Sometimes when you live in a huge city it's hard to picture the whole place pieced together. Sure you can stare at the map in the metro all you want, but it doesn't become real since you climb deep down into one station only to magically appear in another. The idea of walking places becomes preposterous since, even though it would probably take you only 10 minutes to get there, you're more than likely to get lost along the way. I'm somewhat ashamed to say that only now have I figured out how to walk to the school near Red Square from a different station than "Okhotniy Riad."
The best way to finally make sense of it all is to either: a- walk from one end of the city to another, which might take you 5 hours (not such a viable option when it's a cozy 3.2 degrees Farenheit outside). Or, option b- find a friend who not only has a car, but comes up with the crazy idea of using said car to travel around said city (aka Moscow). Option b didn't occur to me until my friend Igor casually invited me to go on a "drive" with him and his friend Tanya.
Moscow is a rather imposing city by day, and even more so by night. Everywhere you turn there are bright neon lights: on bridges, on buildings, on billboards, and on the few sky scrapers that Moscow has. The lights dazzle you from either side of the Moscow River, which winds its way through the city. Regardless of where you're driving, you always feel like you're going in circles, because you actually are! As many times as people have explained to me the circle pattern of Moscow, I still never quite get used to the fact that roads never stop here, and you can keep going in a loop forever if you want. Of course there are the spokes to this wheel, which run straight, but you have to choose the right one or else you will be lost forever.
The buildings themselves are quite impressive. There's not really a skyline, like in New York, since most buildings are on the shorter side. There are the 7 sisters, 7 uniformly imposing towers from the Soviet era, which circle somewhat around the "White House," (The USSR's response to the US's by being bigger and taller of course). But admittedly when you go to the part of town with the true sky scrapers, which didn't exist 12 years ago, you truly see the modern, flashy side of Moscow. The architecture is incredible, with every shape and size imaginable, and some pretty creative buildings too. There's one sky scraper where you can see a pulsing red light in the upper right corner: the beating heart of a large giant. Igor pointed out his favorite building: an every which way stack of blocks that blink lights that slowly change colors. We stopped and admired it from the bottom, right off the side of the large highway.
As we drove by, Igor pointed out interesting monuments, buildings, and parks, as I soaked in all of this newfound knowledge. Then he pointed out something that I would have never noticed, as obvious as it was: so many of the buildings we were driving past, regardless of style or age were....empty. "There's another apartment building. I guess buildings, really. Nobody lives there." He definitely had meant buildings, because the place was huge and Igor was right, no-one home. "A lot of Moscow is like that," explained Tanya, and when I asked why, Igor shrugged. He told me it was because the terrain in Moscow is swamp like, and the soil incredibly unstable. "Nobody can live there, it's too dangerous, but they can't afford to demolish it." Really? I wondered. Maybe there are economic reasons too, although the whole thing confused me to begin with, since I could see everywhere I turned more cranes building newer and taller skyscapers. As we finally made it to Sparrow Hills to look down on the city, Tanya and I admired the architecture as we danced away the cold. Igor took out his lovely SLR digital camera, aimed towards the city below, and...."Ah man, my batteries are dead!" More like frozen! We all laughed, glad to have an excuse to run back to the warm car we had left behind.
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