SUNDAYS AT VERONIKA’S: MIKE...

…had been visiting Veronika and her apartment-mate Marina for while and also been on an excursion with them to the (relatively) nearby city of Mariinsk. Mariinsk is Veronika’s hometown and one of the best-preserved “islands” in the gulag archipelago. Mike is mild-mannered guy, a retired photographer. Not an art photographer… he apparently took scientific photographs for textbooks in a lab (I think)… but that’s over anyway. He now works and volunteers part-time as a teacher in London’s state schools.

He shared his impressions of Siberia with the growing crowd: How everyone seemed much more trusting in Russia than in England; he was surprised people would trust strangers to pass their fare up to the driver on the bus. How the ill-kept the roads in Novosibirsk are… as he explained, if you see so much as a pothole in London, you can call a local office and they’ll send a road crew to fill it ASAP; that’s as compared with the canyons and ridges you have to negotiate on any side street in this city. He read some poems he’d written. He answered questions.

Most interesting to me was when he started talking about attitudes of ownership. Most people, according to Mike, had massive debts in England… most on their homes but some on something else. He said he had the sense that this wasn’t the case in Russia… that it seemed people didn’t buy things until they could pay for them. People in the room said yes: In Russia, if you haven’t paid for something in full yet, it’s not yours. It might just show how shamefully ignorant I am about the economy here, but this had never occurred to me as a major difference between Russian and Western economies. I knew credit cards were virtually never used here. I knew people lived with their parents well into their 20’s if they couldn’t get an affordable apartment. But I had the impression that any economic woe we were dealing with in the West would be not only present, but much worse here. I’ll look into this more…

After most of Veronika’s neighbors had left, I had a chance to talk with Mike personally. I’m sure this was one of the reasons Veronika invited me. Mike might have felt a bit left out if the Russian conversation started getting too fast or deep to translate…

I asked him about British politics, and if he’d be voting Tory or Labour in the next election—I’m never shy about asking these kinds of questions, and I always tell people they don’t have to answer if they don’t want, but they usually don’t mind. He said he’d probably be voting Conservative. I didn’t comment, didn’t want to preach or judge. I just said I understood that a lot of people had been fed up with the job Labour was doing, and he confirmed.

He said his biggest concern was with the growth in membership of far-right parties. He didn’t trust extremists like that, he said, but the strange thing was that if you actually listened to what they claimed to support, it didn’t sound that bad. They claimed not to want to stop immigration altogether, just control it. And he agreed it needed to be better-controlled, because England almost wasn’t England anymore.

Mike is open-minded person. He certainly got along well with Russians and seemed happy to spend time in the middle of Siberia, something that’s certainly not true of all Westerners you might meet. If this is how a kind-hearted, moderate voter in Britain thinks right now, it probably sheds some light on why far-right parties have been gaining ground in Europe lately. Mike is probably right: the younger generation is noticing the same demographic shifts in Britain that he is. But, being young, naïve, and hotheaded, they don’t understand (or don’t care) that when a neo-Nazi talks about the need for “controlling” immigration, it should be interpreted as a euphemism for something more extreme.

It makes you worry that the progress the West has made in attitudes about race is easily reversible, especially as memories fade and people forget what Nazis did when they were in power. Enlightened attitudes about ethnicity are supposedly one of the most important things that distinguish late capitalist European (and American) citizens from post-communist citizens… and it’s true, many Russians remain frankly, even innocently, racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic, if the ones I meet day-to-day are representative. But the Russians’ low-intensity, pervasive, traditional prejudices are just objectionable. I think reactionary racism, of the kind represented by the Western anti-immigrant parties, has the potential to be a lot more dangerous.

SUNDAYS AT VERONIKA'S

Flashback: The First Sunday

From the moment I showed up in the foreign language cathedra, the professors in the Department of Foreign Languages have referred to me as their “colleague” or “coworker.” I appreciate this respect but it makes me feel a little guilty… I’m working far fewer hours and have far fewer real responsibilities than any of them, so I don’t feel like I’ve earned the status and dignity implied by being a colleague…

But anyway, the first or second Sunday I was here (I forget which), one of my “colleagues” who has done a lot more to earn the title, Veronika, invited me to her place the next Sunday to speak English to some guests. As arranged, I met one of Veronika’s friends/former students at the main entrance to the academy. We introduced ourselves as we headed to his car. This was weeks ago, and I haven’t seen him since, so I forget his name. Pavel, I think. Anyway, I liked him; he was one of those big, bluff, unshakably cheerful young Russian men that seem to be ubiquitous here … until the Siberian winter hits in late October and everyone’s spirits plunge.

His car was a Japanese model. Almost every car-owner I know in Novosibirsk (which is not a representative cross-section, but still) has one—and they all have their steering wheels on the right side (which is the wrong side for Russian roads, just so that’s clear).
The car trip was of the kind I’ve learned to expect here but never gotten used to… we weaved through the lanes, within inches of other cars’ fenders, and barely a scythe’s-length ahead of the grim reaper... When we miraculously arrived at Veronika’s apartment, my driver was promptly sent off to schlep the next carload of people. To judge by the number of guests already in the apartment, he had been doing this all day. It had sounded like it was going to be casual and intimate, just some chatting among friends. But when I arrived, Veronika’s modestly-sized living room already had a classroomful of people in it, sitting on whatever surfaces were available—and more kept coming.

They had all showed up to hear two native English-speakers, me and this guy Mike Pritchard from London. He was a friend of Veronika’s and she had brought him to the academy a few days earlier, so I’d met him. Mike doesn’t have much Russian. He talked for a while in English. More on that in the next post.

Then Veronika asked me to talk in Russian for a bit to give all the Russians in the room a break. I explained who I was and what I was doing in Novosibirsk. Part of it, of course, was the additional research I’m expected to do on education and attitudes about citizenship here. I asked them a few questions about this… did a civics curriculum exist in Russian schools? Nope. No surprise. I had already heard this.

Veronika said I could switch to English, and I did. I asked about religion. How many people were not religious, how many were Christians, and how many had some other affiliation? There was a mix of non-affiliates and Christians… nothing else. Did it have any bearing on political views in Russia? The short answer, which everyone seemed to agree on, was “no.” Religion here was a private matter. I explained that the reason I asked was that I felt religion had too much of an influence on politics in the United States… that it should remain a private matter, but had entered into politics to a dangerous degree with the religious right. (I’m sure that won’t surprise anyone who reads this.)

People asked me for details, made their own comments… all very interesting, but with their knowledge of English and my knowledge of Russian, we could only go so deep. Still, it felt very satisfying to have drawn even these few broad contrasts between our cultures from this one discussion…

SATURDAY AT VERONIKA’S

I’ve decided to make a series out of these posts about going to Veronika’s apartment because (1) it’s always interesting and (2) it’s about to become a regular part of my schedule. When I was there six Saturdays ago giving a presentation about art, she asked me if I’d come and teach Spanish to her and a group of her neighbors and friends every week.

So, every Sunday at 13:00 (sometimes 12:00), I show up at Veronika’s apartment building in one of Novosibirsk’s less picturesque neighborhoods (which is, basically, all of them except for the triangle between Ploschad’ Lenina, the train station, and Krasnyj Prospekt metro station)… ride the elevator up sixteen floors, and teach my six faithful pupils how to say, “Nosotros vivimos en Rusia” and “Ksenia tiene los ojos azules.” This Sunday will be our third lesson… we’ll see if people coming. So far, they’re more dedicated and hardworking than my students at the academy.

Small Triumphs (Mostly over T.S.)

In the few weeks since going to Moscow, I’ve started feeling more confident about my teaching. I think it helped that I moved to topics that are more interesting to me personally.

In my Country Studies class, I had been trying to build a lesson plan around the passage from The Grapes of Wrath which describes burning crops as people starve. It’s written in pretty simple English, it’s one of the few canonical American novels I’ve actually read, and I figured I could draw interesting connections to other American memes (the “grapes of wrath” line in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Woodie Guthrie’s “Tom Joad,” Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” and the cover by Rage Against the Machine).

But, for whatever reason, this didn’t wow my students. Some didn’t get the politics implicit in Steinbeck (it was either too remote from their experience or impossible to understand in English). Some just didn’t like country music, so they didn’t like Woodie Guthrie. I was hoping they would take more to Springsteen or Rage (most Russians, like Americans, in this generation prefer rock to country), and tried a listen and fill-in-the-blank activity with them. But even with most of the lyrics in front of them, they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) pick out the words.

So I changed course. I told them about party politics in the United States, which was all new to them. We started with a discussion of how to define left-wing and right-wing, which yielded some interesting opinions (more on that in the next post). A few of my students stayed pretty listless, but there were some very encouraging days: I assigned a presentation to each of them on one political issue in the United States and each party’s position on it. On the first day of presentations, not only did the presenters find good information, but every student joined the discussion and had at least one comment to make… At the end of those 80 minutes, I was bursting with pride.

I didn’t know how to make sense of this very quick improvement, but I figured it might just be that these were, after all, students at an academy of public administration. Maybe they just took naturally to discussions of politics… I found out later that I was wrong. But this post is supposed to be about good things…

Another good thing happened around this time:

I mounted a successful democratic revolt against my tutor’s authoritarian style at my Russian lessons.

I had been getting more and more frustrated with Tatyana Sergeyevna’s techniques. She just didn’t seem to get what I needed… a native speaker to practice conversation with. I think she even knew she wasn’t helping me much, but her solution was to become more severely Soviet in her teaching style, rather than just relax and be my Russian conversation-buddy.

I know it will sound arrogant and bratty to say this, but it’s frustrating to feel like you’re smarter than your teacher. And no, I don’t think I’m smarter than TS in most respects, I just think I’m a better linguist. We once got into a stupid argument about subject and object where she tried to tell me that just because a noun was in nominative case in a sentence, that didn’t make it a subject. I’m sorry, but if you think that, then you don’t understand the concept of nominative case or subject. I used the example, «Им нравится мороженое», and she мороженое was an object, not a subject, in this sentence. I said that couldn’t be right, that мороженое was clearly the subject. She said no.

I said, “But, grammatically speaking…”
And she said, “Oh, well, yes. Grammatically speaking, you’re right, it is the subject.”

Um… what the hell else could I have meant?

It becomes even more obvious when I’m able to stump her with questions about grammar in her native language.

We were talking about the verb ждать once… (It means “wait for” or “await”) I mistakenly thought that it usually took the accusative case. So when we were looking at the expression «Ждать у моря погоды » (“Wait for weather by the sea”), I asked why “weather” was plural in this example. She told me it wasn’t, it was genitive singular. So I asked when the verb ждать took the accusative case, and when it took genitive. She said, “It always takes genitive,” and, as was her habit, adopted a Jehovah-like tone of authority in her voice and began rattling off a list of examples where ждать governed nouns in the genitive case, to show me how mistaken I was.

I said, “What about ‘Я жду подругу’?”

She stopped dead. Her eyes shifted side to side, her lips pursed. I had just used a perfectly grammatical example that directly contradicted her rule. She looked so flummoxed, I almost felt sorry. She dithered a bit, before saying, “Well yes, that’s the conversational variant, but it’s not the best way.” Yeah, right. Inflexible, Soviet-trained philologists might not know it, but any first-year linguistics student will tell you that prescriptive rules like this are total bunk. If everyone breaks a certain grammatical rule, then it has ceased to be a rule. And I bet even Pushkin would have said, “Я жду подругу”, not, “Я жду подруги.”

To do her credit, TS had enough self-doubt to look it up when she got home, and at our next lesson, she told me she was wrong. The verb could govern nouns in either accusative or genitive case. (Actually, she didn’t have to tell me, because I’d looked it up myself, but I didn’t tell her this.)

Another day, she was trying to teach me about command forms. She decided to give me an exercise where she would give me the infinitive, and I would give the command form. This is sometimes a bit tricky in Russian, but in my second year, I had learned a foolproof way to form the imperative of any verb by using the stem of the third-person plural form (они), and the stress from the first person singular (я). It’s in the В пути textbook and is a very useful technique.

So I asked if we could conjugate the verbs into these forms so I would know how to form the imperative. She said OK.

This worked fine for a while. But then she started asking me why I wanted to know these first- and third-person forms when the imperative was clearly related to the second-person forms (ты and вы); A command is “Go you!” or “Go thou!” not “Go they”. This was too complicated to explain, so I just told her it was the technique I had learned. She would have none of it and started telling me it was incorrect to form imperatives from anything other than the second-person conjugations.

This really pissed me off. The method I’d learned worked fine, but because she couldn’t understand the logic of it, she was making things more difficult for me. I cast around for examples to show her why my way was more helpful. Finally, I hit on the verb “бежать.” If you try to form the imperative from this second-person forms of бежать, you end up with бежи, which is wrong. If you try to form the imperative from the first- and third-person forms (the technique from В пути), you get беги, which is right.

TS considered this example for a minute, and then backed down. She let me use the В пути technique for the rest of the lesson.

OK, so this wasn’t exactly Gettysburg, but I had won an argument in Russian, and found that TS, however stubborn she seemed, was willing to listen to reason. It was good to know that I could actually convince her to ease up if I was persistent.

But even since then, she has still been an insufferable know-it-all. When I told her I would be taking a test at the end of our lessons to gauge my progress, she insisted we practice questions. She would ask, I would answer. And she stopped me to correct every mistake, as was her habit. I told her that when I’d taken my pre-test, the test-giver hadn’t stopped me to correct me, so TS refrained… for a while. She started again, and I told her, “You know, I think the people giving this test are more interested in fluency than flawless grammar.” She said, “Oh no, I think they’ll be more interested in grammatical errors.” And you would know this how, TS? All I could do was sigh and submit.

The lessons with TS just ended this past week, and I have to say I’m glad. Up until the end, I never got over the sense that the many, many evenings I spent with TS were basically a waste of time. I could have been chatting over tea with Dima or YeG, but instead I was doing stupid exercises out of a book, and talking to someone who wouldn’t let me complete a sentence. Her teaching just seemed not to be informed by any consistent sense of my level in Russian. One minute she would assign me an exercise designed to help me understand words I already knew, and the next minute she would assign one that was clearly meant for native Russian-speaking schoolchildren with a much bigger active vocabulary.

I’ll stop rambling. The only thing I have left to say is that Tatyana Sergeyevna is a lovely person but a bad teacher of her native language. I guess it could have been worse. She could have been a total ogre both personally and professionally. But I can’t say that, based on my experience, I would recommend the CLEA to the next Fulbrighter in Novosibirsk.

Евгения Горн (Genie Furnace)

Jevgenija Gorn (or Yevgeniya Gorn, hereafter Jevgenija, YeG, or Genie Furnace) is the only Russian person I’ve told about my blog. I guess it’s because, as much as I’ve liked people here, she’s the only one I feel like I can trust to be totally honest with me at this stage, and therefore the one person with whom I can be unself-consciously honest. And there are a few good reasons for that: One is that she’s been nice to me over the past few weeks, but a better reason is that she wasn’t that nice when she met me. She’s one of the few people who didn’t act over the moon to meet me on the day I was first introduced to everyone in the Foreign Languages Cathedra (Кафедра Иностранных Языков, called InYaz for short). When I first saw YeG, she was animatedly discussing some scheduling problem with Natal’ja Mikhajlovna Grishina, the head of InYaz. She had a harassed expression on her face, which I’ve seen a lot since then.

Natal’ja Mikhajlovna had invited me into her office, and she stopped Yevgeniya to start proposing a tentative schedule to me and another faculty member in English. Although YeG was in on this discussion, she never looked at me, and only used Russian when asked for her input. The expression on her face just got more exasperated. After that conversation, I went out into an adjoining room and was getting ready to leave, and YeG came out and introduced herself in very good English. She said we would need to discuss preparations for class, and she would need to meet with me to talk about it, so we agreed on a time and place. She said sorry for being rude (I waved it away) and told me she was normally a nice person but had a lot of reasons to be stressed, and I said it was OK because she seemed stressed. I said some of this in Russian, and she approved of my accent, which made me proud.

I was worried that it was a little shady to be setting up meetings deliberately in the absence of the department head, but when we did meet, she clarified for me that she was going to share/supervise my teaching for one of the subjects that had been assigned to me. And this time she was a lot nicer, not that I’d been too fazed the first time I met her. I figured it was good to know I’d met someone who would be candid if she had something bugging her. It’s understandable, too. Yevgeniya is only 24 (that’s just a year older than me! My God, I’m old) and in her last year as a junior teacher which, as I gather, is a pretty stressful thing to be in Russia. You basically make about enough to pay for transportation between home and work, feed yourself if you’re lucky… and that’s about it. And they’re usually completing a thesis at the same time to become senior teachers. Plus you have senior teachers delegating tasks to you left and right, which may have to do with their classes, or their research… Basically, I think Yevgeniya is pretty pleased that this is the last year she will have to take all this crap.

As planned, we’ve been sharing teaching duties for the “Listening” groups of second-year students going for an extra qualification as translators. To get this qualification, they need supplemental classes in each area of language skill (I think the division is speaking, listening, writing, and reading). It’s been going pretty well. Yevgeniya is a good source of moral and professional support. She’s gradually having me teach one of the groups more and more on my own, and offering advice to help me improve. And it is genuinely helpful advice, not the busybody variety which is so common here. The one drawback is that it’s very tempting to speak English with her, as her English is better than my Russian. It usually isn’t a problem if I start the conversation in Russian, because she’s very patient while I’m groping for words, so I’ll just have to be stricter with myself.

“Gorn” is a German name. The nice thing about German surnames in Russian is they don’t change by gender and they don’t decline. In Russian it means “furnace”, but it’s probably derived from another language, because it’s just like horno (“oven”) in Spanish, and that’s too close to be a coincidence. So maybe if “gorn” were a Slavic word, Yevgeniya might be Gornov, but since she’s not, I don’t have to worry about case when I’m talking about her in Russian. Another plus.

At the chalkface

I should really say “at the dry-erase face” because most of the classrooms have white-boards with pre-dampened rags and erasers… no markers though. Teachers bring their own from the department. I’ve definitely left behind at least one dry-erase marker in a classroom. I’m not supposed to do that. Tsk tsk.

My experiences as a teacher so far have been pretty mixed, but I’m feeling better about it in general now than I was before leaving for Moscow. My last class before that trip was in the early afternoon on October 2^nd, a Friday. I had instructed my group of second-year students to give oral reports about Malcolm X. Even though they were supposed to have prepared these at home, I knew most of them would have, as usual, neglected their homework completely. So, rather than subject one student to a humiliating public punishment for something of which the whole class was guilty, I decided to split the class into groups, have each group prepare a speech together, and then choose its most ready and able member to actually deliver it.

Even after I made these allowances, the first two speeches which turned out to be just shy of abysmal, and the last one was read (not even recited by memory) straight from the information I’d given them as a guide. Grammar-wise, content-wise, style-wise... they just obviously hadn’t prepared. I know I was more visibly disappointed than I’d ever been in front of them, but it was hard to tell if they would react by getting huffy or by stepping up their work. I just cut the last student off, and told everyone sternly that I was very cross and they’d all better be prepared next week or else… Or else what? Time-out? No recess? Principal’s office? The thing is, I have very little say in their final grades. In fact, that group of second-years is one of the ones I’m sharing with another cathedra-member, a 24-year-old junior teacher, Jevgenija (of whom more in the following post). She knows and I know and the students know that she’s the one who will have the final word in how they’re evaluated, and she couldn’t be there that day.

I was worried that I’d already been too lax with them and couldn’t credibly change that dynamic now. I’d already noticed that most of the students I’d taught or guest-taught greeted me in the halls by saying “Privjet”, which, generally, is too familiar for a student to use with a teacher. I would feel ridiculous telling them to address me formally, especially since my social life is already uneventful enough that I don’t want to discourage people from being friendly. Is that unprofessional? Maybe not if the goal is “mutual understanding”, as stated in the Fulbright literature. But anyway, I wondered how I could possibly motivate them if they just saw me as a peer.

Also discouraging was the embarrassingly low rate of attendance at my lectures that week. Only two students had showed up to the elective course I’m teaching on the American party system. (That was out of fourteen in the whole class, which seems to be a normal class size here.)

I’m feeling a little better about these things now. This week I had nine students come (actually not a bad showing) to the same class where I’d had two the week before, and although attendance was down for the second-year group (the oral reports group), their work was much better that day. It might have been because the other teacher, Jevgenija, came and observed that day, but I like to think it’s just because they didn’t want to disappoint me again.

I’ve also observed some other teachers’ classes, and I feel like I’m getting a better sense for what makes these students tick. We’ll see if that wisdom does me any good by the time I post again.

Moscú, güey (In-Country Orientation)

A “turkey drop” is apparently a favorite technique among Moscow robbers that exploits a foreigner’s sense of chivalry. The procedure is to drop a bag or wallet full of money in front of a well-meaning naïf, wait for him to pick it up to return it to its owner, then go back to claim it. Another guy comes up, saying he’s a militia officer and asking to see your wallet to make sure you haven’t taken any of the other guy’s money, and maybe demanding to look at your documents into the bargain. Amounts are discussed, your wallet gets passed around, they hand it back, and you leave only to realize two minutes later that your own wallet has been cleaned out and the nasty thieves are long gone.

I’m glad I learned this the easy way last Monday, and I guess that’s the kind of thing in-country orientation is good for, even though I won’t be in Moscow, and I’m not sure the turkey drop is a popular technique out my way. For all I know, the Siberian thieves have their own tricks for unsuspecting marks like me. I also learned a lot about the Russian economy while I was there. They gave us a lot of general background on conditions in the RF… and that was very interesting, but I’m also not sure how or if any of it will help me adapt to life in Novosibirsk.

Actually, it’s a little absurd to call the three hours I spent in the U.S. Embassy last Monday “orientation” after the five weeks I had already spent negotiating the tortuous straits of class-scheduling, tutor-locating, Russian pedagogical method, and so on at home (that is—Novosibirsk). As I explained to a few people in Novosibirsk who asked what my conference in Moscow was about: “It’s called orientation, but in my opinion I’ve already oriented myself pretty well here” (sorry for the clumsy translation… actually, it probably sounds just as stupid in my Russian).

Anyway, I was in Moscow for two days before the actual meeting. As soon as we got word of the date (October 5^th, a Monday), Helen (the ETA in Krasnoyarsk for you outsiders) put the word out on facebook that she wanted to fly into Moscow early and spend the weekend there. She invited any and all ETAs to join her. I didn’t have to think about it too hard. Helen is an Oberlin alumna and… uh… even cooler than that normally implies. She was also one of my winter term students a-way back in 2006, and probably the one who made me feel best about my teaching.

Four other ETAs and I would eventually decide to meet up early with Helen and stay at the same hostel near Kitaj-Gorod. I’m glad now that I jumped on that bandwagon, because the weekend in Moscow turned out to be exactly what I needed. That’s not to cast aspersions on Novosibirsk’s irresistible charms. As I’ll explain in the next post, I was just feeling discouraged about my work there, and it was good to get a break.

It’s hard to say what, in particular, felt so good about this break. We didn’t see much (or, frankly, anything) outside the normal tourist spots, unless you count the inside of the U.S. Embassy. In fact, I’d be sort of surprised if everyone there agreed with me about how enjoyable it was, so don’t take my impressions as gospel. But that exhilarating feeling of being so close to so much history came back when I was in Moscow… it’s one of those things I miss from St. Petersburg that’s lacking in Novosibirsk. I liked the bustle in the metro, which just makes Novosibirsk look sleepy. It was also great to finally see (I know that’s a split infinitive, sue me) the old Tretyakov Gallery, which lived up to the hype (I didn’t see the new one, but that wasn’t a top priority).

I saw Lenin in the mausoleum. One of the other ETAs told me he’s submerged in a chemical bath of which one of the ingredients is paraffin every eighteen months… which I just confirmed on the incontestable authority of a book about mummification on google books. He’s probably more wax now than flesh. So did I really see Lenin, you may well ask, or just a big Lenin-shaped candle? A question for the philosophers…

And it was good to compare notes with the other ETAs in person. I’m not, as it turns out, the only one feeling discouraged about the pace of my progress in speaking Russian, or finding that most of the written material I’ve tried using is way beyond my students’ level (even with supposedly advanced students), or concerned about my ability to motivate them, or trying to answer two different departments’ demands/requests simultaneously, or subject to spells of loneliness (although those have gotten rarer as the lecture hours, class visits, English club hours, Russian homework, and so on have accumulated on my schedule).

One of my friends just wrote me asking for more pictures. Moscow is the most picturesque place I’ve been in this country this time around, so I hope you like what I got from there, Jon… Those statues you see at the top of this post are depictions of Russian fairy tales in the fountains at Manezhnaya Square, put up in the’ 90’s. Kitschy, yes, but as an outsider, I liked seeing them and identifying the ones I knew. Anyway, I don’t feel like I have anything very fresh to say about Moscow, so just enjoy the pictures if this post has gotten boring...