wash out

Spent much of sunday getting very wet in Gorky Park, at Design Act - billed as a design festival and exhibition, but washed out almost completely. Making the market stalls and furniture out of cardboard was probably a bad idea (and presenting a lecture where power cables + damp meant my laptop gave off electric shocks whenever you touched it was interesting to say the least) .

Dvor in the Springtime!

Just to show that the weather has definitely improved....(actually not sure this works; meant to illustrate beautiful bright sunlight!)

a city of yards

As the weather improves (this is an old photograph!) I have been increasingly taking shortcuts through the courtyards or dvors/ двора between buildings. These feel like a defining feature of Moscow; not just back gardens as in England, or central courtyards within blocks as in much of Europe, but a unruly set of confusingly linked spaces, flats, houses, factories, offices and misc. sheds interspersed with paths, tunnels through buildings, alleys, greenery, small parks and playgrounds and car-parking (of course).

It takes a bit of reconnoitering to work out how to cut through; the first time was at Christmas when a friend from London showed me how to shave the journey time of one of my 'standard' walks in half. I understand from a Russian colleague that taking these shortcuts has got harder as more and more new housing is fenced off into 'exclusive' enclaves. There is a also the problem of ownership and maintenance. Where I live, as already mentioned, the maintenance people are obviously paid in a way which means they are always looking for jobs (even when these don't really need doing) to justify their existence. But there are also places where nobody is doing anything, producing a patchwork of extreme neatness and relative squalor.

I like the yards. Makes for nicely random and unexpected walking, if and when you have the time to explore.

another unexpected drink..

This is Baikal, which really confused me when I first tasted it, since it tastes just like Coca Cola (well not just like, but quite close). Then I found out that that is what it is, a deliberate Soviet version, first made here in the 1960s, and named after the famous lake. It even gets its own page on Wikipedia, telling you exactly what is in it.

Meanwhile Baikal lake, which was famously pure and healthy (Pearl of Siberia, the Sacred Lake etc.,) is currently at the centre of a big environmental campaign to do with the local paper mill....

spring- cleaning

One of Mayor Luzhkov's proposed subbotniki (volunteer public working days) for spring cleaning the city - the 17th April - seems to have come and gone without much activity, at least not in my neck of the woods. But then, around here everything is already looking very spruced up. The many, many maintenance people who endlessly shovelled snow from roofs and grounds and blocked the pavement where icicles might fall, then broke up the remaining ice and swept away flooded drains and gutters, are now in gangs painting fences and kerb-stones around the local estates, picking up litter and blocking the path again, where it is now bits of (dampish) buildings that threaten to drop off.

The earth is still mainly blank, but grass is just beginning to show through and some neighbours are planting flowers. And the ubiquitous paint - which I remember from being here in 1970s - is still that really unpleasant green.