Moscow City is a ghost town on weekends. It also might very well be a ghost town on weekdays too – this skyscraper city known officially as the Moscow International Business Center has entered its third decade of development, and although a number of businesses have already moved in, the complex still has a “work…
Reason 652,238 why I love walking around Moscow: Also check out Moscow Street Art Part 1 and Part 2. You will like it 🙂
Moscow is an incredibly green city. It has 120 parks in total – 120!!! – and the whole 20% of the Central district is taken up by park spaces. A week doesn’t pass without me taking a walk in a park, no matter the time of year. With so many to choose from, there is…
March 8th is the International Women’s Day. In Russia it is also an unofficial start of Spring. The reason for this association is probably the custom of giving flowers to all the women in one’s life – family, romantic, platonic, professional. The resulting abundance of blooms everywhere screams “Spring Is in the Air!” In reality,…
The small, pedestrian Patriarch’s Bridge connects the northern crescent of the city with Bolotny (Bog) Island in the Moscow River, and offers some of the best panoramas of central Moscow. It begins right behind Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the tallest (and one of the largest) Orthodox Christian church in the world, erected to commemorate…
For many Moscovites the Old Arbat street is imbued with an almost mythical aura and a heavy dose of nostalgia. One of the most famed Russian bards, Bulat Okudzhava, even sang “oh Arbat, my Arbat, you are my Fatherland…” It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact source of this reverence. Arbat’s history is very layered. In the…
This is the second part of my long and meandering hike through Moscow. While part one was all about capital’s grandest landmarks basking in the rays of a setting sun, part two is straight-up Christmas nostalgia. I loitered around GUM shopping arcade, walked the historic Nikolskaya Street, went up to Lubyanka Square and its massive…
I feel like this winter went by so fast – especially with me spending most of its advent abroad – that I already miss its crisp, snowy days. One such day I took a fantastic 9-kilometer (5.5 mile) walk across the Moscow Center. This is Part 1, basking in the glow of a winter sunset:…
VDNKh is one of those Moscow places I do not particularly enjoy yet keep going back to over and over for various half-baked reasons. What is VDNKh? Good question. Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva, (Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy) is Moscow’s enormous exhibition complex and is one of those grand Soviet relics that seems more like…
Today seemed like the first real day of autumn in Moscow. It wasn’t September 1st, when fall officially kicks off in Russia, and every person from the age of 6 to 21 suddenly reappears on the city streets after three months at the dacha. It wasn’t September 20-something, when the sun decides to do its…
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