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On 19 September I flew from Moscow to St Petersburg, then on to Blagoveshchensk with an hour- long stopover in Novosibirsk.


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Blagoveshchensk

Map

September 20–22, 2005

China is indecently close — just across the river. I really wanted to go over there for a few hours, but didn’t have enough time.


Blagoveshchensk is full of Chinese people anyway.

Shopping centre
Celestial
Huafu


Chinese fair


At the local market blonde women sell caviar while all of the other traders sell clothes and mobile phones at criminally low prices.


The city is utterly uninteresting from an architectural standpoint. It’s impossible to get lost in it — it’s built like a grid. From time to time you see attempts to inject some variety into the landscape.


Everyone recognises the font they use for patriotic propaganda from Chinese-made canned meat tins.

The Declaration on state sovereignty of the Russian Federation was adopted on 12 June


You also get maverick patriots.


Since there are hardly any traffic lights in the city, particular care has gone into the road signs. In the city centre there’s a sign the size of a real-life pedestrian:


Right behind it they laying the pavement. The road workers drew the attention of passersby with a handmade poster, its meaning shrouded in mystery. But it certainly did grab your attention, which the workers were inordinately pleased about:

Stop
Fucking
My
Dick


Public service advertising.

Break the speed limit
And you’ll have to switch modes of transport


Rubbish bins.


Civilisation’s achievements come in clusters here.


The style of the street signs is borrowed from the area inside Moscow’s ring road.


Everything else is unabashedly Chinese.

Chinese cuisine


Or maybe not quite everything.

Amur bready bread bread


Some people actually have their knickers in a twist over this.

Men of Russia
SOBER UP, MISFORTUNE
Has befallen your home


But the Chinese have a numerical advantage.



Onwards to Khabarovsk by train.

september

Around Pirogovka street

september

Odessa

september 2005

Blagoveshchensk

←  Ctrl →
september

Khabarovsk

september

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk








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