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Walking in Moscow...
Jun. 9th, 2010 09:51 amI've always loved to walk around cities in the early morning, before the heat of the day, before the tempo of business picks up. Yesterday morning, I set off from the Aurora, which is a pretty ritzy hotel not far from the Bolshoy Theater, and turned left, up Petrovka Street.
I walked past the Vysoko-Petrovskiy Russian Orthodox monastery, which was still closed, and crossed the street to the park that lies in the middle of Strastnoy Boulevard. There is a monument to Vladimir Vysotsky there, and I had not been aware there was such a thing.
I was first introduced to Vladimir Vysotsky via an "underground" cassette tape of one of his shows given to me in Moscow in Soviet times. Vysotsky was an actor and a singer. His singing style was markedly unique, with a voice that ran over your eardrums like a rasp, mostly angry (I thought), sometimes funny (I recall a song about Sean Connery visiting Moscow and being mistaken for James Bond), with pensive comments interspersed between songs. He lived hard and died early, in his early 40s, in 1980.
The statue to Vysotsky shows a man with a guitar slung over his shoulder, wearing a shirt that's open at the collar, with sleeves unbuttoned, and vaguely bell-bottom trousers. The face is upturned and the arms are spread out, giving the statue a crucifix shape. What really got to me was the single rosebud that lay on the base of the statue. It seemed to me to be only hours old, perhaps from the previous evening.
I decided to walk through the park behind the statue, and it was a good choice. There were splashes of color everywhere, from groups of flowers. Red. Pink. Violet. The air was cool. There was some white poplar seed-fluff scattered about, but not anywhere as thickly as in other parts of the city.
I saw what looked like a homeless person asleep on one of the brown-painted benches held up by stout cast iron supports, but the man seemed adequately dressed and was wearing headphones, so perhaps "homeless" is not the right term to use.
A small squad of mushrooms - not edible, I was told - had erupted from the ground not far from a tree on whose trunk there was an old wound that had exposed what lay under the thick bark layer. On that surface, someone with some kind of sense of humor had painstakingly painted a pattern that looked like muscle tissue.
I wished I could stay in the park longer, but after sitting for 5 minutes on a bench, I got back on my feet and kept walking toward the Beeline office.
Cheers...
I walked past the Vysoko-Petrovskiy Russian Orthodox monastery, which was still closed, and crossed the street to the park that lies in the middle of Strastnoy Boulevard. There is a monument to Vladimir Vysotsky there, and I had not been aware there was such a thing.
I was first introduced to Vladimir Vysotsky via an "underground" cassette tape of one of his shows given to me in Moscow in Soviet times. Vysotsky was an actor and a singer. His singing style was markedly unique, with a voice that ran over your eardrums like a rasp, mostly angry (I thought), sometimes funny (I recall a song about Sean Connery visiting Moscow and being mistaken for James Bond), with pensive comments interspersed between songs. He lived hard and died early, in his early 40s, in 1980.
The statue to Vysotsky shows a man with a guitar slung over his shoulder, wearing a shirt that's open at the collar, with sleeves unbuttoned, and vaguely bell-bottom trousers. The face is upturned and the arms are spread out, giving the statue a crucifix shape. What really got to me was the single rosebud that lay on the base of the statue. It seemed to me to be only hours old, perhaps from the previous evening.
I decided to walk through the park behind the statue, and it was a good choice. There were splashes of color everywhere, from groups of flowers. Red. Pink. Violet. The air was cool. There was some white poplar seed-fluff scattered about, but not anywhere as thickly as in other parts of the city.
I saw what looked like a homeless person asleep on one of the brown-painted benches held up by stout cast iron supports, but the man seemed adequately dressed and was wearing headphones, so perhaps "homeless" is not the right term to use.
A small squad of mushrooms - not edible, I was told - had erupted from the ground not far from a tree on whose trunk there was an old wound that had exposed what lay under the thick bark layer. On that surface, someone with some kind of sense of humor had painstakingly painted a pattern that looked like muscle tissue.
I wished I could stay in the park longer, but after sitting for 5 minutes on a bench, I got back on my feet and kept walking toward the Beeline office.
Cheers...
