What I think about while I'm pounding the pavement:
Another pastry kiosk... smells pretty good... stop or skip?
There goes another pair of stilettos. How do they do it? I mean in terms of sheer physical stamina? And it's curious how young Russian women come across more readily as ingenues, in the best sense, though their style of dress is much more overtly sexy than that of women in the States. and micro-minis abound, but there is an innocence, or maybe earnestness would be a better term, to their aping of magazine covers and movie stars. Perhaps it's the literalness (never satisfied with a suggestion of glam) that's endearing. Or perhaps it's the little mistakes, and the little tell-tale signs of budgeting: the over-matched red bag, red scarf and red shoes; the ultra-mod asymmetrical jacket with the villager's long, long braid; or the heels too high to really walk in. In any case I love it; I could watch the girls here forever. And why don't Americans walk arm in arm anymore?
I think the understanding and use of buildings here is closer to an early modern understanding and use, and it's fascinating to have glimpses of this up close. In most places in the US, a single building has a single purpose; even if it has many tenants, the building is labeled (office building, grocery store) and its range of occupants is limited (perhaps even by law) by what is customarily associated with that label. One doesn't go looking for a barber shop or shoe repair inside a shoe wholesaler. Here, a building is a structure with a face/personality, often a history, and a certain physical size. Beyond that, all is haphazard. Like a French or Dutch city house in the seventeenth century, one Moscow structure might contain a motley assortment of businesses, associations, and residences that even the security guard outside cannot or will not elucidate. Certain people seem to have milling rights in the entryways and stairwells, while others don't. Not only are buildings along a street often not in the order that their addresses suggest (houses 6 and 9 are adjacent, while number 7 is a block away), several buildings might share a single house number. To locate an office, a veterinary clinic, or a fabric store, I've needed not only the written address (and always the closest metro station), but additional directions that only someone who knows the place well can provide: go around to the left side of the building, for example, and follow the alley past the first two archways, enter the third courtyard, find the door for units 90-115, buzz "12" on the domophone for the guard who'll let you in, and then head down the stairs. Dentists and theaters are tucked into the lower floors of apartment buildings. Only a closet-sized space is needed here to merit the term "shop," and so a dozen tiny businesses might be found inside what would be, at home, an echoing lobby, empty except for a few ficus trees.
Our apartment was once communal, we were told. I often think about multi-generational families living in these rooms, constantly ducking around laundry on indoor lines, negotiating use of the kitchen and bathroom, claustrophobic and resentful, in the evenings the young people and the men spilling out into the stairway to smoke and talk, a space that is always quiet now but must have been crowded then. Our landlords are the children or perhaps grandchildren of the family that held out longest, staying to claim the whole apartment after the occupants of other rooms moved elsewhere. And now we are here.
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