Month: August 2006

My card reader is officially Missing In Action. I can’t find it. I remember taking it with me to Russia, but I never used it there, or even took it out of the bag. It’s not in the bag. I’ve checked all my bags, and I can’t find it. I looked for it all over the place, and it’s not there either.

I asked my hardware supplier brother to find me a new one. He brought a brand new universal USB card reader today, and I am dumping pictures as we speak. Thanks bro!

It looks like there’s only about 300 images from my trip, half of which or so will be censored and deleted. The rest of them will take me some time to postprocess. At least, I managed to download them to my laptop.

There’s a lot of building going on in Russia. As I’ve been told, people are afraid to lose their money in yet another economic crisis, so they invest in real estate. Real estate prices are already crazy, and still growing.

Moscow seems to have more building activity than any other city that I’ve seen on my trip. It’s a 24×7 process. Especially in the center of the city, where the land is extremely expensive. I was also surprised by how clean the process is. Before the old building is demolished it is wrapped around with the green construction net, and there’s no rubbish or dust coming out. When the green net goes down, a new building is revealed to the public eye.

In Togliatti there’s plenty of construction too. Half of the buildings look very fresh, like they were finished only yesterday, and the other half looks like they are almost ready, and will be operational tomorrow. Most of the new buildings, at least in Togliatti, are constructed with red brick, and not concrete or any other technology. Probably the bricks are cheaper there.

Another interesting thing about construction is the way the new buildings are connected with the old ones to save some money on communications. As I said before, there is usually a lot of spaces between buildings, especially those that were built during the Soviet era. What they do now is insert another building between the old two, connecting it all from wall to wall. And if the old buildings were 9 stores high, the new block is usually higher – 14 or 16 stores or so. It also goes inside too, instead of being flat, along the street. I understand the economic reason of building so, but it still looks pretty odd to me.

With all these building and construction, it’s surprising to see the lack of parking space. Soviet city planning calculated for about one automobile per one thousand people. That’s by far off today, but it seems that no changes were done to this characteristic. Huge buildings with hundreds of flats and thousands of inhibitants have less than ten parking places. And there is all these space covered with grass and gravel around the building. That’s just ridiculous!

One other thing that I’ve noticed different from Russia of ten years ago and Cyprus of current days is graffiti. Loads of it. The center of Moscow is somewhat clean off it, but there is plenty of it on walls and fences in suburbian areas. Togliatti has it throughout the city. There’s a bit less of it in Mezhdurechensk, but still enough to notice it here and there.

Most of the graffiti signs look cool. There’s art and color to it. Images, logos, names, things like that. Some advertising companies use graffiti as well. I’ve seen a lot of examples of promotions and contact information done in a nicely designed way on concrete fences. Looks interesting.

Of course, there are some racist and fascist signs too, as usual. But most of them are too small and unoriginal to even be noticed, let alone taken seriously.

I remember taking a few pictures of graffiti walls in Moscow – we’ll see if any of those pictures made it through, after I’ll find my card reader. Or get a new one (I am already considering this option).

Cyprus is a somewhat small island. But it still has plenty of unoccupied land, even in the middle of cities. With current prices on real estate it looks surprising.

But when I came to Russia, my perspective on spaces changed a bit. There is just so much more space in Russia! Kilometeres upon kilometers of untouched fields and forests. The feeling is also true for inside the cities. Buildings are far away from each other. There are empty spaces everywhere.

Travelling by plane, I saw hours and hours of unoccupied land. It’s somewhat hard to digest it – so much I’ve got used to the distances in Cyprus.

Beer was everywhere. And everyone was drinking it – boys and girls, men and women, grandpas and grandmas. Everyone. And everywhere. From the early morning hours on the way to work til late night before bed. People were out on the streets, going each their own way, carrying an open bottle or a can of beer in hand, sipping constantly. That looked mad.

I mean I am a beer fan myself, but there should be some cultural rules to the drink too. I have no problem with drinking in the bars and pubs or a few pints at home. Hell, I can even understand enjoying a pint at lunch or comprehending some magnificent view. But running around the town, drinking from morning till night – that’s way too much.

The only exception though was my native city of Togliatti – a pleasant surprise. Municipal laws allow for draught beer to be sold only in a places that have tables, walls, and toilets. Also, drinking in public places is forbidden and enforced! The fine is 800 roubles (about $35 USD), which is a lot (yup, with average salary around $200 USD). Police patrols everywhere, not only the main streets, but everywhere and frequently.

Also, there is a federal law about beer advertising. People cannot appear in the beer ads. That has something to do with people associating themselves with those who are in beer ads. Or so they say. In reality, more restrictions on what can and cannot appear in the ads make ads more creative and interesting. There’s plenty of beer ads on TV and most of those short videos are nicely done and a pleasure to look at, even over and over again.