ремонт

remont seems to be happening every where in this city. i suppose the city planners have decided to follow the berlin example, i wonder if they also will go bankrupt in the process.
so everywhere you go in the centre, it seems something is being rebuilt, torn down, or constructed from scratch. they started all of this when i was living here before, by tearing down the old hotel intourist, which was a good decision on the whole, as the place was nasty and infested with cheap prostitutes and roaches. they have been building a new luxery hotel in its place....but remont being a much longer process than the english variant (renovations) it looks like it will be a while yet before intourists replacement opens. in the meantime they have torn down the hotel moskva and are now in the middle of getting rid of the rossia (once the largest hotel in the world, and one of the ugliest, it was built for the 1980 moscow olympic games) Furthermore, my hopes of going to the theatre were dashed when i went by the bolshoi, only to discover that it too is zakrit na remont, as you can see from the photo above.
additionally, they are building "moscow city" a new business centre along the lines of la defense,
and a huge new residential area in basically the centre. i drove by the residential place the other day, it is being built on top of what used to be a miltary airfield (or something like that) the place looks enormous, but i wonder who exactly will buy those flats? they certainly will not be cheap!
oh, and it seems that next to every train station a shopping mall is being constructed. atrium was the first in this trend i believe,a dn it opened when i still lived here before.
however, i never go there, it always just seems to sterile for my tastes....
and just to add to my notes on remont, it would also appear that many of my friends have decided that this summer should be the summer of remont....it is becoming a major topic of conversation!
i only have to ask myself, is this level of remont going on in other russian cities, and who the hell is paying for it all?