Birches on Our Mews

Birches on Our Mews
Originally uploaded by jakeyd.

My mom says we haven’t been writing as much now that the baby’s home. It is true that our schedule is pretty different, but I think it’s mostly that we are pretty sure you don’t want a recounting of our first conversation about Otis’ poop…. or our second or our third. (This seems to be an inevitable part of parenthood.)

So, OK, yet another post about…. greenness. Everyone here is very proud of how green the city is (as they should be). Thus, we have repeatedly assured people that, no, New York is not as green, and we have been repeatedly told that Astana, the new capital, is not green at all. As far as we can tell, everyone here is still vaguely peeved that the capital was moved after independence. (DJ: Some say it was moved to Astana because it’s President Nazarbaev’s hometown, others say it was because Almaty is too close to China, and still others say Nazarbaev moved the capital north to make sure the predominantly Russian-populated north did not secede. This is discussed in an earlier post.)

The other reason to obsess about the greenness is the fact that it is one of only two colors in the cityscape, the other being gray. Dark gray stone or concrete buildings like ours; light gray, new marble-faced buildings; and medium gray, soot-streaked, older marble-faced buildings, as well as sidewalks.

Anyway, the point: It finally dawned on me that much of the greenness is a function of the siting of mews streets at irregular but frequent intervals between the larger streets. These mews have two narrow paved lanes for traffic with a wide (two-three lane width) green median in the middle, often with a paved walkway in the middle of the median. Residential buildings face each other across the road/median-way. Since very little traffic – and no through traffic – uses these streets, they end up feeling like little private parks.

One of these mews streets is behind our building. This particular street turns out to have been, according to Zoya, the most fashionable/important residential street in the city in the Soviet times. Literally every building has at least a couple of plaques with pictures and bios of important Communist functionaries who lived in the building. Here are some pictures from this afternoon.