I haven't been out much these past three days - just a few quick runs to a nearby store and to a nearby Lebanese café - but here're my first impressions of Moscow:

- Compared to St. Pete, there's no dog shit to step into...

- People in the street look so average compared to those in our St. Pete neighborhood: there, every third person could be mistaken for an actor rehearsing for some underworld role in a Dostoyevsky-based theater production; here, I've sighted Mark Rozovskiy today, the director of one of the small yet renowned theaters located nearby...

- All we could see from our four windows in St. Pete were our building's roof, the neighbors' windows and the courtyard; here, there's the huge city outside the four (yes, again) windows: a recently renovated synagogue, the TASS building, one of the box-like buildings on Noviy Arbat, the roofs stretching out all the way to the horizon, the Stalin-time "skyscraper" I posted a photo of yesterday, a business center with its name unchanged - World Trade Center, written in huge letters in English, lit up in bright yellow at night...

- I caught myself thinking today that if something horrible happened here again, I'd no longer be able to pretend it's somewhere far away, somewhere in Moscow - because I am in Moscow now, again...