Freezing Rain.....as fun as it sounds!

So the snow yesterday was all a ploy to get silly foreigners overexcited about Russian weather, today we have freezing, sideways-blowing rain and a low of -6 degrees, I think I'm gonna need another coat to go on top of the one I already have! The update on the apartment that in hindsight has become the greatest apartment in the world ever is that the owner is missing, presumed skiing in Switzerland, and they can't rent it to us without his say so. My theory is that they have found someone to rent it for a higher price and are just seeing how crazy they can make their story. So, our rent in the student accomodation runs out on monday and we've got the weekend to find somewhere to live. It'll never match the pimped out mirrored hall, MASSIVE fridge, leather couches, piano and general great location of the last one....sniff!

Lui has been doing some work for a magazine here and they asked him to do a club review at the weekend. There's an interesting institution here in nightclubs called Face Control, basically bouncers on the biggest power trip in the world...ever! They are so inconsistent, you might get in somewhere five times in a row and then they'll turn you away point blank the next five times. Anyhoo, the magazine had been invited by this club to review it and, being the concerned citizens that we are, Anna and I went with Lui to help him spend his drinks budget. Couldn't find the club for a start (they love hiding their clubs down dark threatening alleys here, they make you work for your carousing!) and when we made it to the door the knuckle draggers in charge wouldn't let us in! Lui explained to them that we were there to review the club, on foot of an invitation from the management, they answered that it didn't take four of us to review a club and they would only let two of us in. They didn't seem to understand the concept that Lui had the power to be VERY nice about the club or verrrrrry stingy! Long story short, if your interested in the review that he wrote, based on his spending a total of 1 minute in there and his friends being left outside its at www.elementmoscow.ru%2Farticles.php%3Fi%3D123000%26s%3D10-night-life. Say it with me kids....Moscow, there's gotta be a better way! (its a running theme here, still love this dysfunctional city though!)

No pics today, the computers not cooperating.

Lessons learnt by Fiona today
1. Don't count your chickens, they'll all get bird flu.
2. Don't believe a word Russian letting agents say, ever.
3. Never think that just because you have agreed to rent a flat, have withdrawn large amounts of money to pay for it and arranged a meeting time to sign it over to you, that the letting agent ever had any intention of ever considering renting you the flat.
4. Russia....There's gotta be a better way.

LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW!!!!!

It snowed today, real proper big flakes of snow and we crunched and slid our way into college, all excited about the prospect of a white winter, it snowed heavily all day, the city looks amazing covered in snow. Imagine our disgust this evening when we left the warm cafe that makes great sandwiches (an unfortunate rarity in this city) to see that it was raining!! Our snow was melting, meeeeellllllting!However we have been reliably informed that we will be well and truly
sick of snow by mid-december and what were we getting so excited about. It's definitely still a novelty for this girl from a temperate climate! This is the view from my bedroom window this morning, even our local building site manages to look festive!!

Chilling out in college, my ass is still defrosting! Spot the hardcore Russian without a hat!

The Big Move....Maybe.

We have found ourselves an apartment, within walking distance of town and college and five minutes from the nearest metro stop (which happens to be two stops up from college, not that we won't be powerwalking into college everyday!) It's got three big rooms, a piano (ooh, fancy!), a bath, a washing machine (a luxury item that I never even considered a luxury until I moved to this country, handwashing everything is the biggest pain in the ass ever!), a big telly, one of the biggest fridge/freezer combo's I've seen this side of the atlantic (or the pacific, depending on what direction you feel like travelling!), BROADBAND INTERNET, an oven (see entry on luxury items above) and a general lack of babushka's. So after living in the same house for 20 years I find myself getting ready to move for the second time in two months....the monster suitcases make an appearance again! Though the path to living in an apartment in this country is never smooth, of course they like to keep you on your toes. For a start the prospective tenant, not the landlord who's making all the money, has to pay the agent a finders fee for about an hours work. This can be as much as 1 months rent, when we are going to be paying 1000 dollars a month for the privilege of staying in the place, it cuts deep to fork over hundreds of dollars on top of that. Also, having told the agency that we will take the flat and are willing to move in right away, they told us they would ring us back to organise a time to sign the relevant documents (along with the ubiquitous stamps that go on everything here, documents, restaurant menus, even bed linen, if you stand still long enough you'll end up getting stamped!) and we still haven't heard from them. I've never heard of a letting agent playing hard to get like that, we've got the dollars burning holes in our pockets, just let us move in!!! The moving trauma updates will continue...

A High Class Evening

We pretended that we were cultured for an evening last night and spent the evening in the Bolshoi Theatre. Anna and Lui bought me tickets to see the opera 'Tosca', sung in Italian, with Russian captions, which was great for the 2 out of the 6 of us who can speak fluent Russian, for the rest of us it meant a crash course in operatic Russian, but the whole show was amazing. We even got the tiny little opera glasses and pretended that the view was better with them, I wasn't people watching with them...honest! Its amazing how people can be tortured and killed and still manage to sing in perfect pitch at the same time! The Bolshoi theatre itself is being renovated at the mo so we were in the temporary building.....which for a stop-gap was amazing, blinged up with chandeliers and general fanciness. We are definitely going to be returning, have to see the ballet, where better to see the Nutcracker than in Tchaikovsky's home country? That didn't sound pretentious at all...did it?

Its not going to get much colder than this.....
is it????


Ive decided that group emails are too much effort and I'm going to try out this blog idea, I'm informed that it's so hot right now! Hopefully I'll be able to get pics up on to it so anyone who's interested can see how we are getting on. Two months in, I'm still trying to understand Moscow, it's quite the class city but every day it turns around and reminds you that you are never going to understand what the hell is going on. Plus it's getting really cold and it's only October!! This is me and Lui near college, in our snazzy new duvet-esque coats.....freezing our asses off!!

Last week I had my twenty-first here, it was really weird not being at home for it and I had visions of me sitting in a corner on my tod, with a party hat on, singing happy birthday to me. It wasn't quite like that! We have been really lucky here making friends, Russian, American (for that read Mexican, Chinese, Armenian, Cherokee (one of them swears his great great great great grandparents were native americans, I'm not so sure!) and various other random nationalities via America!), Estonian, Polish, German and more Irish people, for some reason we just find each other. There was quite a mixture of people out last saturday night, the spoken language was mainly english and pigeon russian. I refused to get a birthday cake, anyone who has ever experienced the sickly sweet wrongness that is Russian birthday cake will know why, so instead, Sean and Kaspar (our visitors from St Petersburg) made me a birthday watermelon...saturated in vodka. The Russian way, sometimes its the best way!!

Le Birthday Delicacy, dodgy stuff!!

Our next big adventure is trying to move out of our student accomodation, we have our own rooms, they are nice enough but for the low, low price of 300 american dollars a month each we have the privilege of a shared kitchen with no oven that is also the designated smoking area, temperamental showers (believe me, living in Moscow, its never a good time for a cold shower!), sporadic supplies of running water, the woman who is inexplicably either always washing her clothes (we have no washing machine so our communal bathroom always resembles a chinese laundry) or cooking up HUGE pots of food in the kitchen, narky acrobats and assorted other circus people and their offspring, AND, the icing on the cake.....the babushkas! They are supposedly employed to keep the place clean but we really think they are making sure we aren't breaking any rules. Every morning they open our doors, then knock, empty our bins, pick one thing to dust (the top of the tv is a favourite!), give out to us in Russian about whatever's annoying them that day and then leave. They have been known to clean the toilets at about 4.30 in the morning (obviously I have never seen them, I'm always tucked up in my bed by 11!) and mop the clean floor about 4 times a day. Basically they are a prime example of russian overemployment, they could just do an hours work for the day, then leave us alone! There is also a different breed of younger babushka downstairs on 'reception'. They watch tv and smoke all day and if one was to come in late to the building (not that I would, as I'm always in bed by 11 of course!) one has to wake them up in the middle of the night to get ones key, and a torrent of abuse. I have a mother, I dont need about 8 more! Anyhoo, long story short, we are looking for a flat, all we want is three rooms, a washing machine (oh the luxury!), a proper kitchen, proximity to a metro and not too high rent. Sounds simple....nothing is simple in this city! The search continues....



I got VERY excited when I realised I could buy Irish brown bread and assorted other 'cuisine de france' goodies in Moscow, slightly more expensive than home but most definitely worth it. All I have to do now is find the shop selling Irish sausages and rashers and I will be a very happy bunny!


For the record, I was nowhere in the vicinity of Liam Lawlor's accident, honest Guard. What the hell was he doing in Moscow? He made the Moscow Times, described as a disgraced politician.