Notes On Moscow

On housing and toilet paper

ok, so, proper update of stuff wot has happened now… was all a bit dramatic and stressful for a while but has all turned out for the best and is fine again now…

probably not very interesting but it does explain my general lack of contact with most of you in the last few weeks….

so, as some of you may know, i had been looking for an apartment to live in before i left last time to come back to britain for christmas. This did not go well due to muscovites apparently not advertising their apartments for rent until the week before, or even after, their flatmate has moved out, meaning you have to move incredibly quickly to get somewhere and telling the landlord you wont be able to move in for over a month is not an option as they just let it to someone who wants to start paying next week. So i gave up and just started to enjoy christmas and figured id worry about it later, id also booked one of the schools apartments which was extortionately expensive and way out in the middle of nowhere, but i figured it would be fine as a fallback option. Then i got an email from D, new zealand mate here saying that he knew someone with an amazing apartment who was going back to oz for 3 months and wanted someone to look after the place while she was gone… sounded perfect, i emailed her, we sorted everything out. Then, 2 days before i was due to come back, she emailed me to say shed decided to rent it to someone who could pay more than me. That was pretty gutting, and happened at exactly the wrong moment when i was busy freaking out about a whole bunch of other stuff. Delayed my flight for a week to calm down about it all, because i didnt want to arrive back in moscow in a crap mood, since i love this place to bits and didnt want to do anything to ruin that..
Calmed down, booked a hostel and started emailing everyone i knew again plus answering adverts online for apartments again. Got to moscow, hostel was like someones apartment with only me and one other american in it (moscow in january obviously not that appealing to anyone in their right mind) and right across the road from K so got to hang out with her loads and ease myself back into russian stuff. Found a potential apartment, in the area where my host family lived before. Went to look round it, bearable wallpaper, hideous curtains, living with irish and ozzie guys, horrendously cheap. Told them id love to move in, and started arranging everything moneywise. Then two days later got an email from one of them saying that the flatmate who was supposed to be moving out had suddenly decided not to. Obviously he was pissed because hed spent the last 3 weeks advertising and having people look round, i was pissed because yet again id failed to find somewhere and the school was starting to get annoyed with me for holding out on whether i was going to take their apartment or not.
Gave in, decided that clearly apartments in moscow and me were not destined to be and that i should just go with the schools place and stop stressing about it even though it was a complete rip off, was miles away from everything and didnt have internet. Got to schools apartment a couple days later to discover the whole place smelt of damp, had wallpaper peeling off the ceiling, a bed that my feet stuck off the end of and a collection of hideous soviet furniture and accumulated junk. All for the bargain price of €900 a month each, sharing with someone else. Was completely shocked by this because the other apartment run by the school id stayed in before was really nice and fully ikea’d up, as well as being in the same building as the school in the centre for the same price. Burst into tears, rang N and got her to pick me up immediately as i didnt want to spend another second there.
Had a big fight with the school the next day and refused to pay the fine they wanted to charge me for not taking the apartment. After that, D, the one who’d been helping me with apartment stuff all along told me to stay in his spare room til id found somewhere new, dragged my insanely heavy suitcases for me and took me out for drinks with loads of lovely ozzie people and was generally a complete dude. So i spent a week going to classes and then looking round apartments and then chilling out with D in the evening (his wife apparently existed but she works writing about forex and this was the week the rouble was going crazy so she was working insane hours).
Finally found somewhere! In the very centre of Moscow (Kremlin is 15mins walk away) in one of the nicest streets (also handily the only pedestrianised street in Moscow and the only one where the snow is cleared instantly thus not giving it time to descend into black sludge like it does everywhere else) amazingly for less money than the schools place out in the sticks (thankyou financial crisis for causing all the rents to crash). Comes with internet and a 2 month old kitten, as well as a russian woman who’s back in moscow for the first time in 10 years after having lived in hong kong, holland, the states, mexico and cuba, so shes pretty cool too.

So, yeah, moved in last week, and after some technical glitches with the internet, all is up and running. Life is good again.

In other news, proper russian winter has yet to appear, despite people constantly going ‘next week its supposed to start’ so ive stopped believing them. On the other hand, there were a few days where it got down to -24 and that was just deeply unpleasant so maybe i should be grateful that its hovering around 0 and keeps raining and turning the snow to slush…

Swallowed my pride last weekend and joined the international womens club, something i didnt think i would ever do, given that these organisations usually consist mostly of bored american/ambassadors housewives who just sat around moaning about how they had to import macaroni and cheese through the embassy shop and that their cleaner wasnt living up to standards and how other such rubbish… i deliberately went to a weekend meeting intended for professional women though and was surprised to find loads of really interesting people there, who took over the meeting and forced the annoying housewives into a corner by themselves.. so had good chats including with one crazy japanese american girl who was over here with her italian boyfriend and had just spent the last few years pottering around europe by herself picking up languages and intermittently going off to live in micronesia to do scuba diving, so hanging out with her will definitely not be boring..

K, my best friend here is unexpectedly moving back to the states after her fiance Dn got sacked on friday. Having paid thousands of dollars to relocate an entire department of american investment bankers to russia, the state owned bank here has fired the entire department. Went out with them to drown sorrows at the weekend and ended up in a hilariously typical club with ludicrously overpriced watered down cocktails, full of plastic barbie looking 25 year old russian women (jury is out on whether they were prostitutes or not) who were practically orgasming with excitement every time one of the utterly disgusting 60 year old men who formed the other half of the clientele groped them.. Something i will never understand about russian women, they think its something to be grateful for and a major acheivement when any man, no matter how skeezy, pays them even the slightest bit of attention… Made for an entertaining evening though, followed by being given a valentines day card by Dn’s drunk russian friend which said ‘kiss me or else’, russian romance clearly as delicate and considered as their politics. Sad about her leaving though, with her leaving in the next 3 weeks, and D going to St Petersburg for a month, im feeling a need to make some new close friends pronto…

ummm yeah…so thats about it for now… ive done more stuff but im tired and have forgotten most of it… and this is way too long already.

I shall leave you with the next installment of entertaining russian memorabilia: Financial crisis toilet paper which i found in my favourite silly gift shop and had to buy just for the pure ridiculousness of it