The old region of Zelenograd is, indeed, older. On the other hand, it's possibly more interesting and certainly doesn't lack for character...I live on the first floor off a grimy, rubbish-strewn landing that's so poorly lit that I have to find the keyhole by touch. We all have rickety balconies, where everybody hangs their laundry out to dry (or rather, freeze), and every morning a man with a kind of beggar's pushcart comes wheeling by and collects the tra
sh that people leave on the front stoop. The pipes on this side of town are above-ground (permafrost, I guess), and run along between buildings, occasionally rising up into an arch so that cars can drive under them. They're all so old and knobbly and gnarly that they look they're made out of paper mache, and during cold snaps they're blanketed in burlap to stop them freezing...During cold snaps also, you're liable to find migrant laborers out on the sidewalks, grimly chipping away the built-up layers of ice, snow, and sawdust (never salt!) that make street travel a little hazardous sometimes.Then all you need are the babushka in knitted turbans and musty overcoats who shuffle up and down outside all day, eyes glued to their footing, and you have a distinctly Soviet image of life here in the fourth region...
On the other hand: high speed internet. Done Russian-style, of course, which means that a man came yesterday and fooled around with the circuit box out in the hall, drilled a hole in our ceiling above the door, ran about ten yards of ethernet cord (two separate cords of course, one for me and one for Shayla) through the hole, dragged them down the hall, and hooked one each into our laptops. I'm not kidding, an entire kindergarten class could play double-dutch jump-rope with the superfluous ethernet cord that's lying around our house now. Fortunately the dog restrains himself to eating my socks, and doesn't chew on the stuff... (Central Prospekt - my bus stop)
We're on the edge of the forest here, and it's lovely to walk in the morning after a fresh snow when the drifts are all piled up among the birches and fir trees.
One caveat: schoolkids have gym class (cross-country skiing) on the trails, so you have to be careful not to get run down by a flock of them when school is in session.This picture (from Google Earth) shows Youth Square, where there's a movie theater and KFC-spinoff, on the very edge of town, with the forest stretching out behind it.
