Open Mic Night in Moscow audiobook

I absolutely loved writing this book. (Have not yet had a chance to read it.)

I genuinely really liked this book. Full of adventure, love for Russia (and CIS), Russian language, Russian men (ahem). Funny, but not overly sarcastic. And of course it is great to see a woman travelling alone perspective that we don't see nearly enough in books and movies.

“Open Mic Night in Moscow” is a chronicle of stand-up comedian’s Audrey Murray’s trip to the former Soviet republics (inspired by her Russian ex-boyfriends). Most of the book is spent on countries like Uzbekistan/Kazhakastan/Tajikistan/Turkeministan (the more Asian parts of the former sprawling Soviet Union land mass), while the last third finishes off with the European republics (Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, and lastly Russia).Murray accompanies her travelogue with historical backgrounds about each country, to provide the reader with a fuller picture. The history is interspersed with the author’s travel adventures: almost getting kidnapped, attending weddings, running out of cash, contacting the useless embassy to come to her rescue, staying with random locals, exploring her ex-boyfriend’s place of birth, etc. The writing is simultaneously witty and informative, juxta positioning the author’s current experience being there with that of the Soviet past, from an outsider’s perspective. There’s also a lot fish-out-of-water type of moments. Overall, an entertaining yet informative travelogue.

If you like laughing, if you like deadpan wit, if you are curious about Russia and wonder about the land that made Putin possible, PLEASE READ THIS! Punched through with fun, this book. You won't regret picking it up.

I enjoyed this memoir/ travelogue very much and managed to gain some knowledge of the former Soviet Union along the way. Audrey Murray is delightful and full of humor which makes her the perfect travel companion. There were a few times I wanted to shake her for making really stupid decisions, but that’s totally the mom/ worrier/ pessimist in me. Highly recommend. I did a combination of reading & audio listening and both formats were engaging.

I really, truly loved this book. Audrey has a great voice- she’s witty, funny, chaotic, smart, and quirky, which draws the reader in. The realities of traveling were showcased in a way that demonstrated both Audrey’s personal development and her flaws- it felt very real and relatable in that sense. Also, I didn’t know much about the ‘Stans or the former USSR at all, but this book awakened my travel bug and I’ve added a bunch of new places to my bucket list. Audrey’s knowledge of the Soviet Union and its history was fantastic and I loved how the book felt both like a journal and a short history lesson at times. This book is a real, raw narrative that captivated me and I highly recommend it!

I LOVED this book! It made me laugh. I also learned a lot about the "stan" countries. (I have to confess that I used a map to keep track of the places.) The author REALLY knows how to tell a good story! Highly recommended.

Why undertake daring solo travel to the former Soviet Union republics? (in Central Asia, the Baltic states, Eastern Europe, and Russia, 2015 to 2016): Let’s say you have a twenty-eight-year-old friend whose single. She grew up in Boston, currently lives in your Brooklyn, New York neighborhood. What if she told you her “pipedream” was to travel to eleven (for now) of the fifteen countries once part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, the majority still autocratic regimes? By herself. For as long as a year. Your friend is candid, so you’re well aware she’s “insanely obsessed with the Russian language and culture (aka all her boyfriends were Russian),” but you hadn’t realized her obsession mushroomed into an “all-consuming passion” to take this crazy trip. What would you say to her?Suppose you also knew your friend takes Xanax for anxiety. Why throw herself into such high-risk, high-anxiety situations regardless of her wildest dreams?Your friend also suffers from motion sickness. She’ll be traveling on planes, trains, cars but figures her Sea-Band bracelets will counteract that. Good remedy, but not nearly good enough for the nitty-gritty of her protracted itinerary you weren’t privy to because she hadn’t planned that far ahead. So of course you couldn’t imagine she’d go trekking by horseback “climbing hills whose surfaces resemble the texture of crumbled paper” into the craggy, ten foot mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Audacious at best, particularly since the friend we’re talking about – Audrey Murray – had an episode of “high-altitude cerebral edema” at fifteen thousand feet.Add to the list of motion sickness triggers Murray encounters: buses in Kazakhstan that don’t fully stop to let passengers on and off, and a “rickety prop plane” in Tajikistan considered “the most terrifying flight on Earth.”All this happens to Audrey Murray a mere fifty pages into her 400 page memoir! She always wanted to be a writer. Did she have to go to the ends of the earth to accomplish that?Murray is someone who walks the talk. “Nerves are the whole point,” she says. Overcoming her worst fears offers her an enormous sense of accomplishment and boost of self-confidence, which she’s in need of when she sets in motion her “dreamy” idea.The gist of the author’s backstory: Murray was living in New York, then moved to Shanghai for four years SAT tutoring and founding a comedy club. Two years later she’s at a crossroads. Should she settle down, listen to her biological clock, parents, the path her peers were taking, societal expectations? Or, keep pursuing her curiosity and desire “to see life as being about the journey not the destination”?Murray’s push and pull struggles as she enters her thirties are perhaps universal, but the striking journey she took anything but.Shanghai is key to understanding why she took this plunge. Murray is obviously not new to throwing herself into the anxiety fire. Stand-up comedy is hard enough without attempting to tell jokes to an audience whose native language is Chinese. Gutsy.Shanghai is also important because of that boyfriend thing. Murray had two Russian boyfriends – Oleg and Anton. Anton’s the one who haunts her, leaving a “dullness to everything.” They met in Shanghai; he’s also a comedian. Their break up two years before she flew to Kazakhstan to launch her Soviet-inspired trip coincides with those last two unsettling years in New York.Anton is from Belarus, which accounts for Murray feeling: “of all the countries on Earth, Belarus is the place I’ve longed for the most.” Almost in the same breath she notes it’s “an isolated, authoritarian state said to most closely replicate life behind the iron curtain.” Daredevil that she is, she misses the intimacy of Anton terribly, fears she’ll never find another love like that. The poignancy of these emotions are ever-present. Poignant prose the heartbeat of her debut memoir.Amidst the seriousness of the trip, might the comedian/author’s prose sometimes be funny? Not laugh-out-loud but in a dry humorous way, witty, self-deprecating, lively, entertaining. An example: When Murray visits Chernobyl in Ukraine – yes, the actual site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster – she wonders: “Why am I here?” Precisely the question we keep asking. Why not stop after visiting Ukraine’s National Chernobyl Museum in Kiev? Instead, the author traveled into the Exclusion Zone, to the evacuated town where the reactor sits. Murray’s and our question is the book’s arresting literary hook: what drives someone to venture to dangerous places? Her reply:“Morbid curiosity? Regular curiosity? Fear of missing out on radioactive waste? Am I just drawn to anything that calls itself abandoned?”Murray details the history of the disaster. Here’s a synopsis:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLkv_...Given Murray’s unorthodox itinerary, it’s staggering how “severely underprepared” she was. She did not overprepare to lessen anxieties like obtaining, in advance, all the visas she needed! Visas from countries like Belarus and Russia, notoriously difficult to obtain. The “tour fanatic” could have signed up for a tour run by a reputable travel company that would have handled the visas for her.Prearranged group excursions would mean the author could not have been gone as long she was (nine months by my count), and they cost a small fortune. Though for this independent spirit, feeling constrained may have been the strongest motivator.You might assume the traveler would have packed as light as humanely possible traversing so many countries, cities, dicey border crossings, hauling luggage on so many different types of transport, trains more than any other. Murray did not pack light. Her oversized baggage drew countless strangers to assist her. Their kindness surprises her over and over again.The writer is an amiable, romantic soul. Everywhere she goes she meets strangers: from the “hopeful and hopeless” former Soviet places they live in to adventurers from Europe and elsewhere, many couples. All while encountering numerous language barriers (Murray studied Russian for six weeks, but soon learns an hour a day fell woefully insufficient); cultural misunderstandings; and the baffling, constant exchanging of currencies, stunning devaluations when converted. For instance, 200,000 Belarusian rubles equals $1.The friendliness of foreigners also holds true for the varied hosts of all the accommodations she stays at: hostels, guesthouses, Airbnbs, yurts, a goat-herding camp, and with so-called couchsurfers who open their homes freely to foster authentic cultural awareness. (Can’t say that for the secret police hotel, but miraculously that worked out too.) Murray is on the lookout for connections, be it female friendships or perhaps another Russian love. Wide-open to possibilities, anything could happen.Like a dreaded travel fear: being kidnapped. As the author describes the frightening scene she found herself alone in, in a self-styled taxi driven by a male with a male friend seated beside him (shared taxis generally the rule), a nightmare she and we conclude was an attempted abduction, not some major language mishap. Harrowing, but it did not deter the intrepid traveler.Who goes on to ride the longest train route in the world, the Trans-Siberian Railway. For a month! Careful to portray only the most salient aspects, we learn there’s six legs on the Mongolia-to-Moscow route Murray chose (three options). Some span as long as twenty-three hours and more, with stopovers at five Russian cities. Except for the final destination, all unpronounceable and unknowable, certainly to me.In fact, the whole trip is hard to imagine. Making Open Mic Night in Moscow a window into the unimaginable.Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)

I'm going to say 4 stars. I may rating it higher than it really deserves but that's because I didn't expect to enjoy it. It was a random grab off the library shelf and it worked out. I learned a few things I didn't know. The narrative made me laugh and almost cry too. Also, she stayed honest and it goes to show that not all American tourists deserve the reputation of entitled liitterbug. At least not all the time. You should read this book

This is an excellent book about a part of the world most of us know little about - The former Soviet Union. A contemporaneous account of her travels through all the "stans".I do feel it was a mistake to market the book as humor or comedy.

I’m very grateful that Audrey shows by example that you can still be a procrastinating, untrusting, hangry human being and still successfully manage a multi-month trip through places where you neither know anyone nor speak the language. Audrey is real throughout this book- any lessons or transformative moments were not contrived but came as a result of kindness being forced upon her from strangers, despite her most stubborn efforts to sabotage all non-awkward social interactions. I very much connected to the deeply Massachusetts-style self-reflection about how misinformed her assumptions had been about a particular person or city... especially when she was so certain everyone was trying to take advantage of her through offering help and expecting nothing back. Who does that??! (In this book I learned: most people not from the Greater Boston Area)Because of the writing, I felt okay that I didn’t know anything about the history or culture of the former Soviet Union, though I ended this book with a long list of things to read more about. Audrey made me want to learn more without feeling like a terrible person for not knowing, because she was often in the same boat. The book is hilarious and I am excited to see what Audrey’s next adventures look like!

This book recounts the adventures of the author as she visits all of the countries that once made up the Soviet Union. The chapters vary from hilarious adventures to thoughtful musings on romance, yaks, bad breakups, moths, Genghis Khan, and society’s expectations of women. She visits a museum in the middle of the desert where a collector secretly amassed the works of banned Soviet artists, camps beside a crater that has been burning for forty years, and becomes an expert on trading currency in black markets.The writing is extraordinary, reading this book was pure delight. We are right there with her travelling along the border with Afghanistan, riding the Trans-Siberian Railway, and everywhere else. As we travel, she calls our attention to the unique, the striking, and the thought provoking in scene after scene. The chapters on the Uzbek wedding, the secret museum, getting out of Turkmenistan when she had run out of money, and the visit to Chernobyl are exceptional high points in an excellent book by a gifted writer. I enjoyed this book so much that when I finished it, I started over and read it again.

Travel can turn the smallest errands into triumphs that feel like major accomplishments.I adored this book. Hilarious - especially at the start - I have a soft spot for any woman-traveling-alone-memoir and this one does not disappoint. Murray and I, I am quite sure, would be fast friends. I love how

I understand what a lot of people here in the reviews section are saying when they write "who goes to the former Soviet Union without adequate preparation?!" But that is a VERY minor part of the book. It is a chronicle of Audrey Murray's adventure through the former Soviet Union which will most definitely inspire its readers to plan a trip there (post-Covid). It's laugh-out-loud funny, relatable (as in, that is most DEFINITELY how I would act being in her place in such scenarios as the Trans-Siberian railway or trying to get to sleep in a yurt), and a highly enjoyable read.

Loved it. I came in expecting a funny book, which I got, but did not expect to learn as much as I did. The author's misadventures through the former SSRs are at times charming, painfully awkward, and illuminating. Her self-deprecating approach distinguishes her from other travel writers who can often seem self-righteous and willfully culturally insensitive. She comes in with no illusions and copes as she can, often with hilarious, but sometimes jarring, results. Good travel read!