KROKODIL GENA COMES TO STAY

Dread times are upon us at emgay ooo.

The last post suggested that we were just getting to the beginning of the end. As if in response, already on Tuesday I was told in no uncertain terms that "it's already the end" "we're done for" "it's over" "it's the end" and "we're screwed for ever".

All because "Krokodil Gena has come to stay."

There's a fair amount of background info required to fully appreciate the full gravity of these statements. Three main points:

1) They were part of one long speech said by gruff blue overalls workman man. He seems to be the general handy-man for my block of the accommodation. He always wears blue overalls. He is often in the kitchen smoking or frying potatoes or (multitasking) smoking and frying potatoes. Up until Tuesday I would occasionally say hello to him, and he once shouted at me for opening the window in the kitchen which was making a draught so I shouted back and told him it wasn't me that opened it. Otherwise he's generally rather taciturn; more than 5 words per contact with person/hour's conversation is a clear marker of extraordinary circumstances. Let alone a full on speech.

2) What had happened so far that morning:

-I slept through my alarm. I sleepily wandered through to the kitchen with some rubbish to put down the rubbish chute and with my saucepan of porridge. I opened the rubbish chute and there was sitting an ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE RAT. So I shoved him down with my rubbish and shut the door again, and put my porridge on the hob to slowly and sleepily simmer over what had just happened. Then gruff blue overalls workman man comes in to the kitchen with a hammer in one hand and a glass jar in the other and crouches by the door...

3) Krokodil Gena: a favourite Soviet cartoon character from the cartoon "Cheburashka"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKaRb28b0NU (crocodile)

Must see. A choice cultural reference albeit strange point of comparison for said rat.

So gruff blue overalls workman man rails off while smashing the glass all over the floor with the hammer. I stand in my flipflops watching him wondering what on earth he's doing and continue stir my porridge. It's quickly clear that his long monologue is about new rat infestation which is immune to poison (!) and which has been breeding and has come in to the rubbish chute to shelter from this:

first proper snow - view from my window last Sunday morning

Then he took a brush and brushed all the broken glass into a little hole under the door - i.e. little ratty hole (so, all clear what he was actually doing).

Since then we have been bonding over how much the rats are cunning and evil little bastards. His glass thing was a complete waste of effort they cleared it away no problem and we have bonded over both monitoring this process. Also, since the chitchat takes place in the kitchen, it has extended to laddish subjects such as the relative benefits of the size and shape of my kettle.

hot conversation

I like how he never actually said the word "rat". I've heard about peasants who live in Russian forests and who never call bears bears as it's bad luck or something. They refer to them as "the landlord" or "Ivan Ivanovich" or general things along those lines, apparently. Nice story anyway, and it seems this is the skanky city version.

These events have also given rise to another little collection of Persian animal names.

Khar in Persian means 'ass' (or 'donkey') or can just be a prefix meaning 'big' in a few compound animal names. Two of these I think are definitely blogworthy, however you translate them...

Goosh in Persian means 'ear', moosh='mouse'

Rabbit = khar goosh

Rat = khar moosh

Lolz.

That's all for now on the donkey mouse infestation. As for the donkey mouses themselves I haven't seen any since tues but I bang on the rubbish chute door now before opening it, and occasionally hear them rustling and squeaking. I live near the kitchen but I'm optimistic that my farts have kept them at bay thus far.

Next thing on this post is The Sudden Arrival of The Cold Weather I'd Been Waiting For, and Subsequent Second Thoughts

The snow from Saturday night/Sunday day (ie that picture above) lasted a couple of days and was stuck to everything like icing. Very pretty and put me in a great mood. We also had thick fog that froze over everything and covered everything in ice. It all felt quite ominous, the fog was very low hanging and you couldn't see much which I guess is pretty normal really for when it's foggy and that's probably why they say that fog is ominous.

Then everything melted and was just grey from Wed to the next Sat (this one just gone). On Saturday evening the temperature dropped about 6 or 7 degrees to minus 5. It was cold walking home on Saturday night. During the night it got down to minus 10 and a real chilly wind picked up. I was slow to realise the seriousness of this and went for a jog in shorts on Sunday and got very pink knees and a shocking case of willy-shrink.

also this has been happening when I go outside:

For some reason the response to this plummet in temperature was that on Sunday morning the heating went off in my side of the building. My windows are a bit draughty, I thought of cling filming them but didn't get round to it. The temp continued to drop - was minus 15 overnight and minus 13 in the day. So last night I had a shivery sleep in my hoody and thick socks and sleeping bag under my duvet and felt pretty frrreessshh this morning as I ate my steaming porridge. It was cold enough for breath to do the steamy condensationy dragon breath thing inside my room and condensation froze on the inside of the inside window of my double glazing.

Once I got outside on the way to class it was a beautiful crisp clear morning and stayed clear and sunny all day, the first bit of sun in over a week, not a cloud in the sky apart from huge billows of condensation cloud hitting the cold air from factory chimneys dotted over the city skyline. Down at the metro I looked out onto the Moscow river. It is freezing in big sheets of ice from the edges in and the was steaming like a not very enticing hot tub.

When I returned this evening I actually laughed out loud a little (deranged as that may sound) when I found that the heating has been turned on. I found that my cabbage which was by the window overnight has frozen solid:

weapon.

and my smetana (the tasty creme fraiche I eat with pretty much everything) which was in my between-the-windows-fridge has turned into quite a nice kind of frozen yoghurt.

With a warm room now though I feel ready for anything and could happily get used to this proper cold winter, especially as I'm planning not to linger on for the slush in spring.

All in all rats and cold have been a good opportunity to have a good chat with the people who live in my block, and have provided entertainment and distraction. (Although my neighbour who is gently freezing with a draughty hole in his wall seems to have turned to drink!)

Otherwise life trundles on as usual and busy as ever with work, studying, cooking things like cabbage, and all the out and about stuff that make up big city life and the emgay ooo good times!

Hope you're all well, all my love.

The End of The Beginning and The Beginning of The End

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I'm feeling pretty tired and my homework is doing my head in so while I wait for my macaronis (chakaronis) to boil it seems an opportune moment to kick back and post a new and well overdue nugget of moscow blogglington.

So put on your safety bloggles and prepare for another little trip through snowy wastes, past barking dogs and funky car alarms, to the humble little abode of Yours Truly and my trusty sidekick Glen, the one off of post number 1.

Weather or not you're interested

After promises since August that this is going to be the coldest winter ever according to indisputable scientifically proven meteorological true facts, on Monday it was still stubbornly 13 degrees C outside and I was a bit sweaty (a detail for the ladies). Here are some stimulating (mildly interesting/relevant) statistics:

"Russia is experiencing an unusually warm November, with four temperature records set in Moscow this month.

The capital reached a temperature of 12.3C on Monday, breaking the previous record of 11.7C set in 1923.

Meteorologists say temperatures have hovered around 10C above normal, due to warm air moving north from southern parts of Europe. The average temperature for this time of year is just 1.1C."

and, most importantly,

"The high temperatures have caused problems for wildlife according to ecologists. Hedgehogs and badgers have been unable to go into hibernation, while some species of red squirrel have not changed into their white winter coats."

The poor red squillies!

So the upshot of all this is that for those of you who hadn't guessed yet that stuff back in October about snow and bears roaming the streets, although partly true, was mostly bollocks.*

However, from 12 degrees on Monday it dropped to zero today plus wind and the latest is that it's going down another twelve for next Tuesday. So maybe my sweaty cynicism is a bit premature. It is still only mid November after all. Better get ma long johns on!

The next exciting piece of news is that Ostrich in Persian is camel-chicken! I've already told some people this in my excitement so if you're one of them and it's not news to you just chill your beans and skip this bit. If you study Persian you may say "Nay, it can also be translated as camel-bird" but firstly nay is what horses say and secondly camel-bird doesn't sound as good in my opinion. In Russian ostrich is strauss. Dunno why. Did Mr Strauss discover ostriches or did the first ostrich discovered look like him?

Apart from the fact that I'm not doing my dull and boring homework for tomorrow, and aside from exciting animal discoveries, my studies are going pretty well. In any case, whether they're going well or not is not really relevant to anyone, as basically whatever progress or not I am making I am a convenient tool to spur on my Russky peers either by the old prod "look how well mark is doing and he doesn't even know russian" or booster "look how badly mark is doing and he's from cambridge which is supposed to be good, well done, keep it up, he can't handle it here". This weekend I am entering myself into the all Russia Persian olympiad which will take place on 22nd and 23rd January 2011 so look out for me on the International BBC sports headlines as I wrestle my opponents to the ground.

I've not only been studying. My English teaching has been fun and "rewarding" although pretty tiring. My rich kids have gone off to the UK to have a stab at the common entrance, and today I almost took on some more refugees but I'm going to think about that because I don't actually have much time. I've also got myself a decent night job at a top secret nuclear bunker 60 metres beneath the ground:

my night time call-centre job at the Top Secret Nuclear Bunker

So, I've got a proper niche going on. I have some friends now and I know my way around pretty well, I even show Russian people to places. I've now thought I've finished with bureaucracy at least three times, so I won't say that again, as no doubt the time will come again to stand in another queue or two to take a piece of paper to tell one office in this building something from another office which they obviously couldn't have just told each other. But I have managed to set up my accommodation til the end of Jan for a haggled fee (kaching!), and my visa is being extended. My inter-window fridge is fully functional. I find it harder and harder to work out what is weird or hard or menacing or foreign about Moscow life, and now that I have Marmite, Lea and Perrin's and Frank Cooper's Oxford Marmalade from some generous friends, not to mention a hefty bottle of Scotch for when it really gets cold, apart from occasional late night longings for bacon it's difficult to remember what I missed so much about England to start with.

happy chappy

Obviously within reason though, because I will always miss my friends and family (gotta keep my readers sweet!) (joke, I do actually miss you!), but I mean the place. So it's the end of the beginning. The middle, really. And as such also...

The Beginning of the End of ma emgay ooo good times!

How and when this Russia bit of my year abroad ends depends on the beginning of the Iran bit. You could even say that the whole year will end up a bit of a weird hybrid linguistic ostrich (linguostrich) made up of camelrussia and chickenran. Sorting out the Iran bit has been another of my main occupations over the past months. I'm relatively confident I should get there eventually, and I'm hoping for early 2011. There's also a high chance now that I'm back in the UK for an as yet indefinite period of time from the end of January.

So much for what's past and what looms on the horizon. In the longer term, I've not made my investments on pots, pans, rugs, accommodation, work, a working timetable. Now, life is hectic and spontaneous, squeezed between lessons and homework, and firmly rooted in the present. I busy myself with meeting people of different ages and backgrounds and exploring different parts of the city and its population. I'm fortunate, as a poor student from an educated background doing a weird subject can mix with pretty much anyone -from Central Asian refugees to Naval Attaches- and I'm eager to get the most out of this. Moscow's an exhilarating place to live and I'm jogging to keep up. Life now is characterised by involuntary little smiles, as when I jog through the birch woods, the moonlight glinting off the leafy carpet, listening to the wolf-like howling of stray dogs, or, further down along the embankment of dilapidated concrete slabs, city lights glinting off lapping ripples, a lone workman welding on his makeshift platform.

*there had, in fact, been a couple of snowstorms, and there were also a couple of big fat old bears dressed in people clothes who came to visit me from England

Lady Clare Planting Her Flag

This blog is now feeding into a parrallel, more general archive by and about Clareites (ie people from Clare College Cambridge) Abroad.

So any current Clareites and alumni reading this now, definitely have a look at the new online colonialist drive that's kicking off over at wordpress. Any time you go on holiday, take a year out, get a travel grant etc. it would be good to hear from you on there.

It's all for the good cause of furthering Lady Clare's enterprise of World Domination as part of a long and worthy British Tradition. (In the hope that in the long run we all turn out like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BKRZTalEys, because that would be funny.)

In any case, it bears explaining quickly that the whole colonialist theme arises solely from the fact that Clare College has a place up on Chesterton Lane called "The Colony", which provided a neat name for the abroad blog, and a good opportunity to put up a bit of Eddie Izzard and The Fast Show on this one.

Lots of love,

Mark

Begemotizm

Begemot = hippo in Russian. from Behemoth. Begemotizm = eating ridiculous amounts of food. Arrived in St Petersburg yesterday morning on the train in time for an extended four hour breakfast on the balcony of pancakes, potato pancakes, home-made banana milkshake, bread and cheese, apple pie, fried potatoes, some biscuits, a bit of cake, then a nap, up in time for lunch, then some afternoon tea, then a stroll down into town to meet an old friend for a snack, then a couple of beers, warming mulled wine, another good friend popped by, then I came home for some supper.

Taming the Beast, Clowning Around

After a heavy and exhausting week last week, and a scare about a roommate just when I was feeling all settled (scared them more so have preserved my pimpin solitude), I gently collapsed over the weekend and had a nice domestic time regenerating all strung up with drying washing. Also tried out the chair lift on the hills which was fun, counting the weddings and stray dogs which seem to gather in equal number around the view point at weekends. Since then this week has had quite a perky kind of buzz about it. The weather has been cold and crisp and clear, hard frosts over night and sunny days.

Sunday night - Spooky barbecue in spooky wood.

We went for a spooky barbecue in spooky wood. A successful induction session for my grill set involving lots of lighter fluid and grilled meats.

Monday night - Mission Cake Bake Bake Cake

This was two of Cambridge's greatest Moscow representatives teaming up for an evening of culinary concoctification. Since success is a subjectively defined social construct I would say it was a very successful endeavour, although I have also on occasions been subjectively described by certain third parties as a delusional optimist.

Armed with tin and various ingredients and snacks to keep us going through the cooking process, Charles (Russianist from Jesus College Cam at the history faculty here) and I set off in search of working oven, since mine doesn't have a handle on the door and his doesn't have a knob to turn the gas on. We went up to floor number 8. Couple of near misses with the gas oven explosion wise - ooh er - and lots of whisk-y fun (see last post). The cake was a bit of a cobbledy jobby. We just had eggs and flour and sugar and some frozen fruit to chuck in it, and decided it needed a bit of baking soda or yeast or something (last baking experiment was stodge). So we plied the mix with beer (bubbly logic) to try to get a rise out of it. But alas yon cake proved resistant to our tried and tested seduction tactics and despite all efforts the result was really remarkably dense.

The whole point in all of this was that it was Jo's 21st - Cambridge Moscow Uni resident numero 3.

So we stabbed some candles in our creation and blew up a couple of balloons and set of for Sektor G, as it was by now just past midnight so birthday time. We got a couple of funny looks from security. Lit all the candles (there were loads, cake turned into mini forest fire) and banged on what we thought was Jo's door. Sleepy grumpy looking Russian guy emerged so we moved on to the next door sharpish. Banged on it. Jo emerged. Mission Accomplished.

Tuesday night - Georgian food

It was yummy, especially the pumpkin dumplings, and we got free wine at the end. A success whichever way you look at it.

Wednesday night (tonight) - Circus!

Fantastic circus, I'm ruined now for any kind of petty acrobatics and if I ever had appreciated the skill required in training dogs for dog shows then now I definitely wouldn't. Lions (both sea- and normal big catty maney african ones), magic tricks, trapeze, nail biting balancing acts, bears driving motorbikes, funny clowns. And of course the stodgy cementy birthday cake made an appearance as a filling interval snack. Basically, it had it all. To dispel any squeamish hesitation about the ethics of what discipining animals to such a high level must involve, the Russian response I received was that the animals are kept in good order, fed, and ruled with an iron rod so obviously much happier, healthier and more successful than if they were struggling with chaotic freedom in their wild (natural?) habitat. A theoretical viewpoint which sounds strangely familiar.

Thursday night (soon) - off to St Petersburg for a long weekend. Looking forward to getting on a train off to see old friends. But also glad to feel - delusional optimism aside - that I can now leave the Moscow I've been arduously carving and digging a niche into, nail and tooth, since the end of August, and to come back on Monday to my niche all ready carved and dug and furnished and ready for the winter.

A Whisk-y Business

settling in process has involved a steady ascent to domestic deity and general conquest of the aforementioned grimness of my living arrangements.

this involved some choice purchases early on including a roasting tin (non stick - score!), a kettle that screams like a dying harpie to let me know when I need to leg it to the kitchen for my boiling water/ makes you want to run for the nearest air raid shelter, and a mechanical whisk which is probably definitely my most prized purchase (hence title of post):

such a beast. good for pancakes. found accidentally on an unsuccessful (winterbootswise) shop in search of winterbooty

early on went to a honey festival with honey from throughout the land! I massively overdid on free tasters and had to sit down for a while with something like heart palpitations. felt like the russian winnie the pooh who def deserves a place on this blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qam9JBk5Oig

that same weekend went to a great flea market in search of a rug, lots of bear skins, gold teeth, old soviet memorabilia, ie good ol' stereotypes all still going strong to bolster the exoticness of ma bloggy. no photos tho unfortunately.

classes going fine but tough 6 day weeks and lots of Persian through Russian and vise versa. I like to think of tricky bits language in these kind of terms:

http://www.stcustards.free-online.co.uk/topp/latin/latin2.htm

Also getting to know people more in the faculty and generally a nice bunch.

had a great visit from a friend of a friend who had been Making Cultural Learnings of England for Make Benefit of Youth Culture in the Siberia, and brought me Marmite and whisky (whisky business eh eh eh). We had a fun time including one night out that included street spit roast chicken (ie eating one) and sparring with some well hard Chechens.

tried unsuccessfully to keep this short for readability and cos of time constraints which have been constraining my time and continue to constrain my time - I've been meaning to get round to a blog for weeks but not been getting round to a blog for weeks even though for weeks I've been meaning to get round to blogging, on my blog, about these weeks. But for some reason it still seems to be quite a long post. maybe it's my long winded writing style that I should work on.

main thing is I'm fine and all well, busy busy busy with general japes and teaching english to loaded people in one place and to refugees in t'other (former subsidising me for latter) and trying to sort out iran half of the year and still standing in queues for odd bits of bureaucracy and squeezing all that in between homework and classes or squeezing classes in between all that, whichever way round you like to look at the whole squeezing process really. and whatnot*. depending on who you are reading this there's also a fair to high chance I'm missing you.

weather has been great and sunny and warm but suddenly the temp seems to have dropped about 20 degrees, everyone's catching the lurgy, and the bears are out roaming the streets. Fighting both off with honey and whisky.

*big shout out to Peter Hill

I’m not a fan of round robins (prefer my robins slim. wahey!) and I have quite a fair old bit of news and a lot of people I’d like to keep up with so if you want to see how I’m getting on in Moscow then you can just tap into this here blog. I’ll also use it to vent my moaning and grumpiness into virtual space so watch out for that. I dunno how much will be worth writing about when I get into a routine but here’s my news for now anyway. It’s turned out fairly long so go to the loo before you start and get settled with a cup of tea somewhere comfortable, otherwise you probably won’t make it through to the end. Or just quit now and skip to the bottom for my address and send me a postcard.

Birch Trees and Leaden Skies – my arrival in Moscow

I left London feeling tired and very emotionally fragile. I was sitting in front of the emergency exit on the plane which meant my seat couldn’t recline, and I slumpy hunchy dosed for the three hours here from Heathrow. We arrived over verdant forests, silvery lakes and little dilapidated dachas (country cottages), shafts of sunlight beaming down through a layer of cloud. I clapped for the pilot along with the Russians, for touching down successfully without crashing. I unclicked my back and neck and emerged into a crowded airport. Got through passports and baggage etc no problem, and took a bus to the nearest metro. Took absolutely ages stuck in traffic. The metro is big and dark and fast and loud but I spotted one carriage with a massive bunch of balloons in it, which was nice.

I arrived at the main building of Moscow State University, (MGU or “em gay oo”) around 8.30ish. I found a couple of old grannies in a seventies style office in charge of my accommodation. They spent about two hours trying to find my papers by looking at the same ones over and over again and then getting distracted by other people coming in (I was witness to the workings of some hilarious bureaucracy) and telling me that I don’t exist. Eventually they found them in the next door office, and I got my piece of paper with my room number and a stamp and went through to sector D. I arrived in sector D. There’s a little security man sitting by the entrance who you have to show your pass to – the one who it was on Monday I met again in another sector today while I hunted for a fridge and he is my favourite security man so far. I got my keys and clean sheets (a relief) and a small towel off the granny who’s in charge of looking after my block, went along to room 128 at the end of the corridor on the left, and turned the key in the lock…

Mark’s Russian Chagpad

My room is part of a shared set. We have an outer door into the corridor, with a small, box-like toilet on the right and shower-with-sink on the left, and straight ahead 2 bedroom doors. The one on the left opens into a room with one window and one bed, which is inhabited by Toshi, a 34-year-old Japanese man, who greeted me on my arrival in flawless Russian. The door on the right leads into my bedroom. It has two tiny cot-like beds in it with two high sets of shelves with little desks dividing it down the middle. It has one small wardrobe built into the wall and two windows, one over each bed. The best description for the condition I found it all in is probably “grim as”. Toshi had arrived a day before me and bought little sponges and cloths and some washing up liquid and was already going at cleaning the shower room. The whole place was beset with dust and human hair (long and dark from the head, short dark and curly from elsewhere) (i.e. pubes! yuk!). The shower is mouldy pretty much everywhere and I fear for my lungs. The loo is smelly. There’s a thick layer of grime over everything and there was loads of dust. The curtains are minging. The paint and wallpaper are peely. There are dead cockroaches everywhere and some alive ones too, including coming out of the tap in the sink, and the sink doesn’t drain too well so if you have the tap running you get doubly attacked by dead cockroaches pouring down from above and welling up from below. In addition, Toshi has dried blood splattered on his wall (he’s scrubbing away at it valiantly as I type this up). It’s been really lucky to have Toshi as a neighbour though for buying this cleaning stuff. While he was cleaning the bathroom I gave the whole place a sweep with a straw brush I got from the granny down the corridor. Then I found a dried out old mop but when I wet it it gave off a terrible stink and reminded me of Medusa’s hair so I aborted the mopping operation sharpish and rinsed it out as well as I could and left it by the loo to fester. After I’d done all that, and beaten dust off my three cushions that make up a slightly too short mattress as well as I could, and also realised that I’d forgotten drinking water and my toothbrush (d’oh!), I was pretty worn out and went to bed for a fitful sleep, losing my blanket and getting chilly and dreaming of Richmond park in the sunshine with as much food and water and cuddles as you could want.

Since then me and my room have been getting along better. Last night when I got back from town I put up the map of The Russian Federation that I found in my room before and also my map of Iran, and I’ve put out some of my stuff on my newly dusted and de-cockroached shelves and generally feel more settled. Inspired by Toshi I cleaned my two big windows today, which made a massive difference as, like everything else, they were pretty grimey. It’s remarkable any light was coming in from outside at all before. It’s still gloomy down here on the ground floor, especially when even outside it’s gloomy, but now at least it feels gloomy on my own terms.

Also, Toshi bought a shower curtain today! So that’s good although he was really annoyed that it’s about an inch too short so the floor will get wet anyway. We plan to customise it by sticking plastic bags on the bottom (my idea) or just lowering the bar (his, better, idea).

Dokumenti

My first day in Moscow was spent mostly standing in queues. I queued at room 5 for my bit of paper to confirm I live here, then queued at room 16 for them to calculate how much I should pay to live here, then queued at room 15 to pay for living here, then queued at room 5 to show them the piece of paper that said I’d paid to live here. In each queue you have to be pretty sharp because there will inevitably be actually three queues for different things and a list at the front of names of people queuing who’ve wandered off. I was a bit slow off the mark on the first queue and so even though I was there at opening at 10am I was only 94^th on the piece of paper and got into the office just before they broke for lunch at 1.

While I was waiting I wandered around in the big university building. It has it’s own little overpriced shops of pretty much everything, and I went up to the top floor (twenty something) to look at the museum and the view. The museum was closed and they wouldn’t let me look at the view so all I got was popped ears that wouldn’t unpop for ages. The university building is probably a bit bigger than Cambridge University Library and pimped out like an opera house. It’s one of seven similarly hefty Stalinist wedding cake buildings dotted around Moscow.

After all those queues I had to go in to town to get registered at my faculty, which is just next to the famous Moscow Kremlin.

They were really friendly, and it was from them that I’d been instructed to ask about changing room by the unfriendly people at the main building where I’d been all day. When I did ask they said that our faculty only get given these dingy rooms but I might not have a roommate after all (a relief for me) and if they can find anything better for me then they’ll let me know. In the meantime I’m settling in nicely with my wee Scottish roomie Glen McFiddich who has just turned up for the sake of a comic cameo appearance on this blog:

And I’ve only paid until 1^st October so may find a room in a flat somewhere or something.

In Russia you have to register within three days of arriving in any city. I got my registration forms from my faculty but all the actual regisration happens back here in main building. By that time it was already 4.45pm, and the registration office back here closes at 5 and has Wednesday off. So I can’t register until day four and, like last year when I was in Russia and the same thing happened, I unfortunately end up leaving myself vulnerable and open to getting ‘fined’ by every predatory policeman sharp enough/greedy enough to spot the disparity between the dates in my documents.

Finding a fridge (fail)

Today I went off to try and find a fridge. So far I’ve seen two groups of students in different parts of the building staggering along under fridges. There were a few adverts for selling fridges and kettles and I phoned the numbers but got no answer. I asked the security man and he sent me across to the opposite block. My fave friendly security man from when I arrived was there and we had a good chat and he recommended going to floor 18 on blocks V and B and just working my way through the kitchens and down the stairs and as soon as I saw a spare fridge taking it because “it probably wouldn’t belong to anyone”. Nice. I took his advice but got bored after trailing around the fridgeless block V. The only fridges I saw (2 fairly antique and broken looking ones) had aggressive looking messages selotaped onto them like “don’t touch or I’ll kill you”.

Freshers’ Day

Today, being the 1^st of September, was also the first day of all schools and universities around Russia and as such the solemn celebration of Knowledge Day. This meant that there were loads of excited freshers hilariously glammed up crowded in the marble halls of the central part of the main building. There was a military brass band, posh food, speeches, and also some sporting and musical events but I was busy looking for a fridge and also feeling a bit ill (got fresher’s flu) so didn’t go. There are also posters around for clubs to join, some look quite good, there’s lots of theatre stuff, ball room dancing, writing groups which could be great for my Russian. I’m most tempted to participate as an international representative on the judging panel for Miss Moscow State University 2010 (missmsu.ru) mwuhaha.

The Weather

The weather is rather chilly and has been between about 10 and 14 degrees Centrigrade since I got here. There was a little bit of sun at one point on Monday evening and on Tuesday evening, and today we’ve had pretty constant rain. I tried to go shopping this evening and got totally soaked in a freezing cold version of a tropical downpour with thunderclaps that set off car alarms. I turned back pretty quickly.

Fortunately I’m not alone

I’ve already mentioned my Japanese neighbour and my Scottish room mate. My best friend from school is also living here until the end of the month so we met for a beer and some fried potatoes and meat in a smokey bar yesterday evening since I was in the centre of town. I also used to live here in the nineties so we went to have a look at my old house, and that means I have friends here from that time which is nice. It will be good once classes start as well because I’ll have a reason to hang around with Russian students and get into a routine and not be speaking English. Also my goodly wifey from Cambridge Luigi is coming for two months, she looks a bit like this

There's a bunch of Cambridge people and Russian people and stuff around.

What I’m actually doing here

I’m going to be studying Persian at the Institute of Asian and African studies which is part of Moscow university, because I’m on my third year abroad from studying Russian and Persian at Cambridge.

POST me a postcard!

Here is my postal address – I’ll let you know if it changes but it will probably be this at least until 1^st October. No idea whether anything would ever reach me but it would be really really nice if it did.

БРИНКЛИ, М. Э. / MARK BRINKLEY

RUSSIA

МОСКВА 119234

УЛ. ЛЕНИНСКИЕ ГОРЫ

ДОМ 1 (ГЛАВНОЕ ЗДАНИЕ МГУ)

КОРПУС Д

RUSSIA

Lots of love,

Mark