According to a Mercer survey on quality of life, Moscow ranks 170th in the world, below even Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. RIA Novosti report:
A city needs to be convenient if it wants to sell well. The two main complaints by foreign tourists about Moscow is that it is difficult to find your bearings because of a lack of street names and other signs in Latin letters, especially in the Metro, and a shortage of public toilets. One of the main problems, in the opinion of travel agents, is that Moscow and Russia are not advertised overseas, whereas Russians can see all sorts of adverts for foreign reports on the streets and the television. Besides, the traffic in the city is poorly organized, and there is a shortage of parking spaces in the city center, especially near the Kremlin. And, of course, there are too few hotels.
I couldn’t agree more with the complaint about the lack of latin leters on signs. If you don’t speak the language it’s a real pain to get around – on my first visit to Moscow I invested a little time in learning the cyrillic alphabet, but I still had to spend ages puzzling each word out – and there really isn’t that much other than pride stopping the city authorities from writing street signs in both latin and cyrillic letters, at least around the city centre.
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