Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men

by Audrey Murray

Overview

The raucous and surprisingly poignant story of a young, Russia-obsessed American writer and comedian who embarked on a solo tour of the former Soviet Republics, never imagining that it would involve kidnappers, garbage bags of money, and encounters with the weird and wonderful from Mongolia to Tajikistan.

Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Siberia are not the typical tourist destinations of a twenty-something, nor the places one usually goes to eat, pray, and/or love. But the mix of imperial Russian opulence and Soviet decay, and the allure of emotionally unavailable Russian men proved strangely irresistible to comedian Audrey Murray.

At age twenty-eight, while her friends were settling into corporate jobs and serious relationships, Audrey was on a one-way flight to Kazakhstan, the first leg of a nine-month solo voyage through the former USSR. A blend of memoir and offbeat travel guide, this thoughtful, hilarious catalog of a young comedian’s adventures is also a diary of her emotional discoveries about home, love, patriotism, loneliness, and independence.

Sometimes surprising, often disconcerting, and always entertaining, Open Mic Night in Moscow will inspire you to take the leap and embark on your own journey into the unknown. And, if you want to visit Chernobyl by way of an insane-asylum-themed bar in Kiev, Audrey can assure you that there’s no other guidebook out there. (She’s looked.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062909848
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/13/2019
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	670,707
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Audrey Murray is a redhead from Boston who moved to China and became a standup comedian. The co-founder of the Kung Fu Komedy, Audrey was named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. Audrey is a staff writer for Reductress.com and a regular contributor at Medium.com; her writing has also appeared in The Gothamist, China Economic Review, Nowness, Architizer, and on the wall of her dad’s office. Audrey has appeared on the Lost in America, Listen to This!, and Shanghai Comedy Corner podcasts, on CNN and ICS, and in Shanghai Daily, Time Out, Smart Shanghai, That’s Shanghai, and City Weekend. She recently published her first memoir, Open Mic Night in Moscow.

Table of Contents

Introduction XIII

The Silk Road 1

1 Opening for a Meditative Drum Circle in Almaty (Kazakhstan) 3

2 Crossing a Land Border from Kazakhstan to Kyrgyzstan 18

3 Riding a Horse in the Mountains of Kyrgyzstan 30

4 The Most Terrifying flight on Earth (Tajikistan) 53

5 A Ten-Day Road Trip Through Tajikistan 70

6 Touring the Black Markets in Uzbekistan 97

7 Trains, Tombs, and Ovaries (Uzbekistan) 128

8 An Invitation to a Stranger's Wedding (Uzbekistan) 141

9 A Visit to a Secret Museum (Uzbekistan) 155

10 Camping Beside the Door to Hell (Turkmenistan) 167

11 Taken in Turkmenistan 181

12 How to Get out of Turkmenistan When You're out of Cash 196

13 Clubbing with Strangers from a Convenience Store in Kazakhstan 207

Eastern Europe 210

14 An Afternoon in Chernobyl (Ukraine) 221

15 Halloween in Your Lover's Homeland (Belarus) 250

16 Couchsurf the Baltics (Lithuania) 274

17 All Trains Lead to Russia 281

The Trans-Siberian Railway 313

18 Trans-Siberian Prelude: A Brief Stopover in China 315

19 A Month on the Trans-Siberian 320

20 Open Mic Night In Moscow 384

Acknowledgments 393

Editorial Reviews

05/28/2018
Comedian Murray takes readers on an entertaining journey through destinations in the former U.S.S.R. that aren’t on a typical tourist’s must-see list, such as Tajikistan, Chernobyl, and Siberia. “By the time I turned twenty-eight, I’d become so obsessed with the countries that gave us beets, Dostoyevsky 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,” she muses in her introduction. In witty stories, she chronicles her adventures negotiating stand-up comedy routines in front of Kazakhs (she has to perform in socks since no shoes are allowed inside), haggling taxi fares in Kyrgyzstan (she confused the exchange rate and was embarrassed when she realized they were charging her $3 rather than $70 ), and sleeping in a yurt with dive-bombing moths. The author’s travels take her on rickety prop planes in Tajikistan, on the Trans-Siberian Highway, and in one particularly horrifying scene, a near-kidnapping in Turkmenistan by a human trafficker posing as a taxi driver. She visits her ex-boyfriend Anton’s homeland of Belarus, which purportedly has the world’s highest number of police officers per capita, and moves on to couch-surfing in Lithuania. Murray turns what for many women would be a scary solo journey into an exhilarating experience. (July)

Publishers Weekly

2018-05-01
A sporadically funny book by stand-up comedian and world traveler Murray.Unlucky in love and ready to expand her horizons, the author decided to travel through the former Soviet Union to see what she could see and maybe meet a nice guy. "If you're interested in a brief history," she writes of the setting of her quest, "I highly recommend Wikipedia, but the condensed version is basically: communism, Stalin, is Anastasia still alive but living in New Jersey?" Sadly, the jokes don't get much better—but then, as she writes candidly, "mediocre jokes are always a great way to get out of giving an honest response to a question that's complicated and difficult to answer." Murray's travels took her into some interesting and little-visited corners of the former Soviet empire—e.g., Belarus, where she finds positive things to say about the generally unloved city of Minsk, where, at least, people police up their cigarette butts even as their fearless leader mourns the collapse of communism. Sagely, she writes of a Belarusian man she's met, "as long as [Belarusian dictator] Lukashenko keeps trying to bring back the past, people like Zhenya won't have a future." Along the way, she turns in some smart if glancing observations on the places she visited: Chernobyl, she writes, has been set-designed to emphasize the general bad vibes attendant in a nuclear catastrophe, while Samarkand is "like Disneyland," its famed old corner rebuilt for the tourist trade. Too frequently, such settings are just set pieces for snark. Of the ritual orchestration of an Uzbek wedding, Murray tosses off the aside that "certainly a lot of people get nervous on their wedding days, even Brooklyn couples who've been living together for over a decade and already have three children." One wonders what a sardonic traveler like P.J. O'Rourke might have made of the same ingredients.There are some fine moments on these pages, but too often the narrative is forced—a shame given the intrinsic promise of the setup.

Kirkus Reviews