Toilet paper, customer service, and frozen conversations

I thought that I would respond to a concern that my mother's friends voiced before I came to Moscow. They had all told her to advise me to bring my own TP if I was interested in, quite literally, saving my skin. I can now report with confidence that toilet paper in Russia is quite acceptable.

Please see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/science/earth/26charmin.html?_r=1&th&emc=th for further reading on the paper we use.

I guess it all depends on your perspective; I can remember being confused at seeing half-torn history notebooks in my first apartment in Kazakhstan. Then I figured out that was the "reserve supply." So if you were in dire need, and there was no real TP, feel free to take the section on the "Birth of a Nation: KZ" and do what needs to be done. So using single-ply over here really isn't that bad.


or...


Though buying the paper can be (incoming bad pun) a pain in the butt. Customer service in the CIS countries is very similar to what I've seen so far in Russia. That is, somewhere between
A) None at all, and
B) I forgot to smile sarcastically when I threw your small potatoes in the bag.

I had a conversation with some students recently who were all young managers in a large corporate office. We were doing a lesson on the inner mechanics of a company, so we had listed the deparments. Guess which one they forgot? Yep, customer relations. Upon being pressed on this issue, they contended that their medium-sized international pharmaceutical company had, indeed, one person to handle complaints somewhere in the company. It is still currently being disputed whether or not there is a second person helping out.


I went to the store yesterday to get some bread. Aside from the fact that хлеб is one of the most difficult words for me to pronounce (for reasons unknown), I still was bewildered by the experience. I think the dialogue went something like this:

Me - "Do you have bread today?"
Her - "What?"
Me - "Can I have a loaf of bread, please?"
Her - "What?"
Me - "Bread?"
Her - "Which?"
Me - (thinking of white or wheat bread) "Umm, white bread."
Her - "No, I mean, do you want a loaf or do you want bread?"
Me - "What?"
Her - "A loaf? Or bread?"
Me - "I'm sorry, I don't understand."
Her - "A LOAF?? Or BREAD??"
Me - "..."
Her - "Doooo yooouuuuuu want a LOOOAAF or dooo yoooou want BRRREEEAAAD???"
Me - "..."
Her - "Come back when you do understand."

I came back later. Turns out loaves are rounder. Bread is a loaf of bread that looks like, well, a loaf of bread. Maybe the reader loses something without seeing her patronizing gaze, or without wilting under the heat of her mocking and deriding tone, but still. I'm afraid to ask for bread. I now do without.

So I was sweating from the bread encounter. But I can't imagine that the men sitting outside chatting at 10 PM were hot. It was probably 0 degrees F outside, and two old guys were having a grand (sober) conversation outside the store, just sitting on the benches. I stood around and adjusted the groceries I was carrying (sans starches) so I could listen to them talk. The conversation had to do with Dinamo, one of the soccer teams in the area. They seemed so calm, and warm, very much unlike the shivering mass of ice that I felt like and resembled. I've noticed two types of people: those who notice the cold as much as they might notice a passing cloud, and those who, like me, run from location to location for fear of becoming of human popsicle. It's really not that cold, but the wind is bitter.



What's the trick? Do I need to be fatter? Or maybe live through a time period when people survive by burning furniture? Or what? Even in the States, I feel like you wouldn't have two or three blokes sit down in freezing weather, facing into the wind, for a catch-up convo about the latest comings and goings of the White Sox. Well, they might, but I feel as if there would have to be a little liquor behind the cold-weather bravery. Why choose to talk outside? Maybe I'll have to sit down with them soon and find out. Though first I'm going to have to learn to talk about sports... and I can barely do that in English.

The Red Square at night

Here's my stop on the metro - Kuzminki.  Nothing too special in this station, I think.

Here's Teatralnaya Stantsiya.  A bit prettier than mine, but still not as exciting as the Revolution Square Station - that one has cool iron-wrought statues of soldiers lining the walls.

I traveled for about 45 minutes to get to the Red Square.  That's the direct translation from Krasnaya Ploshad, but the red part (krasnaya) is really just an older way to say beautiful (krasivaya).  In the photo above, we have Lenin's Tomb.  Bonus points if you knew his full name:  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

St. Basil's Cathedral was built in 1555 by Ivan the Terrible.  The two statues in front were leaders of the armies that repelled Polish forces during the Time of Troubles (1612).  Napoleon and Stalin had both wanted to destroy St. Basil's, maybe because of the paint job - that was only added in the 17th century.

The walls and towers to the left are guarding (and blocking the view of) the Senate building and the Kremlin Theatre.  The crane and construction that you see is part of a skating rink that's going up.  That's a little better than the way the French treated it (they stabled horses inside Basil's Cathedral and on the square).

So if you look at the top of this building, you'll see ГУМ.  While that used to stand for Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin (Government Department Store), it now stands for Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin (Main Department Store).

Here's the inside of the GUM.  3 floors and two of these halls side by side make it about 1.5 miles long in total.

This red building is the Historical State Museum (it can be seen in two other pictures).  It was built in the late 1870s, early 1880s for Alexander II.  It has 48 halls and over 4 million items in it today.  It even has Napoleon's saber which, incidentally, was also short.

Rolex:  "It's time for your victory!"  Too bad that Federer is on the billboard, and not Nadal.  This is just a block off the Red Square, which is behind me in this shot.

Here's Georgy Zhukov at the back of the museum.  He's looking out towards the Rolex sign.  Zhukov was a hero of WWII.

The tower in the very background is the Senate Tower, while the one closer to us is the Nikolskaya Tower.  The one that's half cut out in the foreground is the Corner Arsenal Tower.

My current apartment

This is the easier map to look at to understand the city's layout.  I'm a 15-minute walk from Kuzminki Station.  It's down at the bottom, right-hand corner of the map (on the purple line).  

A few of my different work sites: 

 - Park Kultury (bottom left, red line, attached to the brown circle)

 - Shabolovskaya (bottom left, orange line)

 - Dynamo (top right, green line)

 - Rechnoy Vokzal (top right, green line)

 - Kurskaya (middle right, blue line)

And our office is located not far from Pushkinskaya (where the purple line meets the green line).

The following map is a little difficult to understand, but it's basically the same system laid out in a more accurate way.

The metro is pretty sweet.  It opened back in 1935, has 12 lines, 180 miles of track, and 177 stations.  I'll take some pictures of the stations for you to see - some of them are pretty fantastic, but they're all crowded during the day.  The system serves about 7 million people everyday.  You can buy a one way ticket for 22 rubles (61 cents), or you can buy a longer term ticket.  You walk up to the gates, flash your ticket card over the machine, and it allows you through.  

Be careful though; if you:

A) go on the wrong side of the machine,

B) don't scan your ticket correctly, or

C) try just running through,

then the gate slams on you, plays a cute song, and a uniformed grandmom comes up to harass you.

It's a super easy system to use; everything is clearly labeled.  Also, the announcer's voice is easy to understand.  Speaking of, if you're going into the center of the city, it's a male voice, but if you're leaving the center, it's a female voice.  If you're on the circle line, you hear a man speaking when you're going clockwise, and a woman when you're going counterclockwise.  

First Week in Moscow

So this is it.  This is the view from my first apartment in Moskva (Moscow).  I'm in a southeastern part of the city.  It's called the suburbs, but I can't tell where the city ends and my area begins.  It's all busy, huge, alive, and very Russian.

So those buildings are apartments across the way, but those are a bit nicer than my building.  I'll have to post a pic of this complex soon, but you might be able to get a mental picture of my building if you pictured a building 1/4 that size, 30 years older, and recently refurbished (on the outside at least).  I'm living in a room that costs about $500 a month to rent in the most expensive city for foreigners in the world (three years running, actually).  My room is tiny, but thankfully the bed extends on both sides, so I fit.

I'll be moving at the end of this week, sometime around March 1st, to a new apartment in the northwestern suburbs.  Apparently that place has a bit less (!?!) green than here, and it's busier in general.  I've been over to that area for some lessons, but I'm not able to capture any general characteristics of the neighborhood in just a few words.  It's too big.  I'll post some pics when I get a chance.

Here's my desk;  I iron here every day... yay.

And here's the meal that I made for myself tonight:  fried potatoes (I'm remembering how to peel them), onion, garlic, sausage, and egg.  It sounds more like breakfast, but it's what I felt like on the way home.

I've been working some funny hours.  My earliest lessons start at 8 AM and it takes about an hour and half to get to most places.  I get up early enough to shower, iron, shave, and dress (yep, in that order).  Today, I woke up, worked all morning, had some meetings and a Russian lesson at my office in the afternoon, traveled to a lesson in the evening, but all without eating.  So my mutant breakfast-dinner did the trick.