Likbez

Preobrazhenskaya Ploshchad may be far from the city center, but then there are few Turkish restaurants to be found in Moscow -- so heading out past the Third Ring Road may well be justified if you're craving a Lahmacun, or Turkish pizza. And there is more to Pasha Kebab than its name suggests, as this is no mere kebab joint, rather, it is an elaborately fitted-out restaurant.

Budapest benefits from the same Central European charm as Prague and Vienna but isn't overrun by tourists.

What to do

Having listened to all the speculation about what kind of president Dmitry Medvedev will become, we should look more closely at a much more contested question: Are the Russians even capable of democracy?

The Russian blogosphere showed a lot of activity during the presidential election campaign. The only part of the pre-election televised debates to generate universal interest among bloggers was when Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky scuffled with a representative of rival candidate Andrei Bogdanov. If it were not for this heated exchange, most bloggers might never have known that there were debates at all.

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, who has worked with Russia on disposing of nuclear materials, questioned whether NATO was right to invite President Vladimir Putin to its summit meeting early next month.