In Which We Discuss Bigness

Moscow is huge, man. Huge in a way that facts and figures don't really express, but here are some anyway:
In 2004 the population inside the city limits is 10,101,500. All these folks are crowded into an area of 1,081 sq. km. That makes it, as near as I can tell, the second densest city with a population over one million. Only Paris is denser, but it has a measly 2,153,600 residents. (Los Angeles, by comparison is 1,290.6 km² with a population of 3,844,829).

All that, true though it is, isn't exactly what I'm talking about. Moscow is BIG; exhilaratingly, oppressively, inescapably, exasperatingly, sublimely HUGE. It partakes, in its totality, of the Platonic form of BIGNESS. It's BIG: as Big as Leroy Brown is Bad; Bigger than the Brobdingnagians; Big like Tom Hanks at a carnival. I mean BIG! Or, as a Russian Billboard advertising a new 1 liter bottle of beer put it: "a BIG taste for a BIG country."

You see it in the parades of giant concrete tenements, 10 stories high, 100 metres long, that march off in ranks as far as you can see.
You hear it in the car alarm symphonies that play in the distance (and not-so-distance) at night, each a fitting sub-melody gracing the grand cacophony.
You feel it in the body warmth of that smokin' hot Russian babe who, on the train in the Metro, is stacked up next to you as tight as cigarettes in a pack.