Moscow colors and specificities

First impressions are often most striking and at the same time most faulty, sensitive as they are to the  random collection of momentary images. Moscow greeted me with long lines at the border, taxi hawkers, a very nice airport to city train and rush hour in the metro where trains arrive every 20 to 30 seconds, all of them full to bursting with a mass of people that pretty much carries you in and out of the stations. Moscow is modern, it has a sense of Europe, there is a coffee house on every block (sometime several in a row), internet cafe's nearby with a reasonable rich city frequency nestling inside hip galleries and public libraries, expensive stores, lots of street food and old grandmothers selling flowers and greenery on the corners. The metro is one of the most efficient transport systems in the world but it does not quite manage the flow of people despite the effort. The traffic is frightening and the tourist guide suggests using ONLY cross-walks and underground crossings if one were to desire to remain unharmed by the crazy driving patterns.

For the last decade Moscow has had blue-siren cars of the very important people that have the right to break all the rules, drive against traffic pass on the sidewalks, etc, in order to get around traffic with impunity. In the last few months, after futile attempts of the Moscow government to remove these privileges, citizens took matters into their own hands, making fun of the important people by attaching blue plastic buckets onto the roofs of their cars or putting them on their heads.
http://rutube.ru/tracks/3254325.html?v=24063637140b9b1b4be96cc28018a9ae
http://www.rferl.org/video/7064.html

I am looking for people to interview and I am starting with house cleaning ladies, young IT professionals and Encounter players (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_%28game%29) along with my usual collection of young and well to do professionals and occasionally their parents. Odnoklassniki still rules and so does vkontakte, Facebook is for foreign contacts and now it is also for hip Moscovites and all of St. Pete is on vkontakte just because. Things have changed and they have stayed the same as I walked along Tretyakovskaya Gallery with A. Voiskonski who has been studying mediated communication in Russia for the last 15 years and knows all of the big HCI names in the business. The internet is pushing, pulling, creating opportunities and I hear a lot of mentions of odnoklassniki and vkontakte as I walk along the streets and I sit in cafe's. These usually come in the context of talking about finding people and about being found... being found seems to be a more uncomfortable experience because being found is usually by those classmate and contacts that are less welcome. The contact with the past is still very important but little of it actually moves toward creating new ties or new experiences or opportunities. It is about the past, the pictures, the catching up and the experience of being similar back then. It is still important....

Moscow is all colors and gorgeous people and ugly moments, as when I watched the paramedics roughly throw in and zip up a corpse of a middle-aged tattooed man in a sailor shirt and dirty rolled up khakis into a black plastic bag before loading him into an ambulance. This in the center of a gorgeous green boulevard, just down the street from a photo exhibit with many drunk youth hanging out just feet away and laughing at the silent horror of the moment. A man in a tight biking outfit on an expensive bike held out his phone, recording the whole thing on video, likely to show up later some place on youtube. The cops just looked on and the medics moved quickly, roughly but efficiently. We walked on, along with crowds of other people, off toward the historic Arbat street, discussing the latest atrocities of Moscow, the frivolities of police - http://abcnews.go.com/International/human-shield-tactic-latest-moscow-police-scandal/story?id=10083153 and the general firm knowledge that the only thing that protects anyone from anything in this place is money and a lot of it. And yet in the story of the human shield and the blue buckets, the Internet had played an important and interesting role of making it less possible to simply ignore what is happening and making it possible to at least question if not actually affect change...