Contact with the Motherland

This Internet thing is fan-tastic. I was looking at a couple of US-based blogs and saw a story about an interesting episode of "Crossfire" last week -- something about Jon Stewart calling Tucker Carlson a dick on the air. Then I was able to actually link to a site where I could watch the whole hilarious episode on small-screen.

I felt like I was right back in DC, except I was in my office in Moscow.

The good life...

Time to start a series...things I will miss about Moscow.

1) Blogging via wi-fi from my kitchen while watching "Strana i Mir"

...to the ridiculous (the inside of the men's bathroom door at Pirogi on Nikolskaya Ulitsa). 

...to the mundane (OK, I confess this is actually a scrap of SPB - Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, to be exact)... 

The mobile phone camera enables one to capture images on the go...from the sublime (bust of A. S. Pushkin in the Pushkinskaya metro station)... 

Rainy Day Sunshine

I had one of those things happen today that makes you think, just for a second, that big cities get a bad rap and are actually delightful and nurturing places to live, and that people are fundamentally decent. It was raining, and I left my umbrella by the counter at the 36.6 drugstore which is located on the ground floor of our apartment building. When I came back 6 or 7 hours later, my umbrella was immediately returned to me by practically the first person I asked.

Duma

OK, the last photo is real, I took it from Ploshchad Revoliutsii looking through the scaffolding that is still surrounding the site of the Hotel Moskva demolition. But the imagery is too good to be real...

I know people have said Putin's got the Duma locked up nowadays, but this is a bit much... 

A true scrap of Moscow - the Dal'pico dried squid package, a common snack food here, which comes all the way from the Russian Far East to increase the thirst of Muscovites. Note the cartoon at the bottom with the archetypal Russian wife and the third guy from the left contemplating his beer and daydreaming of - what else? - shredded, dried, salty squid. Mmmm... when the package is full, his thought bubble (white in this image) is chock full of squid shreds. Brilliant.

Sunday

This is my first foray into the blogosphere, many thanks to Bram(http://ufannikaplan.blogspot.com) for the inspiration.

I haven't really decided whether this blog will have a point yet. Probably not, it will just be a place to store things that strike me as interesting or that I might want to share with others without emailing them.

Lorina and I have been living in Moscow for nearly 3 years now, and we won't be here forever, so there is no time like the present to start laying a trail of memories that we might one day follow back here like so many breadcrumbs. OK, so I'm feeling a bit soft-headed and sentimental. That's what you get for starting off Sunday in the banya and steaming the brain.

The work that brought us here is really not important for the purposes of this blog, fortunately it allows us to live downtown on Tverskaya, in the belly of the metropolis.