Moskva (mit video!)

So here we are, almost packed and ready to go home! Over the past few days I tried to gather my overall impressions of this country (and when I say country, I obviously mean the capital and the other capital, which is all I saw), but I'm not sure I succeded.

Moscow made a much stronger impression on me than Petersburg. When I was in Petersburg, I kept asking the city "what do you want to be?" And now I'm just asking "what are you?" I kept thinking "this is not like a normal city," but then I thought "well, what does normal city even mean. Each city in unique, as people are." I was also trying to compare it to previous experiences (for some reason I needed to make it more familiar), but the only experience I can compare to how I feel in Moscow is that of standing in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, which is also one of the most unsettling feelings I've ever had. 

In Moscow, as it happens rarely, I kept looking at all these people and wondering "who are they? what do they do? what do they want? where are they going? are they happy?" Russia is so militarized. I've been told yesterday that 33% of the people work in the army or in the police (is that even possible? maybe they were talking about men). You feel watched, and you feel treated as a potential criminal everywhere you go. And we're talking 2013! It's a place where, or so it seems to me, women are stronger than ever and do a lot (maybe even most) of the work, and still they have to be married by the time they're 25 in order not to be socially dead - hence young women dress like whores and try to catch someone before it's too late. It's a place where respectable retirees are forced to go beg on the streets. And where people know literature by heart, poetry and prose alike, no matter what their jobs are.

When I moved to the US, I somehow had few expectations. I must have had stereotypes and preconceptions about Americans, but overall I didn't care much. Except for a short silly period in middle school, I wasn't America obsessed. I knew very little about their history, literature, politics, and I started learning about them only once I had already moved, because I am living there after all.

With Russia, on the other hand, it's always been about literature and dreams, from the Brothers Karamazov that I got for Santa Lucia when I was 14 to the discovery of Russian poetry in college, and so forth. I wasn't expecting to see prince Andrey strolling down the streets, but almost. It's been in my dreams for such a long time that I almost didn't want to see the real Russia. It all became more concrete once I started studying the language, which is by the way what got me through this last year and a half, but still. So I don't know, I really don't know what it feels like to have been here for three weeks. It feels like a beginning, I guess.

(italiano, English, по-русски)