Here's a shot I snapped when I was waiting for the bus this morning. You can see that the leaves haven't come out on the trees yet, but at least all the snow is gone. Also, you can see the strange combination of village houses and big apartment buildings that exists in my neighborhood. The neighborhood (called Dobroe, which means good or friendly in Russian) was built from about the 1960s to the 1980s, and it kind of absorbed two small villages. From what I understand, Dobroe was built mainly for workers of the Vladimir Chemical Plant, which is located nearby. There are a few streets where it looks like you really are in a village with little wooden houses and narrow, unimproved streets, but these little areas are totally surrounded by monolithic, multi-story apartment buildings. People joke that Vladimir is just one big village (you really do see the same people all the time on buses and on the street), but what's funny to me is that there are some places right in the city that actually look like a village. Check it out: