Wandering Mess

We live far from the center and that will change. Who thought living in the student residences would one day become an appealing idea? We’ve been assured there are no cockroaches. And no washing machine. It's not like we have a real one in our apartment anyway. But the residences are much closer to the city center than we are now. So we’re planning on moving, but nothing is sure yet. The bad part is that we’re renting from our boss and we killed her plant, but we haven’t had the guts to tell her yet. I almost don’t want to move out, just so we don’t have to tell her that we killed her plant by leaving the window open all night. Why did we leave the window open all night, you say? Because we (many expletives) cook/boil/sweat in our apartment. I also don’t want to leave because we have the nicest konsyerzhka ever. She keeps asking us if we’re freezing and if we like Moscow, and then she tells us to go and relax. She smiles a lot. I think she’s not from here.

But we need to leave because the ride home is infernal, and we will never ever do anything on weekdays except go to work. We’d like to do more, go to the theater, the opera, a café, anything. Right now, we get home between 7 and 9, and, whatever the time, we are exhausted from having been pushed around like cattle for an hour. There are times when we don’t feel the ground under our feet anymore, but we are moving, because people are pushing us around, holding us up in the air, walking away with our scarves without noticing that they are stuck under their arm.

For those of you who are wondering, work is nice. We mostly only work with the lady who rents us our place, a nice lady who is patient enough for our deficient Russian. There is also the director of the center, who just arrived from a business trip yesterday, and will be leaving again Friday. He made Deanna mayonnaise soup today. We’re in Russia. Here’s a typical day:
8:00 Wake-up, take shower, wash dishes
9:00 Make breakfast, eat breakfast, wash dishes
10:00 Leave
11:00 Arrive, have tea
11:30-2:00 Translate grant applications, reference letters, translate articles
2:00-4:00 Cook lunch, eat lunch
4:00-5:00 Work again
5:00-5:30 Have tea
5:30-6:00 Work again, leave
6:00-10:00 Perhaps walk around town, go home, be exhausted, eat, sleep.
Nothing exciting yet.

Except that our friend Roma arrived in Moscow from St. Petersburg yesterday, and we will be seeing him today! That makes us very happy.

Oh, and my thoughts on Moscow? It’s big. People seem to be rather soulless. I think it’s because of the metro rides.