Hitchcock, a block away from Kremlin:

Living next to a church in Moscow (click to enlarge):

An old, wooden building in downtown Moscow (click to enlarge):

Traffic in downtown Moscow is horrible. And now that the weather is finally so nice, this comes as something of a shock, somehow.

But - I've seen a middle-aged traffic cop today who was smiling a genuine, human smile to a cute young girl on a moped, who, for some reason, had smiled to him first as she passed him on Bolshaya Nikitskaya.

I've also seen a traffic cop today who shouted an unusually friendly "ay-ay-ay" to a woman who decided not to bother walking all the way to the intersection and was instead crossing the street illegally, right in front of his car.

And, almost sadly (in this context, at least), I've seen a traffic cop who was talking on his cell phone about his kid's cold and low-grade fever.

An elderly, fat, homeless mutt was running down the dusty street, thinking: "I have survived. I have survived winter."

A tiny, young Yorkshire Terrier was riding a bicycle down by the river, squeezed into a leather bag that her gorgeous owner had tied to the rack over the rear wheel. They were going very fast. The poor thing was thinking: "I hope I'll survive this ride. I hope I'll survive."

All this on the second truly warm day of spring 2011 in Moscow. The 55th day of the actual, calendar, spring.

This note is pasted on one of the first-floor windows of an old building on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, which, I assume, houses the Moscow city branch of the Russian Writers' Union.

It reads like something from the 1980s, very sour in a Soviet kind of way, very pitiful. Very uninspiring.

But they mean well, so I wish them to succeed. Or - I hope they'll feel as if they've succeeded.

Internet is a path to the reader!

The Moscow City Organization of the Writers' Union of Russia is launching a program aimed at creating a centralized system of personal WEB-pages [sic] for writers who are members of the MCO WU of Russia.

From now on, every writer will have an opportunity to post on the Internet, under the aegis of the MCO WU of Russia, [his/her] biographic and bibliographic data, information on awards and achievements, as well as [his/her] works!

An application form and instructions on how to fill it out are available at the Secretariat of the MCO WU of Russia (2nd floor, room 18 - Conference Hall, phone # [...]). Completed forms should be returned to the Secretariat of the MCO WU of Russia or sent electronically to this electronic address: [...]

Municipal workers' revenge :)

In addition to this wonderful French site for kids, Marta really likes this Polish one. The ongoing Russian Orthodox Church luxury scandal has reminded me of her concern for Jesus and his family after she had played a Christmas baby Jesus game: "They are so poor, they live in a barn," she told me sadly, then added hopefully, "Did they become better off later?"

Moscow's downtown buildings, just as Kyiv's, don't get treated nicely when it comes to preserving their initial height...

This is Moscow a few days ago:



And this is Moscow today - the first lovely spring day, but a bit too much dog shit everywhere still:



It'll only be getting better from now on, hopefully.

8 PM - and the sun is still up there!

Lovely when we switch to summer time - even if winter's still here.

And it is still here, totally:





At the market today, I learned from one vendor that in the North Caucasus, for example, spring is already so far advanced that their wild garlic/cheremsha season is now over. The stuff that I bought today is from Moldova:



My two posts on cheremsha, weather and geography from 2009 are here and here.

It snowed on April 19 back then.

End of March in Moscow:

Sunny outside. A pot-bellied neighbor is smoking on the balcony, with no shirt on. As if it's spring already. Must be one of those brave Orthodox Christians who swim in icy water in January, pretending it's River Jordan.

Three minutes later, a snowstorm. A snow wall. Or, as if some prankster has thoroughly painted our window white, thick white.

Two minutes later, sunny again.

Ten minutes later, snowing again.

And on, and on, and on.

A bus stop at Nikitsky Boulevard, between 7 and 8 PM a few days ago, cars moving really slowly, no trolleybus in sight.

A Bentley parks in the middle of the no-parking zone by the bus stop. A stocky, tough-looking, middle-aged driver in a suit gets out, lights a cigarette and starts walking back and forth, occasionally glancing in the direction of a fancy clothing store nearby. Naturally, he has an air of superiority about him.

Five minutes later, a girl emerges from the store and walks towards the Bentley, accompanied by a bodyguard. She looks typically classy; he looks a few degrees tougher than the driver.

The driver's back in the car, the girl's in the backseat, the bodyguard shuts the door after her, but stays outside. The car begins to back out.

But, the traffic jam's still there - and a white SUV is right behind the Bentley.

The Bentley's driver begins to honk like crazy, but the SUV's not moving. For one thing, it's got no space around it to move away to.

Suddenly, the girl's bodyguard gets visibly jittery. He gesticulates to the driver, orders him to use the space in front of him to get out on the road, instead of honking and trying to back all the way out. The driver obeys, the bodyguard gets inside the car, and off they go, slowly but steadily.

When the Bentley's gone, we, the folks at the bus stop, get to see what had unnerved the bodyguard: the white SUV sports a Saudi flag decal on one of its windows - a Quranic inscription and a sword, ominous stuff in the context of Moscow - and the driver doesn't look like a tiny little man, either, judging by the size of his hand (see picture below).



Could be some Kadyrov's buddy, and, in any case, definitely not the type who'd tolerate all that honking business.

P.S. Or, it could be that the guy in the SUV is totally harmless, has nothing to do with any of the thugs, had bought his car somewhere in the Emirates, already with the decal, and decided not to take it off, because, as we've seen, the message it sends works really well.

Like a ladybug with its protective coloration.

P.P.S. Aposematism is the word: "Aposematism has been such a successful adaptation that harmless organisms have repeatedly evolved to mimic aposematic species [...]."

:)

I don't have enough abstract thinking skills or attention span for philosophy, but I've realized that the way we are dealing with one highly unpleasant situation that arose last week is actually a good illustration of something known as "moral relativism": we all have different responses to the same situation; our own response would differ from those of others if we were those others ourselves; similar situations in the past, which did not affect us so directly, had us react differently than the way we are reacting to this particular situation now. Whatever. Hard to say if I'm on my way to emotional recovery or am heading in the other direction right now, but, either way, that sentence above is too much for Twitter, and that's why I'm posting it here.

:)

Bilingualism at a public bathroom in Kyiv - a request (in Russian and Ukrainian) to please not dump objects, as well tea and coffee, into sinks: