Saturday, 21 August 2010

Burning Down The House



So last Sunday (15th) was amusing. Actually, the previous Wednesday (11th) was genuinely entertaining, as I attended my friend Dima's wedding, which was an absolutely wonderful day and I'll write about it later. A couple of hundred pics are on flickr from the day.

But something happened on my way to Dima's wedding, which took place at the Дворец Бракосочетания (Dvor-ets Brak-oh-so-shey-tan-i-ya lit. Palace of Marriage) which is more or less the same as ЗАГС (Zags an acronym for what is essentially a Registry Office, but everyone says Zags for short). A few doors up from mine an apartment was on fire and the firemen (пожарники po-zhar-ni-key) were busily blasting it from a cherry picker.

"That's interesting," I thought, as the apartment itself was part of the same building I live in. Most apartment buildings in Moscow have multiple подъезды (pod-yez-dh lit. um... well, езд comes from a verb of motion, but it means entrance). I was in a rush to get to the other side of town where the registry office is at, but after seeing the burly Russians attacking the blaze I became plagued by the idea that I might not have an apartment to come back to after all the wedding fun times. My fears didn't manifest themselves, and my apartment was fine after I came back home at two in the morning.

That was, of course, until Sunday. Coming back at about three in the afternoon - I can't recall what I had been doing before then - I noticed the apartment stairwell stank of what could best be described as burnt plastic. Подъезды smell funny most of the time, usually of stale piss because tramps have a tendency to pass out on the stairs in the winter, but this time round it was especially pungeant.

One astute neighbour also noticed the stench, and was pacing up and down the stairs looking for the source. I became paranoid and started feeling the floors of my apartment wondering if any of the parquet had suddenly become especially hot (not easy to tell when your apartment is hot to begin with given the recent heatwave). And wouldn't you know it? The apartment directly below mine was actually on fire.

By the time I had realized it was probably the right moment to vacate the place, I heard a colossal banging from downstairs. Firemen were already there and were attempting to force their way in with a crowbar, hose at the ready (meaning I couldn't really get past, but I guess I could have jumped off my balcony, which is only about twenty-five feet from the ground). Then I got a phonecall from one of my Russian friends who lives nearby, inquiring, "Umm, Ben, there's smoke coming from one of the windows of your building, are you alright?"

At that point I noticed that some burly firemen on a crane were peering through my balcony window at me to see if I was alright and rudely hung up on my friend to chat with them.

Given the sturdiness of doors you find in some Russian apartment buildings like the one I'm in (where the ceiling is about three meters high), the crowbar wasn't sufficient, prompting the appearance of an enormous diesel-powered angle grinder to saw through the bolts, which made a hilarious amount of noise.

Obviously, no one was in the apartment at the time. In fact, I can't recall the last time I had seen someone entering or exiting the place in the past year, so I suspect it may have been an electrical fault. I'm vaguely sure I heard mentions of an electric blanket, which might have explained the initial stench.

Anyway, the fire was put out relatively quickly. No towering inferno, I regret to disappoint, just a stairwell full of smoke (ironic, given the fact that the thick amount of smog that had descended on Moscow over the past fortnight had finally lifted). A fireman came in to inspect my place afterward and found no smoke or soot damage, and merely said that I should just leave the window open for a while.

Oddly enough, my friend who called me earlier was still waiting down on the street, which was nice, but, because of his particularly unique character, I was wondering if he was less interested in seeing me safe and well and instead more excited by the prospect of me emerging from the подъезд half on fire. He simply grinned when I later made this observation.

Not wanting to enjoy the stench of burnt plastic, I left the building for a few hours to both get a drink and let the excitement die down.

A few days later, I encountered a couple of my immediate neighbours talking by the lift. Unfortunately for them, who weren't present on the day it happened, it turned out that the fire had kicked off underneath theirs, and that there was some sort of soot damage here and there in the apartment. Although most of the apartments are uniform, a lot of them used to be all one large thing, called a коммуналка (com-oo-nal-ka lit. a short form of communal apartment) in which several families would live. After the Soviet Union died, a lot of these apartments were split up.

The flat below me, however, hadn't been completely rearranged as the ones above, and covered the same area of the two apartments above i.e. mine and my neighbours'.

But anyway, no lives lost and mostly superficial damage. Here's to the next disaster. Perhaps something less dramatic, though, like the power outage in four of St. Petersburg's city districts last night.

Sunday, 1 August 2010

Summer has come... I almost wish it hadn't



Yes it's incredibly lazy to just embed YouTube vids haphazardly, but it saves me time because I'm awfully lethargic. Since the last post I've been in between jobs - which actually means I've been doing two jobs until the latter is done with - so the prospect of coming home to read and write more stuff (that I won't get paid for) has been a little unappealing. That and the year-long honeymoon period of keeping a blog has nearly ended. But fret not, I shall endure!

Coming back to Martha and The Vandellas, it's been hot. No really. It started off as fun, but then came forest and turf fires, thick smog from the infernos completely blanketing parts of the capital, people's dachas (country houses) burning down in the Moscow outskirts, crop failures, and states of emergency being declared in 20+ regions of Russia. The past three weeks of drought have been hellish for a lot of people, but it's finally cooling down.

As a result it has added to the whole being idle thing. I have mostly hidden away indoors because there are only so many sunbeams the Northern Irish tan can take, as well as the fact that I am being less wild with my money - though what I would be spending on eating out is now being spent on keeping my air conditioner working overtime (my bedroom window faces the setting sun). On top of all that, the student loan Sword-of-Damascus over my head has finally made me paranoid enough to start paying it off.

So what is there to say? Well, my friend Mitya (formally Dmitry; Russians have various diminutives, e.g. Benjamin = Ben/Benny/Benster etc.) has finally released his first book, called «Секс в саду камней» (Seks v sah-doo kahm-neigh) which means... umm... "Sex in the Stone Garden". It's an erotic satire consisting of a collection of short stories, of which I've read the first four, which revolves around Japanese culture.



The huge irony is that, while Mitya spent a lot of time in China in his formative years, he has never once set foot in Japan, and instead bases his stories on various stereotypes and his own perverted mind. With each passage, I begin to look at him in a slightly different light, as they get ever more extreme in content, but all the more hilarious.

Pending his approval, I'll eventually put pictures of the book presentation, which took place at the Mayakovsky Museum, on my flickr account. It should be noted that in order for any book to be printed in Russia, the publishers must have a letter from what is ostensibly the propaganda ministry declaring that it does not contain extremist material. I would have been interested to see the expressions on their faces upon seeing the cover of Mitya's opus land on their desk.

Aside from potential book pics, a lot of (mostly untitled) photos have been added to the new Moscow 2010 flickr album They feature sunshine, and there are some ladies contained therein. Enjoy.

Update: Moscow continues to be enveloped in smog. There was brief respite on Friday afternoon, but it came back with a vengeance at the weekend. I took some pics last Wednesday, which more or less show what it's like currently.

But if that's not enough for you, someone made a video on YouTube of what it's like.



Thankfully I have an air conditioner in my apartment, as well as some surgical masks.