Trekhprudny Lane

Soon I guess I'll overcome this discontent and remember that the experience is what you make it etc but for now I am brimming with hate for Moscow and counting the hours until we leave for Spain. A sure way to make the time pass slowly. But I cannot help it. The same sights, sounds, smells... the seasons change but the city's mood never lifts. What a profoundly sullen bunch these Russians are. Every day the same: the men, thuggish, standing around, or sitting in their idling cars, smoking, growling low into their phones, and the painted women, bang-banging down the streets in crippling shoes, tarted up (once and for all, why?) and radiating seemingly inexhaustible disdain (or the appearance of... but what does it matter?) as if magazine pages must be copied completely, from the models' toes up to and including their very expressions. Every third car a Mercedes, but the so-called public restroom in the park has neither toilet paper nor toilets. For months our neighbors have passed us, silent as ghosts, on the stairs, and disappeared into their double-bolted, soundproofed apartments. Robot-like, they emerge from their doors perfectly coiffed and tightly buttoned up; there is no juggling of keys and bags, no coffee to go, no goodbyes at the door, no spilling out of life from inside their homes. No opening, no opportunity, in other words, for empathy with strangers. That and the brown air and near-complete lack of green space make this is an unhealthy place in almost every sense. It seems to me that most of what is human and joyful was somehow, a some point, stamped out: spontaneity, blind trust, even clumsiness. 

Everything and everyone is guarded. Over time that becomes terribly wearing.