222: Go whippet!

1.   America has Greyhound buses for inter-city transport. In Cambridgeshire we have whippets!
I am a great fan of bus travel, especially now that I have my free bus pass and petrol is £1.37 (about 70 roubles) a litre! 
I went to Cambridge earlier this week and, with my courier hat on, met with three very nice Russian ladies. I'm now busy arranging collections in Moscow.

greyhound (борзая)	whippet (гончая?)

2.   On 15th February, in 1989, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan, marking the USSR's first military defeat since World War II. In just over a year the last "Western" soldier will have left too. I feel a great sorrow for Afghan women. Once the Taliban fill the power vacuum they will surely revert to treating women as third class citizens, depriving them of basic human rights and education.

3.   A song to finish with. Having just flown back to Moscow from UK yesterday perhaps this would be appropriate:

221:Dead Fred

1.  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose body lies embalmed on Red Square, is having a(nother) makeover. Allow me to translate the article in yesterday's Metro newspaper.
"On Red Square in Moscow maintenance work is continuing on Lenin's mausoleum. Workers have covered it in a huge inflatable marquee to maintain the correct temperature. The FSO (Federal Protection Service?) explained that is was necessary to guarantee a constant temperature to support the specific technology used to carry out the maintenance work. The body of the leader of the world proletariat will be put in a special sarcophagus, in which the required temperature and light regime will be maintained. The work will finish on 30th April this year."
This is good news for my friends Alisdair and Cecilia, who are coming to visit me (well Russia actually) in May. Lenin's mausoleum is usually high on the list of sights (достопримечательности) for foreigners to visit. Once upon a time it was almost mandatory for Soviet Russians visiting Moscow to pay homage and queues could be seen stretching for some considerable distance. Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has been a significant decline in the number of visitors. It has slowed to a trickle. Times change!


2.  On this day, in 1904, the Japanese kicked off the Russo-Japanese war by attacking the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in China. In October, Russian ships from the Baltic fleet, en route to Japan the long way around, opened fire on some British trawlers off the East coast of England - mistaking them for the Imperial Japanese Navy. This became know as the Dogger Bank incident.
3.  A tenuous link back to item 2 allows me to show the lyrics to one of my favourite songs. Rod Stewart recorded Sailing in 1975. 

220:The sun was shining (briefly)

1.  I couldn't resist snapping off a quick picture (in the middle of a lesson!) as the sun suddenly appeared and made Moscow look brighter. Here is the view, through the window, of the frozen Moscow river. Notice the frozen-in pleasure boats waiting for their season to start on 1st May, the on-going construction in this part of the area known as Moscow-city, the convoy of buses patiently waiting, perhaps, to ferry the migrant workers back to wherever it is they spend the night, and the factory chimneys belching out smoke.
Quite a bit of snow around as well. I thought it was never going to stop falling yesterday. It was certainly falling faster than the poor overworked and probably underpaid dvorniki could clear it away. 
In February one's thoughts turn to Spring but there will be a long wait before that appears to brighten up the drab Winter. At least the sun shines from time to time.

2.  On this day, in 1953, sweet rationing ended in UK. I was around at the time but a little too young to remember the occasion. Must have been quite something after 10 years of being rationed. Apparently it sparked a scramble for:

toffee apples	and nougat

3.  Wild thing, you make my heart sing, but I want to know for sure! 
Reg Presley, lead singer of the Troggs, has died, aged 71. RIP Reg.

219:'elf and safety (again)

Forgive me if I keep banging on about Health and Safety as an issue but I never cease to be amazed by the extent of the difference between Health and Safety in Great Britain which, to my mind, has gone too far, and in Russia, which still has a long way to go.
This morning's photo shows snow clearing operations outside my flat. The little dozer darts back and forth to the pile of snow across the road and then takes a bucketful to the lorry. The dozer (dozy?) driver gambles with, and almost seems oblivious to, the traffic. Back home the traffic would be stopped and there would be a man with a stop/go board at either end.

On this day, in 1966, the Soviet probe 'Luna 9' made the first controlled landing of a man-made object on the surface of the moon.

Does anybody remember this old Bowie number from 1969 - Space Oddity?

218:Des the Dvornik

Well, here's a turn-up for the books*. I'm in UK, and here in Cambridgeshire, and in many parts of the UK, there seems to be more snow than there was in Moscow. The difference being that this will all be gone by the end of the week, (he says hopefully), whereas in Moscow I'm going to have to wait until April. In UK we can't cope with snow - thousands of schools have been closed and the country almost paralysed. 

*a turn-up for the books

a surprising event

So we're both going to New York! There's a turn-up for thebooks!

217: M&M

The year took a long time to get started. I had two lessons all week last week. Hardly enough to pay for a bus and tube ticket, never mind a plane ticket.Thank goodness it has picked up a bit this week, although there is still a bit of spare capacity left at the moment if anybody is interested?
Inter-Bridge availability

I am spending my time marching from McDonalds to the metro. 
Talking about fast food, in the UK news this week we heard that horse meat has been found in some Tesco burgers. Shock, horror! In UK we don't, as a rule, eat horse - at least not knowingly. 
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Talking about shopping in general, a friend of mine has unearthed an old, 1985, sketch of the two Ronnies where one of them is dressed as a sheikh and struggling with English pronunciation. It is from an era before political correctness so don't watch if you are easily offended and don't like to read references to golliwogs.


On 16th January in 1547, Ivan IV, aka Иван Грозный or Ivan the Terrible, was crowned Tsar - the first ruler, but not the last, to hold this appointment  or to carry on as if he did.

216:Culture vulture*

Back in Moscow after spending New Year in UK, I thought I might visit/re-visit a few of Moscow's museums. I had read that all the museums, apart from the zoo (!, yes, I know), would be free to the general public during the long holiday, 31 Dec - 08 Jan). Of course there can be only two outcomes from such an announcement: firstly it's not quite true and perhaps not all the museums will be free. Secondly the queues for the more popular museums will stretch twice around Moscow. 
This is what I found at the Museum of Contemporary History, just North of Tverskaya metro station.

A dearth of visitors	This says that entrance is payable during the holidays

After that little setback I thought I might try the Borodino panorama, having never been there before. This is what I came across on the way there

If this is Grandfather Frost then he should surely be heading away from Moscow, having delivered all his presents.

And then, when I got to the panorama, ужас!
Not being blessed with Russian patience and single-mindedness I decided to abandon the search for cultural enrichment and went instead to the cinema at afimoll to see The Hobbit. Enjoyable but not the easiest film to understand in Russian. On the way there I managed to spend a few minutes admiring the art exhibition at Vistavochnaya metro station which reminded me how vast Russia really is. I managed some culture after all.
Reminded me of the word оленовод = a reindeer breeder
* Culture vulture = noun, informal, a person who is interested in the arts
N.B. Don't forget - you can click on any of these pictures to enlarge them.