 |
| A self-payment terminal in Moscow |
This is one area where Moscow is positively ahead of most of the UK (and I’ve been pretty much everywhere, except Scotland and Northern Ireland). You no longer have to queue up at the post office, search for the Internet connection or visit a local grocery to sort out your household bills or to top up your mobile phone. All you need to do is to find this terminal – and in this photo the terminal stands in the street, next to the subway that leads to Frunzenskaya underground station. The procedure is straightforward; the only drawback is that the terminals that stand in the outlets of one telecoms provider do not accept top-ups for every mobile network operator. Still, the number of terminals is astonishing: there may be as many as two or three next to each other. This, of course, is dictated by the size of the metropolis that Moscow is: if traffic jams are unavoidable, there at least should be no people-jams.