YekaterinburgMapNovember 14–16, 2004 Phone booth.  Trendy phone box.  Rubbish bin.  The only good logo on all of Lenin Street. 
I EAT There are bad logos on every second house the entire length of Lenin Street (this isn’t the number for directory enquiries, it’s city’s age).  Yekaterinburg Kind woman.  Ad made by police force creatives who’ve completely lost the plot. 
Pick a profession, A fantastic teaching aid for anyone studying the basics of how perception works (notice the circular message).  Our city’s ice cream A monument to Sverdlov, a prominent Bolshevik, suffering from megalencephaly in this instance.  The most decorated factory.  Visual culture. 
We work round-the-clock! The complete absence of any road markings is striking. Yekaterinburg is the only city in the world with a metro, but no double yellow lines, zebra crossings, or other attributes of urban excess. There’s no need for road markings since the entire city is covered with an even, one centimetre thick layer of slush — pedestrians and motorists mark up the roads as themselves as they move along them.  At the metro entrance they sell metal tokens marked “Moscow metro”. Ads play on a loop right there in the stations (this is the true definition of spam, just like those “Denham’s” toothpaste ads in “Fahrenheit 451”). Much of the following day was taken up by the lecture I gave. I spent a pleasant evening bowling, something I am just about as skilled at as I am at tipping the contents of my rubbish bin into the chute — all of it ends up on the floor of the communal hallway. * * * On the way back we flew out at seven a.m. and landed in Vnukovo airport at approximately the same time. Two buses stood next to the passenger stairs. The air hostess explained that the one on the left was heading for metro, the one on the right — to the railway station. I opted for the one on the left. The bus rode to the edge of the aerodrome, past the boom barrier, and arrived in front of Yugo-Zapadnaya metro station just thirty minutes later. Not stopping off at the airport —clever idea. * * * This part of Moscow is so revolting at this time of year and hour of the day that I didn’t even bother getting my camera out. All I did was buy two puff pastries and canned lemon iced tea. |
