““Wherever you look, everything is in a row: a seven-story pile abutting a three-windowed log hut hard by a fantastical L-shaped mansion; ten paces from its columns is an outdoor market; farther on, a polluted pissoir; farther still, the white light of a belfry's tent roof, fringed cupolas rising into the blue - and, towering over the tiny church, another enormous edifice gleaming with fresh paint. Moscow is a mishmash of utterly unrelated (logically and optically) building ensembles, of large and small houses crammed from cellar to eaves with utterly unrelated offices, apartments, people living apart, at odds, past one another, yet separated only by thin walls, often plywood that doesn't reach the ceiling. In Moscow people and their paraphernalia are close to each other not because they are close but because they are side by side, cheek by jowl.””
