The City of Contrasts

Today I experienced the city... and it felt like perhaps the first time. I dressed again in my Moscovite fashion so as not to be conspicuous, and I brought my camera along. I walked first to the Fallen Monument, or Statue, Park. This is a plot of land where the remaining Communist and Soviet statues of Lenin, Stalin, and the like were tossed after the system fell. It's an eerie reminder of Russia's past, but it sure makes for good pictures. If you're familiar with James Bond, the park is featured in the Goldeneye movie and Nintendo game, although both state it is in St. Petersburg. Along the way I came across Gorky Park, a small theme park in the middle of Moscow. The carousel below was outside the park, and to be honest, it kinda freaked me out, as it was nonworking and almost in the middle of the street in a highly industrialized part of the city. Within the park were many photo opportunities. The following picture is a view of the cathedral that was blown up by the Soviets in 1931 to make way for atheism... and a humungous open swimming pool. It was built again in the 1990s. Included below are also pictures of statues of Lenin. The picture with stone heads is a wall made of iron bars, barbed wire, and concrete. It houses the heads as a representative of the victims of Stalin's purge. The sunset was beautiful tonight, and I included a couple pictures of that as well.


Throughout my little journey today I realized just how diverse Moscow is - so diverse, in fact, that it begs a passerby to shout, "Make up your freaking mind, Russia!" Communism or capitalism? Tsar, dictator, or president? Industrialism or conservatism? Orthodoxy or atheism? Within one frame you can capture all of these, and it takes only a few seconds to distinguish just which parts of the city are from which era of its past. Picture yourself on a bridge over the Moscow River. You see a glass walkway to a mall. Behind it boasts one of the Seven Sisters (large, nearly identical buildings built during Stalin's reign, one of which is included in the last two pictures), and next to it stand smokestacks that spew pollution into the sky all day, and in front of it all are Christmas lights that are hung from the phone lines and apparently stay up all year round. Directly opposite this view is the cathedral, a monument of Peter the Great, riverboats, casinos, Gorky Park to your right... What a riddle, what a mystery... heck, what an enigma, Mr. Churchill.