Good old days in Russia
I have had the opportunity to go through some old photos, including those of when I travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway. That trip was an adventure from start to finish, in fact my adventure started in Moscow before we even boarded the train.
As I was saying yesterday, under communism, travel was controlled and restricted. The year I went to Moscow, Gorbachov was exiled. It happened while we were crossing from Mongolia into China. That was very fortuitous - if I had been in Moscow, I would have ended up stuck in one of the worst hotels I have ever stayed in. Of course, there were worse in terms of facilities in some poor countries, but my hotel cost me over !00 pounds sterling (i.e. British pounds) a night, and, I had to pay a single supplement as well. For this I had a narrow uncomfortable bed, and a formica bench. The service was surly to say the least, although I did get a better response on the second day when I spoke German to the receptonist rather than English.
Despite the cost, the hotel would not serve any vegetarian food for me. Even the Trans-siberian did better in this respect, though I could tell when I was served my soup alongside everyone else that I was getting the same soup with the bits of meat taken out! At least they tried. At the hotel, there was no a-la-carte service for us foreigners, we were simply expected to rock up and sit and wait for a number of courses to be brought to us. Little of it was edible for me. Bottles of cold mineral water were set out on the table, but this water hd the highest concentration of sodium I have ever tasted in mineral water. It was akin to taking a gulp of the Dead Sea. Our second day had our first daytime lunch meal and it was very hot. I was one of the first to arrive, and took a huge swig from one of the bottles of water. It was unbelievably unpalatable. As others arrived, I warned them about the water, but after a while it became a fun game to say nothing about the water, and watch people's reactions.
There was actually an a-la-carte restaurant in the hotel, so the second day I and two guys decided to try it out. We discovered that the menu was almost like a book, but what was on offer was only the items with a price beside them. It took an eternity to get a waitress' attention, and the food took a pretty long time after that. I became so impatient that at one point, I walked into the kitchen to try and get my food. I was astonished by what I saw - a long table of desserts set out, and the staff sitting round with their feet up (literally), smoking! We got the food in the end, and the standard was pretty much like the food in the foreigners' lounge, but at least I could eat it!
The service culture that is so prominent in capitalist countries such as the U.S. took some time to catch on in the former Soviet Union. I wonder what it would be like to stay and dine in that hotel today, over a decade later.
