Sans titre

I've been living in my birth-town, Moscow, for over a month. Yet, I've been unable to produce one measly travelogue.

Of course, I've been blogging elsewhere (albeit, very infrequently) in general, and, the amount of time I spend in front of the computer screen in my regular life due to work and dissertation research turns me off the idea. More important, my other trips abroad, whether to the Old World or the Orient, have been rigorous, but leisurely.

By contrast, neither the smoke-filled stairwells, rusty 1950s elevators, and the lack of heat in various storage facilities of the federal archives of the Russian Federation, nor the daily multi-hour commutes in sardine can-packed subway trains, while being regularly smacked by my laptop bag and impatient travellers alike, feels all that...well....leisurely.

And yet, this megalopolis, in which Starbucks is 3x as expensive as in North America, but which the Old Arbat pigeon polulation can somehow afford, deserves a few raw blog-style sketches. Besides, I plan to revist Patriarshy ponds soon, and I'd rather not anger the mysterious foreigner, who's undoubtedly been back people-watching since his last stay -- at least once or twice.