Moscow Time

A phenomenon discovered by my fellow students and me:  in Moscow, from the moment you open your eyes in the morning, you are on the go.  You are running and running all day and evening long until that time, so late at night, when you can finally go to bed. 

However, when someone asks what you did that day, you will be at a loss to answer them.  Not much, it seems after some reflection.  Or if you do lay out your activities, they may seem rather menial in comparison to what you might normally accomplish in a twenty-four hour period.

 

This is due to Moscow Time.  This city is a black hole, and all of time is sucked deep within its trenches.  Minutes and hours are whisked away, almost as if they never were.  Minutes and hours, years and lives.  At the end of the day you find yourself exhausted, grasping desperately for the little bit of time that remains.  Here there is so much life to be lived, so much more to be done.

 

Where does all of this time go?  I have my theories, which I will share with you now:

 

• The Metro:  Most people spend one hour or more commuting to work on the trains.  Around two to three hours of your daily life is lost to the underground.
• The Escalators Going Down to the Metro: Are among the longest in the world, and just to get down to and up from the trains is another 10 minutes each time.
• Meeting people:  Whenever trying to arrange a rendez-vous, being 20 minutes late is not being late at all.  One hour counts as a slight delay.  And, more often than not, that hour will pass, and then another, and the person that you were planning to meet with never shows up.
• Waiting for other people:  Class begins at 10:30.  You have to be there then.  The professor is never there before 11.
• Sending text messages:  Russian has 33 letters – you have to press a lot of buttons on your phone to get to the one you want.  And you have to keep you texts grammatically correct to make sure a misunderstanding does not occur.
• Narrow Doorways – Cheers to Kevin for thinking up this one.  For some reason, entrances and exits in Russia are very small and narrow.  Even if there is another door that could be opened or a barrier that could be raised, people don’t really bother to do it.  They just try to go through the one that is open.  And there is always at least 75 people trying to get through it. 
• Dressing / Undressing:  Russian ladies look sharp when they go out onto the streets – boots, hair, make-up, the works.  But even beyond that, the simple effort of putting on your coat, your gloves, tying your shoes, wrapping up your scarf ends up taking forever.  On the street you are dressed both well, and warm.  The minute you go inside anywhere, it all comes off.  Coat, hat, scarf, and shoes if you are in someone’s home.  Quite a ceremony is made of the dressing and undressing here – I guess it is an important daily ritual.
• Thinking about how to best phrase things for my blog:  I don’t know how many of you out there are reading this, but I spend an awful amount of time thinking about you ).