On Pastera

I'm living on Vulice Pastera, which runs from the City Gardens on Deribasovskaya to the first of the disused grey and red smokestacks on the edge of town. It's an arty street, with a gallery-cum-cafe, a theatre and the M.Gorky State Scientific Library on my fifteen-minute walk into school. Directly across the road there's a church and the back entrance to a hospital, and there are two twenty-four hour chemists within a hundred metres of the flat. Further down, past the State Qualification Boards for Seafarers is the Iranian Cultural Mission, whose sign, the 'House of Ukraine-Iran Friendship', is half-crowded out by a Kangaroo in boxing gloves advertising a language school and a collection of parrots. Next door is a basement shop selling nothing but ladies' underwear.