Day 3: Post-Soviet shopping

Aug 01, 2007

Special to the Star

With our Cayennes stuck in some sort of Moscow customs limbo (they were shipped from Germany in the middle of July but will, finally, arrive in town tomorrow), the teams took the day off to do a bit of sightseeing around the area.

Turns out even that means dealing with a lot of bureaucracy.

Shadows of the past on Red Square.

Arranging for tickets to visit the Armoury inside the Kremlin walls took almost a half-hour of negotiations before our would-be-guide decided not to give us a tour because there were more than 10 in the group. in the end, we could just walk to the Armoury and for less than $20, get not only a ticket but an English-speaking recorded guide to accompany us.

Alex Orlov, who has been our translator and Moscow road-map resource for the last couple of days, isn't surprised by this. He says that many of the people working front-line jobs in retail and tourism grew up in Communist times, where there wasn't really any concept of service. It didn't matter how quickly or well things got done; they took home the same government paycheque anyway.

This is not the case at the giant GUM shopping mall just off Red Square. What used to be one massive department store - where the average Russian worker would go to line up for bread and other necessities - has been transformed into a Western consumer's paradise, with several hundred high-end luxury boutiques for brands from Omega to Adidas to Chanel and Cartier. In GUM, the staff are all impeccably dressed, unbelievably attractive and uniformly smiley.

More than a few of the Communist leaders idolized in nearby monuments must be rolling in their graves.

High-end boutiques in the former socialist workers paradise.

The countdown to the start of the rally begins tonight at GUM, actually, with a launch party at the (what else?) Louis Vuitton boutique facing the Kremlin. All of the teams will spend the majority of the day tomorrow going through the final details of technical inspection, last-minute preparations on the car (mounting cameras, sticking sponsors' logos on, fuelling and other details) and we'll roll across a ramp on Red Square Friday morning.