I feel like I've been falling down on the blogging job for a while now - something like 6 posts in the past 6 weeks, which just doesn't cut it. Happily, we're now fully moved into temporary quarters - a cozy apartment right next door to the Aeroport metro station. I'm blissfully unemployed and have caught up on sleep following a virtually sleepless few days in St. Petersburg last week, and I have some time free for blogging before undertaking some more travel: to Kaluga this weekend, then to Uzbekistan for a week, and then to Moldova for 5 days or so, which means I'll then have the middle two weeks of August in Moscow to say a long good-bye to the city before leaving for Washington on August 22.
My only complaint about our new Aeroport location (that's actually just the name of the metro station, it's mercifully nowhere near the airport) is the lack of easy internet access in the neighborhood. The Zen Coffee around the corner has outrageously priced - 120 rubles, or about $4, per hour - and buggy wi-fi provided by the Time Online franchise. Happily, I remembered a place I had noticed several months ago that had free wi-fi - the Moka-Loka cafe near the picturesque Novoslobodskaya metro station - and a visit here today has shown that they still haven't caved to market pressure and started charging, as so many of the once-free Moscow hotspots have. Let's hope that holds for another month and a half at least.
So, I'm sitting here with a bird's-eye view of the intersection of Dolgorukovskaya St. and Selezniovskaya St. (2 blocks from my favorite banya, in fact), and the fact that a vicious thunderstorm has just broken and all of the passers-by are sprinting for cover and hurriedly deploying umbrellas is doing nothing to dampen my summer spirits.
I'm trying to take advantage of the free wi-fi to upload a bunch of photos for this blog and for my other neglected project, Moscow Graffiti. Probably I'll get the most recent ones up first, but hopefully I'll have time this summer to post some of the better photos from this spring as well, before I'm swallowed up by the demands of my first year of law school.
2 comments:
Glad to see that you're back blogging again.
As for free WiFi in Moscow, check out this yandex directory. 142 places so far.
Also, a little birdie told me that WiFi at the Belorusskaya TimeOnline is currently free.... They're apparently having some problems with their login system there and haven't gotten around to fixing it. Just walk in, turn on your notebook, and you're connected. And that's only two metro stops from you.
Tom, belated thanks for this useful list. Free wifi is an amazing thing.
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