Super-Duper Wacky n' Tacky Euro Adventure

Just got back from a nice day of sight-seeing and touristing; independent style. I feel like I got a much better feel for Moscow by just exploring on foot today. Here are a few things I discovered:

*The downtown area is really not that big. The encircling highway (garden ring) that defines downtown just does not have a big circumference. I was easily able to walk from the west border to the south border, and back to the Kremlin (dead-center) without breaking too much sweat.

*Capitalism is really spreading with a vengeance. Although Russia still has yet to recover its GDP output from the original transition, capitalism and western business is everywhere. In the mall underneath red square (where I have been doing most of internet-café time so far), there is more Latin (western) writing than Cyrillic. The west is in mode and the west is investing in Moscow.

*Even on Sunday, Russians sure do like their Piva.

*Americans like us Stanford students are everywhere in this city. Maybe not as much as most Western European cities; but that’s kinda nice because that means there are less tourists and more people genuinely interested in Moscow.

*Deuce Bigalow 2 is a stupid movie. There were only two positive aspects to seeing this amazingly sophomoric movie today: 1) I only paid $7 to see it. 2) I now know where the English language theater is (Russians prefer dubbed to subtitled).

*Just because a sign says “Sports Bar” in Cyrillic, doesn’t mean it really has anything to do with sports, or being a bar for that matter. It was a Japanese restaurant!

*Iris is good people to hang out with. She can give a guy all the hookups on how to find caffeine in a big foreign city.

*There are probably many Roman Catholics in the city of Moscow, but for some reason they like to keep secrets, like where they go to mass every Sunday. Sneaky bastards.

Alright, homework for now. Tomorrow my laptop will be reunited with its long lost love internet, for the first time in about a week. I, I mean it, was going through some serious withdrawals.

FYI: There is a Quesadilla in the picture above. It is a pic from the Japanese restaurant that isn't a sports bar.