Word: airport
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Christmas rush. The floor is piled high with television sets, videocassette recorders, audiocassette players and sewing machines. Nervous energy and thick cigarette smoke swirl through the crowd. On a Saturday evening, these giddy shoppers have converged in front of a check-in counter at New York City's Kennedy Airport, where they will board Pan Am's nonstop to Moscow, the famed Flight...
Despite the chrome and modern conveniences of Sheremyetovo International Airport, the old city quickly pulls you into her familiar, exhausting, yet not altogether unpleasant embrace: the slush and mud of the broad avenues; the air that smells of bad cigarettes, carbon monoxide and disinfectant; the monotony of dun-colored buildings; the occasional startling glimpse of a golden-domed church or pastel-walled czarist mansion; the dark masses hurrying by or huddling in their inevitable queues to buy what little is in the stores. Much more than merely familiar, Moscow today seems as immutable, as depressingly eternal as ever...
Perhaps Daniel's death colored my impressions. Moscow seemed incredibly dreary. I hadn't been there for 15 years. The darkness was striking. From the first moment, while we were still at the airport, it seemed as if the electricity had burned out and that the meager light was being supplied by a weak portable generator. The sense of abandonment and homelessness was aggravated by the piles of dirty, blackened snow along the sides of the dark streets. It hadn't been like that before. Where were the streetlights? Where had the stately yard keepers, who used to clean Moscow...
...good that at least they're writing about all this in the newspapers. Glasnost provides salvation from psychological destitution. But it's still a long way from physical evidence of perestroika. The gypsy cabdriver who drove us from the airport remarked in a melancholy tone of voice on the neglected roads, filled with potholes, over which we, swearing, were bouncing: "So have ended many great empires!" I was amazed at the daring and aesthetic exactness of his maxims. In my time, people didn't talk so freely...
...attacks, mujahedin rebels were no closer to capturing the city of Jalalabad last week. They seemed to be suffering from disorganization as well as an inability to pull off major assaults. In one battle last week, rebel artillery pounded the Soviet-backed government's positions at the city's airport for hours at a time, but the several hundred guerrillas who mustered to rush the defenses never got going -- the attack bogged down under return fire and arguments within their own ranks over how to attack across several hundred yards of open ground...