Sunday, November 09, 2008

(----) In Russia Vol.8






These three tags were all found in the neighborhood where I work. "Выход есть" means "there is a way out." Not the most uplifting of sentiments in the not the most uplifting of societies.


This has got to be one of the best of the airbrushed cars in Moscow. Click on this picture and check out the details; it's a fucking club, complete with girl in bikini dancing on the stage. The other side of the car is the same thing, just different details. My cup runneth over.


More detail of this car. I saw the owner outside of it last week and he didn't seem like the kind of guy who would appreciate his car getting blogged, so I was hesitant to try and get more photos than this.


This calendar ("ГОД БЫКА" means "Year of the Bull") hangs in a kiosk that I pass every day, and I've been trying to be subtle about getting a photo of it for you all. The previous image had been a cow with a basket of US dollars on its head. Unfortunately, the day I saw my opening (meaning there weren't a shitload of nosy babushkas who might have given me a hard time), someone had changed a page on the calendar. A cow with imperialist currency on its head vs. a cow snuggling a very uncomfortable-looking cat....6 of one, half-dozen of the other.


An ad for a circus that is playing here for a few days. I cannot imagine why anyone would take a child to this. Only in Russia do you have clowns that look like residents of Nilbog.


The gate of the Moscow zoo.


Billboard for a movie called "The Very Russian Detective" ... notice that watermelons have returned to the blog, in the form of the Statue of Liberty's head. And this Carrot Top-esque character is eating a piece of it. I have no insight into the political meaning here.


Mujuice again, this time at a club called Solyanka. I made a lot of friends at this place; everyone kept asking me where I was from, and almost every time I said "America," they started freaking out about Obama. One guy jumped up and down, chanting, "O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!" People here are pretty excited about it.


This is me trying to get a few seconds of footage of Mujuice, only to get smacked down by the security guard. Watch closely, about 9 seconds in, you'll see his face appear before he shuts my shit down.


A rare sight: an empty metro car. Empty except for the 2-liter plastic bottle of beer rolling around on the floor.


Most of the windows in the metro cars have words scraped into them, like this one, which says, "Sory." I was trying to get a shot of all these people sitting under one that had the Russian word for "meaning" a few weeks ago, but I would have gotten spotted. It was pretty awesome, though ... all these disaffected-looking people under this word.


SPECIAL ELECTION COVERAGE: Stayed up all night to watch this shit. It was totally worth it. The experience of leaving my friend's house at 8:30am, walking through the coldest wind I've felt since I've been here, and realizing that our president was no longer going to be a reason to be ashamed to be from the US was awesome. McCain's speech was humble enough to render all of us speechless.


FAIL



To answer RB's question, well, I am not sure why so many dogs. But I can say that they even have dogs on their Internets. This image was on the BBC Russia site today, accompanying an article about a future meeting between Obama and Medvedev. Again, for some reason, dogs always remind me of Rikk.

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