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At long, long last, I hear, I have a few frames of Moscow for you.  A small, small slice of the big village.

Here's a view of my street, looking south (I think) toward the center of the city and my apartment.  Moscow has an incredible diversity of cars: steering on the left, steering on the right, Japanese, American, Italian, Russian, Yugoslavian, sedans, smartcars, Hummers, military caravan vehicles, armored Mercedes, tanks.  They're all incredibly dirty all the time, however--a reminder of how sooty the air is.
I was starting to wonder where the Moscow impoverished live before I found a few shacks set up on the church's land.
And here's the park, an immense stretch of lawns and trees and brick paths, that rolls lazily by my apartment building and continues to wind its away I don't know how far.  One of these days I'm going to make it a long run and try to reach the end.  Here you can see a few other older walkers and, if you look closely, a little girl feeding an enormous flock of pigeons.
Here--I couldn't resist--is the casino Десперадо, which means, you guessed it, Desperado.  English and French words are apparently very good commercial draws, although you get the impression they became kitsch hip a long time ago.  For example, I see a lot of handbags and t-shirts that say things like: "Alternative x choose the only necessity alternative lifestyle.  Every thing is the best choice for everyday life."  It makes for a jarring effect in an otherwise completely cyrillic universe.
A look down the street that runs behind the building.  On the right you can say the entrance, the podezd, that goes up to my apartment.  
The neighborhood orthodox church.
I have a funny story about this place.  My hosts, Rodion and Olga, have a large black dog of some Italian stock named Stanley, and one evening we all went out for a walk in the park.  My Russian is still not good enough to keep up with native speakers in conversation with each other, and probably won't be for some time, but Rodion definitely told me, as we approached the lake, that to swim in it would be to risk falling extremely ill.  Then, having stopped somewhere along its shore, he began to throw a branch in for Stanley to fetch.  Nothing out of the ordinary there, I expect, but the next minute he was in his underwear and making for the center of the lake.  Had to take advantage of the warm weather, he said.  The funniest part of the whole thing was how, as Rodion swam out farther and farther from shore, he would call Stanley out to him, and the dog would dutifully and loyally make his clumsy way out there.  Rodion's head was floating out in the middle of the dark lake, whistling and calling, and Stanley's head would slowly, painfully slowly, progress until they met.  Finally, at what must have been the deepest point in the lake, it took the dog a comically long time to swim all the way out.  It's odd, come to think of it, how much watching that dog labor all the way out there had me in stitches, but it was certainly a very merry time.  Sure enough, the next day came the rain and the cold.
My address.

This photograph doesn't do the scale of the neighborhood justice.  Maybe if I had some kind of special lens.  Standing in the park, however, this cluster of apartments seems more like a mountain range.  Mine is sort of behind the yellow structure in the center.

Yes, an old Soviet facade.  This was a crazy place, maybe the craziest place I've been so far.  It resembled a park, or maybe a promenade, and all the main structures were these old Soviet monuments and pavilions.  But at ground level it was a flea market.  Capitalism gone wild.  Shirtless dudes rollerblading all over the place and merchants selling every kind of knockoff ware.  The place gave you quite an incongruent feeling in your gut--a good symbol, perhaps, of the direction Russia's taken in the past twenty years.