Over dinner that night, our hosts explained to us the strong sense of hospitality that Russians have. They described how even families who do not have many luxuries will forego feeding themselves so that their guests can have the very best of what they can offer. Our hosts embodied this sensibility along with a fierce sense of pride of their history, culture and country. Their warmth, sense of humour, compassion and generosity reached into our hearts and took hold. We will never forget our new friends and we will be forever grateful to them for making us feel so special.
In recent years I have come to love the cinematic genre known as film noir. Noir has always had a fairly substantial following among film aficionados since its heyday in the late 1930s through the early 1950s. That has been helped in large part by the continuing general popularity of a few of the most iconic noir movies, such as Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and The Big Sleep. If you are, like me, a Turner Classic Movies junkie, its continuing appeal (at least to a certain type of television viewer) is pretty apparent.
Film noir makes no effort to tidy up the underbelly of American society. In fact, it seems to revel in the dark side of our culture. Whether we agree with Osip in his theories about American movies (and there is a certain plausibility to them), his description of film noir is compelling and insightful.
One of the major themes of film noir is the allure of evil. In the movie Out of the Fog , Stella Goodwin (played by Ida Lupino) is enamored of the low-level hood Harold Goff (played by John Garfield) precisely because he is dangerous. He offers her a way out of the mundane safety of home. As viewers, we are drawn to it ourselves in strange ways.
All his life Blake has been surrounded by people who were out for themselves. He grew up a hoodlum among hoodlums. All his friends and associates (save one, Pop Gruber, played by Walter Brennan) are looking out for their own interests, and have attached themselves and their destinies to him only in order to serve themselves. The girlfriend he returns to from the Army has no real concern for him either. To her he was just another way of furthering her own interests. Nick Blake is completely immersed in the Order of Selfishness.
But in the figure of the widow Gladys Halvorsen (played by Geraldine Fitzgerald), Blake encounters something almost completely outside his experience: Here, for the first time, he discovers an utterly unselfish person, one whose love for him is also completely unselfish. His friends begin to notice the inordinate pleasure he takes in her company. They begin to worry about his commitment to the scam, and they begin questioning his motives. But Blake is by this time questioning his own motives; he realizes he is falling in love with her.
Blake has spent most of his life deceiving people. And in order to deceive people, you need to know how they think. You need to know people better than they know themselves. This is the way evil is commonly portrayed: as being wiser than the good. The theme of the vulnerability of innocence in the face of evil is not an uncommon one in literature.
In his novel Billy Budd Herman Melville casts a character who is so utterly innocent that he has no understanding of evil whatsoever, and it leads to his downfall. In the act of creating such a character as Billy Budd, Melville implicitly proposes the question: Can a completely innocent person understand evil at all?
Few noir movies, as great as many of them are, reach this height of vision. That such a great message could come from so dark a film could be considered a paradox. But it is this very paradox that is at the heart of Christianity:
It is this very paradox that Chesterton sees: That the God of the Universe would appear in the form of lowly man whose death and Resurrection would save the souls of undeserving sinners, serving to remind us that nobody lives forever, and that, in another sense, some of us actually do.
Edward James Fisher, 70, of Post Falls, Idaho, passed away peacefully on February 24, 2024, surrounded by his loving family following a recent diagnosis and rapid progression of acute myeloid leukemia.
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