Kuskovo – or How My Tour Book Led Me Astray.

I woke up early on Sunday. I guess I have to wake up early on Sundays. The alternative is to sleep till 9:30 and be awakened by the church bells across from my balcony. This is no ordinary church bell, tolling softly on a low baritone note, melancholy and mournful. Its several guys in the belfry banging on all manner of different pitched bells with what sounds like monkey wrenches. It is the most god-awful racket. And it goes on and on.

Anyway, I got out of the house at just about that time and headed off to Pushkin Square for the metro stop. Not before, however, I tested the restorative powers of freshly made Russian blini. There’s a kiosk there called Teremok where they make the blini on a hotplate right in the window. Owing to the hour, I had ham and cheese with a dollop of sour cream. And I washed it down with kvas. Awesome.

Hopped onto the metro and rode to the next to last stop on the violet line, to Ryiazansky Prospect. I was headed out to Kuskovo, a former estate of a noble family. When I exited the metro, I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to get to the estate. My tour book made the assumption, which it clearly stated, that no one in his/her right mind would attempt this trip except as part of an organized tour. A country estate, of course, was well off the edge of all my Moscow maps – which also make the assumption that, as an English speaking person, you would be insane to venture outside the city center alone.

So I started asking around. Apparently, the desire to answer a question even if you don’t know the answer is an international, human reaction in the face of admitting your ignorance. And this is despite the fact that in Russian, the polite phraseology of a question is in the negative – that is “You don’t know the way to Kuskovo, do you?” – because it doesn’t put undue pressure on the other person to know something.

The first guy told me to head down the street I was on. It started to become pretty clear that I wasn’t going in an appropriate direction – alongside a 6 lane highway with a somewhat industrial landscape. I asked a babushka waiting for a bus and she turned me around and sent me back in the direction I had just come from. Then, a woman planting flowers at a war monument tried to send me back to the metro to go to the last stop and take a couple of different buses. She came running after me and admitted that she had just given me directions to a place called Mishikino, not Kuskovo, and that I indeed was on the right track. Look for the church steeple, she said, and it’s right next to that.

Church steeples in general look a lot closer than they really are. It’s amazing how long you can walk while they stubbornly retain their position in the distance. I finally got to the church and went a good distance past. Now I’m getting into a forested area. While encouraging in some ways, the forest was a bit disconcerting in that help was going to become a lot more rare to chance upon.

Another babushka sitting and waiting for a bus. She confirmed that I was going in the right direction. When I asked about the distance and whether it was walking distance, she smiled and said that it would be no problem for a young person like me.

I don’t know how young she thought I was, but it was another half hour to the estate.

Well, it was worth it. Kuskovo was built by the Sheremetyev family in the 1700’s as their country estate. It shows its age in some places; like many Russian monuments it’s a little rundown around the edges. But it must have been something in its day. The estate sprawls all over with a huge man made lake, a palace, pavilions, formal gardens, forests, etc. Except it lacks one important thing - there are no bedrooms. The Sheremetyevs used this place during the day only. For all 200 years that they owned it. So it’s an even more egregiously opulent possession when you consider that.

After a good long walk around, I headed back to the road through the forest. Intermittently, there are clearings where people play different games. One area is all chess tables. The most fun was an area with about 20 cement ping-pong tables. Shirtless old men were playing for keeps. There wasn’t any laughter or banter; just a chorus of paddles "tocking" and ping pong balls "tinking", muffled by a thick canopy of leaves.

Back on the road, a bus rolled up that said “Vykhino Metro” which I knew to be the last stop on the violet line. I hopped on, and we got to the metro by the time I was done paying for my ticket. Clearly, the stop I got off at to reach Kuskovo was really bad advice. I had wasted more than an hour walking around when I could have made it in about 15 minutes.

There’s a lesson in that somewhere, but I’ll probably forget it by next weekend when I go for another excursion.