Zaliningrad

This weekend, Jason and I ventured with Liz to Zaliningrad, a large town which is supposed to be part of Moscow incorporated, but its a suburb by North American standards. We took the night train from Moscow to hit the local club scene. The club we went to was relatively unextraordinary...expensive MGD bottles, comfy couches and a hooka room off to the side (first time for me, it was pretty tasty). It was 70 and 80s night, which while it meant a bunch of Soviet disco standards with whom I admit, sadly, I am unfamiliar, but the DJ did play the "Ghostbuster's" theme. That song has the capacity to make people move, no matter what side of the pond you're from.

But the interesting part of the trip was the town itself. Zaliningrad was designed and constructed to house all the computer nerds and their families as the trade emerged in late 70s or so (I estimate). It doesn't have the broken-down kiosks and slick slots clubs everywhere...the stores weren't swanky, just strikingly middle-class. For a country that supposedly doesn't have that Ikea-shopping bulge in the middle of its income spread, Zaliningrad was a real sight. The bus we rode on was shiny-new, with automated turnstiles...the park we crossed to get to Pizza Pronto was meticulously kept with thick cobblestones and convenient rain-protected benches. The grade school and high school, built right next to each other, looked like Cosmonaut versions of 1980s SoCal schools...and the grade school was an orange-and-white MiniMe version of the impressive blue-and-white high school.

The neighborhoods lack trees, so 17-story pale but newish apartment buildings shoot of the ground like fence posts. Intimidatingly dense forest surrounds the whole town...the birch tree and evergreen Russian-style forest. This kind of forest doesn't have the slopy roundness to the treetops that you see in the Midwest, and they remain the same muted green the whole year. It's dark, foreboding, and after 3 months in Moscow, one of the most beautiful sights I've seen in a while. And the air...lawrd, the air was clear and almost sweet. Jason and I kept reminding each other, "Do it again, do it again...breathe, ahhhh". It's been raining, so Moscow air is like sniffing a wet ashtray. Our friend James thought Zaliningrad was as dinged and flashy as Moscow, but I thought it was lovely. I wondered guiltily if it was because a Whole Foods store might look more at place in Zaliningrad...that my suburban sensibilities drew me to the white-and-gray Tinker-Town. But it made me wonder if this feeling was what young families in the US thought in the 1950s...not that their new McSuburbs were impersonal, or gawdy, or oppressive...but rather pretty.

Living in Moscow, with water-logged gray quickly becoming the season's hottest color around here, and the late fall rains washing countless streams of tar, dirt and trash down the sidewalks, I imagine the charms of a pre-made, sparkly white suburb. No crowded metro wagons, fewer aging drunks sleeping on steam grates, fewer buildings draped in construction tarp. Zaliningrad didn't have a McDonald's every two feet, or miles of strip malls, or streets clogged with traffic and construction. It doesn't have the noise, the oppressive go, go. Just busy families wandering into shops and bustops under the giant white apartment buildings stretching up towards the clear gray sky. Russia's grand version of the white picket fence.