Moscow Madness

Anna Yudina

“Sometimes I feel like my only friend is the city I live in…”

But unlike Anthony Kiedis we don’t cry together – our mutual love is fulfilling, bright, and full of surprises.

It is here that I love riding my bicycle along the boulevard ring on warm summer nights. On a chilly winter afternoon I proudly watch the amazed by-passers stare at me as I bite into my ice-cream. Even my favorite English poetry sounds even more romantic under the Moscow sky.

Moscow welcomes and sees off millions of people every day rushing through it in between their transit flights and only able to see the Kremlin and take a bit strained photo in front of St. Basil Cathedral. But as a person who has lived all her life in Moscow, I want to prove Moscow has a lot more to it than just a few notorious sites one is offered on an hour-long bus tour.

I know quite a number of secrets an outsider hasn’t got a clue about. I know where to stand on the Metro platform so that the upcoming train opens its doors just in front of you. I know how to get on a bus without paying. I know where to find free newspapers and how to get into a cinema unnoticed. But you bet your boots – I‘ll never sell the information cheap.

15 June, 2011, 08:41

Extremely obscure, very authentic, unbelievably Bulgakov-ish…

At the hour of the hot spring sunset, two citizens appeared at Patriarch's Ponds: me and my friend who helped me take the pictures. Mikhail Bulgakov house The destination is the so-called Mikhail Bulgakov house – the incarnation of the sinister apartment where much of the action of The Master and Margarita took place several decades ago. In order to find the place you need to arrive at...

2 comments

4 April, 2011, 19:20

$10 for a trip back in time

They appeared in 1975, making thousands of kids happy. They were put together at a number of the best-known armament factories that had available space and advanced technologies at their disposal. Twenty-two defense plants on the territory of the Soviet Union were doing their best to keep boys and girls happy. They made gaming machines! Invented in the US in the middle of the 19th Century, it...

21 March, 2011, 20:43

A ‘maybe-bag’: what’s in a name?

Avoska, or a “maybe-bag,” is a Russian invention that no other country has borrowed. Avoska is a string bag that was immensely popular in the Soviet period, then lived through quite a long period of oblivion, but is now slowly making its triumphal comeback to the streets of Moscow and the pockets of residents. The peculiar name of the bag derives from the Russian adverb “avos,” an expression...

4 comments

11 February, 2011, 17:44

Where young men were taught

Within easy reach from Kropotkinskaya Metro station, located in the very heart of Moscow, a quiet and fantastically charming courtyard remains intact, like historic film scenery. One side of the courtyard faces the back of the former famous Polivanov gymnasium – a private educational institution for boys opened in 1870s by Lev Polivanov, an outstanding professor and teacher of the time. The...

17 November, 2010, 16:27

A house with a haut-relief

I came across this house quite by chance while taking a summer stroll along the stuffy narrow Arbat alleyways. When I raised my head and saw a magnificent mansion with a marvelous high relief, my first thought was that perhaps I had overdone it, walking in the sun without a panama hat – so unusual was the decoration. The house at 4 Plotnikov Alley was designed by Nikolay Zherikhov, quite a...

1 comment

26 July, 2010, 14:08

A very special museum

When you are about to visit a museum, you don't really expect it to be something funny, eccentric and a little bit illegal, do you? As a general rule, you will likely see something serious, immensely beautiful and in other ways good for you. Indeed, Moscow has a number of such tourist magnets, along with museums that are uncommon in theme. Take a car theft museum for example. It appeared in...

3 comments

22 June, 2010, 15:05

The cursed sundial

Do you believe in witches, cursed objects and wizards? Some time ago I was as skeptical and down-to-earth as any self-respecting physics professor at Oxford. But then I heard this story and…you never know what Moscow and its truly labyrinthine history has in store for you, do you? A long time ago, Peter the Great – apart from doing a lot of good for Russia – introduced...

2 comments

7 June, 2010, 16:47

Suburban Moscow pyramids

The faith of the Russian people in the miraculous, the wonder-working and the odd is so great you might think they learn to believe in such things in kindergarten. Where possible, Russians rely on fortune-tellers and exorcists instead of doctors and science. It takes only the memory of the mass madness that seized everyone when famous Kashpirovsky made his appearance in the country. He was a...

5 comments

26 May, 2010, 12:12

Tall, ominous and haunted

I think I’m the dream client for an average tour guide. I’m sensibly naïve, I believe everything I am told and I ask zillions of funny questions. Houses with a strange history, haunted buildings and grisly ghost tales attract me like magnet, but there are places I wouldn’t like to visit, and not just on a night on Friday the 13th. There is something about them that...

3 comments

11 May, 2010, 15:14

The inhabitable egg

In Moscow you kind of expect to see all sorts of things and with time learn not to be shocked or in any other way wowed by who or what catches your eye. Here the sight of outdoor jugglers in the city center is as common as tiny quiet courts where doors lead straight into small flats from which you can hear someone playing the violin next door. Monuments to curious little girls and soft cheese...

3 comments

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