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