Open Mic Night in Moscow Read online

  Dedication

  For Mom, Dad, Angela, and Andrew

  Epigraph

  “(C) Lonely Planet 2014. No part of this publication may be copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means . . . without the permission of the publisher.”

  —Lonely Planet Central Asia

  “Ничего особенного. Так, поставить галочку. Все очень помпезно, неуютно, официально. Угрюмое местечко.”

  —TripAdvisor User Lihman, on Red Square

  “I want to thank my accountants . . . They are both geniuses.”

  —Why Men Love Bitches (acknowledgments section)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Introduction

  The Silk Road

  1:Opening for a Meditative Drum Circle in Almaty (Kazakhstan)

  2:Crossing a Land Border from Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan

  3:Riding a Horse in the Mountains of Kyrgyzstan

  4:The Most Terrifying Flight on Earth (Tajikistan)

  5:A Ten-Day Road Trip Through Tajikistan

  6:Touring the Black Markets of Uzbekistan

  7:Trains, Tombs, and Ovaries (Uzbekistan)

  8:An Invitation to a Stranger’s Wedding (Uzbekistan)

  9:A Visit to a Secret Museum (Uzbekistan)

  10:Camping Beside the Door to Hell (Turkmenistan)

  11:Taken in Turkmenistan

  12:How to Get out of Turkmenistan When You’re out of Cash

  13:Clubbing with Strangers from a Convenience Store in Kazakhstan

  Eastern Europe

  14:An Afternoon in Chernobyl (Ukraine)

  15:Halloween in Your Lover’s Homeland (Belarus)

  16:Couchsurf the Baltics (Lithuania)

  17:All Trains Lead to Russia

  The Trans-Siberian Railway

  18:Trans-Siberian Prelude: A Brief Stopover in China

  19:A Month on the Trans-Siberian

  20:Open Mic Night in Moscow

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Introduction

  Hello, I’m Audrey. Welcome to my book.

  I’ve never written a book before, but in researching this one, I opened dozens of them, and I noticed that many start off with the same mistake. The first page contains a few quotations that obviously mean something to the author but are presented without context or explanation. As a result, they fall flat, sound pretentious, or make you wonder, “Why is a cookbook leading with an excerpt from Machiavelli?”

  To avoid falling into this trap, I’m going to explain the significance of the quotes from my epigraph.

  The first comes from the 2014 Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, which I obtained by illegally downloading it from a Russian website and used it extensively while planning portions of my trip, and later while crafting the copyright page of this book. I found the copyright page to be one of the most daunting to write. How do you strike the right balance between keeping it light but also sounding legally threatening? What makes a good ISBN? Is it gauche to list your parents’ home address? The Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia helped me navigate not only the Pamir Mountains and a fire crater in the desert of Turkmenistan, but also the supple ins and outs of a well-honed Library of Congress catalog entry.*

  The second quotation is more meaningful to me. It comes from a TripAdvisor user’s review of Red Square in Moscow, and because it’s in Russian, I don’t understand what it means. But it speaks to me just the same, in the way that poetic truths transcend language, time, and copyright laws. (Update: I just ran the quote through Google Translate, and it turns out that it means, “Nothing special. So, tick the box. Everything is very pompous, uncomfortable, formal. A gloomy place.” So yeah, confirmed—immortal words.)

  The final quote comes from my roadmap to life and favorite book of all time, Why Men Love Bitches. If you’ve never read it, go return my book and use the store credit to buy a copy. Why Men Love Bitches lays out a life philosophy that its predecessors (the Torah, Bible, and Koran) were grasping for, but never managed to reach. That philosophy is basically: do what makes you happy, don’t worry about what other people think, and when it comes to dating, play a little hard to get. I’m including an excerpt from the acknowledgments section as a reminder that I need to file my taxes.

  Now that the quotes are out of the way, here’s a quick overview of the book so you know what to expect, and also have something to say if you find yourself in a situation where you need to pretend to have read it (e.g., core curriculum of the near future, a literary salon). Truly, I understand: if I could have, I would have pretended to have written it. My plan had been to just pull an all-nighter and bang it all out the day before publication, but it turns out that publishing a book is a little different from writing a high school essay.

  Basically, it’s about this twenty-eight-year-old woman (aka me) who decides to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union (aka the best place ever) because she’s insanely obsessed with the Russian language and culture (aka all of her boyfriends were Russian), and along the way she learns a lot and and meets a bunch of people and winds up in situations that are awkward and funny and occasionally poignant (aka give her the Pulitzer Prize?).

  It’s hard to say how my fascination with all things Russian began. Was it my first Russian boyfriend (Oleg)? My second Russian boyfriend (Anton)? My third Russian boyfriend (back to Oleg again)?

  It happened in bits and pieces, without my particularly noticing, but by the time I turned twenty-eight, I’d become so obsessed with the countries that gave us beets, Dostoevsky, and websites for streaming pirated movies that it seemed perfectly logical to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union and trying to learn Russian.

  This was not something I’d seen coming.

  Before I turned twenty, I’d been outside of the United States exactly once, when I was six months old and my parents took me to England. I have no memory of this trip, but it did leave me with an infant passport that I used for years as a backup form of identification. Bouncers everywhere were mystified.

  In college I spent a semester in Paris and came back feeling very worldly. I started eating dinner at eight p.m. and annoying every French person I encountered by responding in my high-school-level French to their perfect, unaccented English. Then I met Oleg, and through him, Russian.

  After I graduated from college, I took a real job, then quit and moved to China. In Shanghai, I did comedy, wrote plays, paid my rent and funded my habit of getting my bicycle stolen by SAT tutoring, and had the honor of being a free hotline’s most frequent caller of the year. I met Anton, and through him came more Russian.

  But unless she’s lucky or raised in a matriarchal society, there comes a time in every young woman’s life when she faces increasing pressure to cool it and settle down. While the world has gotten better at allowing young women to explore their passions, there is still an unspoken (and sometimes spoken, repeated, and followed up in e-mails) expectation that she will put them aside in order to find love. Back in America, my friends were starting to get engaged and my parents wanted me to move home and do the same more than I wanted anything in particular for myself. And so after almost four years in China, I moved back to the U.S. and set out to settle down.

  The only obstacles to my plan were the fact that I wasn’t really sure what settling down entailed, that I was unsure how you were supposed to do it, and that I knew that I definitely didn’t want to.

  But I was
certain I could make it work. If I could make a life for myself on another continent and be a distinguished guest at a free hotline’s annual gala, where if I’m being honest things got a little awkward when the operators came out and performed skits making fun of the people who called in but we got over that, I could work out how to become the type of person who drove a minivan.

  In the dreamy and aspirational sense, I wanted to travel through the former Soviet Union. But it was a pipe dream. Not something I ever expected to achieve in this lifetime. Or at least, not something I thought would be financially feasible before the age of 70, unless my Beanie Baby collection shot up in value.

  What I hadn’t realized was that sometimes an incredible stroke of luck takes a form other than a stuffed animal with a tag protector.

  A few months after I’d arrived in New York, a former boss in Shanghai asked if I’d like to come back and SAT tutor for the busy seasons. I’d return to Shanghai for one- or two-month stretches, work truly horrendous hours but make bank, and then go back to New York for a few months.

  Or, I thought, instead of going back to New York, I could go to Russia.

  This was my version of winning the Hamilton lottery, or maybe even the actual lottery.

  But as soon as the thought popped into my head, I banished it. I still didn’t know what settling down looked like. But I was pretty sure it did not involve yurts.

  I had come back to the U.S. for one purpose (to put an end to my anxieties about dying alone by marrying the first person who shared my belief that the maximum amount of time you should spend at a sporting event is thirty minutes), and I felt that I had to put everything else on hold until that happened.

  But when I dreamed, it was never of the job, boyfriend, wedding, or babies I was willing myself to long for. (Though it was sometimes of steamy hookups with really hot guys who seemed emotionally unavailable.) It always was of this one adventure that kept coming back to me. Only now, it wasn’t a pipe dream.

  I tried to tell myself that was the kind of thing you did after you settled down and built some semblance of a normal life. I’d been trying to do that in New York. I had signed a lease on an apartment and stopped flying to countries with lax pharmaceutical regulations to stock up on over-the-counter Xanax. Those seemed firmly planted in the adulthood column! But I was also starting to get the sinking feeling that my ambitions didn’t square with the traditional path I saw around me.

  Not that that mattered! Most people, I reminded myself, hadn’t spent their childhoods dreaming of going into corporate litigation. But they did it anyway, because it was the responsible choice. If everyone else could find a way to make it all work and still be happy, couldn’t I?

  The truth was that the answer was no, and I knew that for a long time before I admitted it to myself, and even longer before I did anything about it.

  When a passing fancy metastasizes into an all-consuming passion, there can be an urge to ascribe it to fate or higher meaning. There has to be a reason you sleep in yurts in Mongolia and Tajikistan; that way, destiny can be held responsible for any havoc it wreaks. Deciding to devote your life to the study of prehistoric ferns or to marry Brad the Lawyer is dangerous, because if things don’t work out, you’ll have no one but yourself to blame.

  When future scholars look back at the written record left by twenty-first-century Americans, they’ll find a history in “moments in which we knew.” We write college essays about the instant we realized our passion for biomedical engineering. We bond with strangers by trading revelations: our moment of deciding to quit our jobs, for their moments of realizing their bodies were sensitive to gluten.

  I never have these moments. Sometimes I think I do (e.g., while waiting in line at a coffee shop: I should open a coffee shop!; while waiting in line for a bathroom: I should write a poem about craft beer in Brooklyn!; after drinking too much craft beer in Brooklyn: I should call my ex-boyfriend!), but when I reexamine them later, I recognize them for what they were: terrible ideas masquerading as insight.

  The things I have figured out have dawned on me so gradually that it’s hard to draw the line between when I knew and when I didn’t.

  Each time I buy a $90 West Elm dinner plate off a wedding registry, I wonder whether, on the night Hannah opened her door and found Brad holding her favorite smoothie, she really gazed lovingly into his eyes and thought, One day, we’re going to make all of our friends stay in a block of rooms at a Hampton Inn. Because I think it’s far more likely she went, That thing BETTER not have any fucking banana in it.

  So, there was no good reason why I loved Russian and wanted to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union, but there were plenty of good reasons not to do it. Such as: I was twenty-eight, single, seasonally employed, still using my parents’ residence as my home address, and convinced that the best way to iron something was to hang it up in the bathroom while I showered. I was, as they say, “still figuring things out,” unless they are my dad, in which case it’s “putting in your 10,000 hours of partying.”

  For the entire time it was around, the Soviet Union was the largest country on Earth. If you’re interested in a brief history, I highly recommend Wikipedia, but the condensed version is basically: communism, Stalin, is Anastasia still alive but living in New Jersey?

  In the early 1990s, the fifteen republics that had made up the Soviet Union decided to go their separate ways and became the independent nations of Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. I originally planned to visit all of them, but because of time constraints and the fact that I haven’t yet figured out how to get people to keep depositing money into my bank account when I’m not working for them, I will only make it to eleven. I purposefully decided to save for another trip to the Caucasus (which, in this part of the world, means Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, not a bizarre Midwestern voting ritual where everyone gets locked in a barn and has to stay until the whole room is standing under the name of one candidate), legitimately forgot about Moldova (honest mistake!), and showed up in Mongolia thinking it had been part of the former Soviet Union and then quickly learned it had not (honest but expensive mistake!).

  I remember the moment I decided to buy a one-way ticket to the former Soviet Union in rich, vivid detail. The rain-slicked streets of Brooklyn glittered in the early twilight, like the cover of an acoustic album inspired by a breakup. I’d been feeling pretty miserable, because I missed living abroad, because I was still hung up on Anton, and also maybe because I had stopped taking my antidepressants without consulting a medical professional. I looked up to the heavens, where the stars winked back at me, and then down at my hands, which I was shocked to see were holding my own destiny.

  In that moment, I realized that the answer to my problems lay not in deliberate introspection or mindful goal-setting or finding a full-time job, but rather in traveling for a year through the former Soviet Union, and I also knew that I would study biomedical engineering and quit my job and marry Brad.

  That’s obviously not how it happened.

  In truth, the decision to go was, like all of my major life choices, random and incremental and maybe a little impulsive.

  But I’m glad I did it, because it worked out. And if it hadn’t, it would have been a huge waste of time and money, and maybe the biggest mistake of my life.

  One: The Silk Road

  1

  Opening for a Meditative Drum Circle in Almaty (Kazakhstan)

  The first rule of comedy is probably “Never say no to a gig.” The second rule is likely an addendum to the first, and it’s “even if it’s opening for a meditative drum circle in Kazakhstan.”*

  Which is why I’m standing in front of a group of confused Kazakhstanis, trying to explain what stand-up is. In case you’re wondering, this is not the ideal way to start a show. There’s a reason Beyoncé doesn’t open her concerts with “Please raise your hand if you’re
familiar with music.”

  “Who here has seen stand-up comedy before?” I ask.

  Two hands go up.

  “Maybe I should back up—how many of you understand English?”

  This time, half of the room raises its hands, which is better, though it does occur to me that some of them might not understand English and could just be raising their hands because they see the people around them doing it. In fact, most of the time I raise my hand, it’s for exactly this reason. But I’m going to think positively. The glass is half-full, and the audience is half-fluent. Not a dream setup for an art form that’s basically just talking, but my third rule of comedy is “A language barrier is no excuse for a comedy failure.”

  I turn to the bongo player.

  “Do you know those drum stings they play after jokes on TV?”

  I’m thinking there’s maybe a 50 percent chance he can even understand me, and a one-in-five shot he knows what I’m talking about. I’m reminded that I never took statistics as he surprises me by doing a pretty good ba-dum-tss on the bongos.

  Okay. A room full of people who mostly don’t speak the only language I can perform in, and an accompanying late-night band that’s just one guy on bongos. To say that I can work with this would be to vastly overestimate my abilities. To accurately read my capacity for obstinacy is to know I’ll try.

  “So I’m going to tell some stories,” I continue. “If you want to laugh, great, and if you don’t know when to laugh . . .” I gesture to the bongo player, who’s right there with me. Ba-dum-tss. Nervous laughter. (If there’s a fourth rule of comedy, it should be “Tip your bongo players.”)

  I look out at the young Kazakhstanis sitting cross-legged on the common room floor of the Loco Hostel. I look down at my socks, which I’m performing in for the first time, because not even the stage gets a break on the no-shoes-inside policy. This is the kind of moment where you’d expect me to pause and go, Wow, I never thought I’d be doing stand-up in Kazakhstan. But instead, all I can think is, Should I talk about dating or ask them what’s up with those buses that don’t come to a complete stop?