Saturday, January 03, 2009

Where I Live

I live on the second landing of a five-storey tenement in a part of the city my guidebook describes as "quiet, run-down...seemingly untouched by post-Soviet economic changes". The snow-piled banks of the Daugava are fifty metres away, there's a chemist's on the corner opposite and a shop selling fireworks directly behind. I can walk to the centre in ten minutes, past an outdoor market, a bus station advertising one-way tickets to Prague for thirty-two lats, a glass-fronted multiplex and the city's first ever skyscraper, a reinforced concrete, Gothic space rocket gifted by Stalin to his new subject people.

1 comment:

Garry Nixon said...

Binary thinkers, taxi drivers.