It’s true— there is no temperature gauge on my stove; my hot water just came back on a week ago, after the annual three week “cleaning of the pipes”; I have a courtyard in which old alcoholics sit all day with tops of cardboard boxes at their feet, playing cards and shooting dice; and last weekend, I found a syringe, filled with blood, on the front step of my apartment building. But wait, that could be just about anywhere in Russia . . . here in Moscow, a six-month membership to a gym close to my office costs $750; my ten-story apartment building is one of the shorter ones in my neighborhood; my metro stop is three stops from the end of a line with 20 or so stops, and there are nonetheless no seats to be found at 9:15 a.m.; and if I ever stay out past 1 a.m. (when the metro closes), I will have no trouble getting a cab ride home from most any car that passes. So crazy! But, really, pretty damn fun, too.
And I think that it can only get better, really. Right now, I’m working for a company called Language Link, which is infamous for paying its employees little but attracting a lot of foreigners because they make it easy for people to find them (on the web, for instance) and offer full visa support and accommodation, an attractive package deal to your average college grad looking to live abroad! It sure was to me. Little did I know, I could’ve easily found a job that pays twice what LL pays ($900/month to start) and a room in an apartment all on the same website! Wish I had known that six months ago.
So, because I have a not-so-sweet job (I sit in an office with some fun Russians and translate economic documents, for the most part, for companies like RTS, the NYSE of Russia; sounds, to me at least, potentially exciting, but I promise, it’s not) and my apartment is linked to that job, I can see myself walking up the steps past a different set of alcoholics and, who knows, perhaps a crack spoon, to a new home in the near future . . . and here I was gonna put up some crazy awesome pictures of all sorts of cool stuff. But I can't seem to get it to work. That's Russia for you.
Anyway, I think I’ll try to write on this her blog once a week or so, about any and everything CRAZY or interesting that happens to me here in the RF, so if you’re ever curious about what I’m eating for dinner (probably cabbage! and/or borscht. Oh, and pickles, too) or you live in a very hot climate and want to feel better about the weather where you are (the low today—August 28—was 45 degrees) or you’d like to live vicariously through someone roughin’ it abroad (that means you, Portlanders! Your life is too cushy—feel some of my pain for me . . . ), just type out www.russiatranslated.blogspot.com, curl up in a blanket, and say hello! to Moscow . . .
