MoscEthnoExp

Map

October 10–31, 2012

An expedition through the city where I was born and where I’ve lived all my life makes for a most compelling adventure.

Moscow is gorgeous even in the fall.

Particularly in the fall.

A dirt alley.

A paved alley.

A back alley.

All the curbs and fences in Moscow are customarily painted green and yellow (like in Addis Ababa or Tehran). Once a year, when green and yellow leaves fall to the ground, nature forgives man’s lack of taste.

A wood platform.

Pretty concrete latticework.

A footpath.

A garden.

The manholes of Moscow are laconic and proud. B stands for водопровод, or water supply.

TC is тепловая cеть—district heating.

Канализация—sewer.

A rare specimen: a pre-revolutionary manhole cover which once belonged to the Swedish-Danish-Russian Telephone Joint-Stock Company—now known as Ericsson. The company’s emblem was an electrical connector with thunderbolts.

When the Soviet government nationalized the bourgeois telephone company, it kept the electrical connector as the emblem for the People’s Commissariat for Post and Telegraph. This cover is from the 1930s.

A life cut short.

A digger.

In the vicinity of Bolshaya Gruzinskaya and Malaya Gruzinskaya Street.

In the side streets around Old Arbat.

Smolenskaya Street.

Tsvetnoy Boulevard.

Pokrovka Street.

Strelka (the former Red October factory).

Near Nikitskiye Vorota.

Tverskoy Boulevard.

Prospekt Mira.

Downtown.

Fresh asphalt.

Three Station Square.

The Hippodrome.

Red Square.

A golf club.

Gorky Park.

I hate tiny dogs in outfits.

Malaya Dmitrovka.

Hermitage Garden.

Volochaevskaya Street.

VDNKh (the All-Russia Exhibition Centre).

Izmailovo.

I love exploring obscure corners of Moscow.

Speaking of corners, the latest development in road surface markings in the capital is these curves painted at turns and archway exits. As long as the island is kept clear, everyone benefits.

And here’s a handicapped parking pictogram—one of the ugliest in the world. It’s as if the task of drawing it was assigned to an asphalt spreader operator. And this isn’t just a one-off case: this hideous pictogram is the standard and appears all around the city.

Bus stops are denoted with yellow zigzags.

A zebra crossing.

The zebra crossings on the Boulevard Ring are made out of paving stones. You can always hear when you’re driving over them.

All of downtown is outfitted with special tactile pavers for the blind (they’re put in completely at random because no one really understands what they’re for). Meanwhile, Moscow still lacks any regulations requiring curb ramps at crosswalks.

Clothing for dogs. VVC Pavilion 12.

Moscow traffic signs are traditionally mounted on cast-iron wheels bolted to the sidewalk.

The popular code for a reserved parking spot.

Fire truck markings in every courtyard. No parking allowed in this spot.

A speed bump.

The city has begun painting pedestrian underpass steps with special non-skid paint, which will be very helpful come winter. But it’s completely incomprehensible why only the edges of the steps have some paint smeared on them. In order to compare on which part it’s easier to break your legs?

Typical floor grates in an underpass.

Oh look, and here’s the first snow.

An old car graveyard.

An office building.

A flea market.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman monument.

The Moskva River.

Old cast iron steps, which haven’t lost any of their functionality or attractiveness over the course of a hundred years.

Contemporary steps, which reflect the standard and quality of everything that’s made today.

The beautiful rooftops of Moscow.

The skyscrapers of the Moscow City complex.

A crazy dog lady has 70 dogs living in her apartment. She’s lucky: one of her neighbors is deaf, the other neighboring apartment is vacant.

A coronary stenting procedure in progress. The doctor points out the blood clot while the nurse attempts to beat her high score on her cellphone.

A dispatcher for one of the metro lines maps out train traffic.

Eight people drove around Moscow in two cars for three weeks, spending each night at a different hostel or hotel, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at different establishments. Eight people had a good time. It’s time to leave the expedition vehicles behind and descend underground. It’s time to go home.

A metro entrance and exit are very easy to tell apart. The entrance always has a bunch of advertisements on the sidewalk outside.

The sidewalk outside an exit is covered not only with ads but also with gum, which exiting passengers spit out after it loses its taste during the ride.

We enter.

Purchase a ticket from the most user-unfriendly ticket vending machine in the world. The ticket is discarded immediately after going through the turnstile.