Scammed by the Shashlik Man

Today was my last day in Moscow, so Chris and I took a leisurely tour on foot. We once again went to the Cosmonautics Museum (metro: VDNKh), but this time they weren't closed, so we got in! It was a pretty neat place with lots of spacey stuff to see, including oodles of Yuri Gagarin paraphenalia. I very much enjoyed my time there! Afterwards, we were hungry so we stopped at the VVC (used to be called the VDNKh) next door for some shashlik. Before we could eat though, we wandered a bit and I noticed the giant ferris wheel from Moscow's 850th Birthday (12 yrs ago) just asking to be ridden. 10 bucks later, I was mounting an open-air ride to the top of this monstrosity. Holy crumbs it was high up! I wondered aloud a few times why I had chosen to ride the open-air trolley, but in the end the view and the fresh air was absolutely worth it! The pictures don't do it justice I don't think, but it was pretty cool.

Now it was time to eat. We stopped at a shashlik vendor on the side of one of the walkways. I couldn't read the menu, so chris and I pointed to the one shashlik skewer and said that was it. Then the guy asked if we wanted salad: No. Potato? Sure. 15 minutes later, Fantas in hand, the guy dropped tons of food off at our table. it was like a whole skewer of potatoes and the whole skewer of meat - which was like 1-1.5 lbs between the two of us. After we ate the meal, which was fine - nothing to write home about (how ironic) - we went up front to pay the bill. 2600 rubles. Umm....surely there was a mistake. That's 90 dollars! We said, no way this is right and the guy came back and said yes it is. He pointed to the thing on the menu that said you paid for the meat by the gram. Nice. In addition, the potatoes cost 20-some dollars out of that 90...what a joke. So, Chris pulled out his 1000 ruble bill and we told the guy we didn't have that kind of money. We just didn't. He kept pointing to the bill amount and demanding that. We kept saying NO WAY and we don't have that amount...We were so mad!

In the end, and mostly because we didn't want a run-in with any police-type guys, i fished out a magic 1500 rubles from my pants (tricky) - and that was literally all we had. We ended up giving the guy 2550 of his 2600+ ruble bill. I hate to think what might have happened if we didn't have that much. UGH. I guess we should have asked "how much", but from the prices I saw on the sheet, I never would have thought 90 dollars of food was headed our way. AND, the guy knew better - he totally scammed us.



Anyway, I'm safe and sound and ready to come home tomorrow. I don't feel so well at the current moment (headache, sore throat), but by tomorrow I should be as good as new :)

Next update from Houston! Mwah!