Howdy. It’s Saturday night and I’m lamely stuck at home reading and blogging. I guess I’m not really stuck here, as I’m free to go when and where ever I please, but since I don’t really know anybody here yet and it’s pretty chilly outside, I feel like holding up in the old apartment for another night. Unfortunately, I am still without internet for the time being, and am writing this in word to be uploaded later. I did get internet installed in the apartment yesterday, but apparently getting online isn’t as easy as just plugging in the cable and firing up the browser like it would be back home. Apparently my internet provider uses something called a VPN, which, not being a computer nerd, I had never heard of, but I ascertained that it’s some sort of exclusive network that requires specific configuration to access. I was given an instruction sheet in Russian with all the pertinent info for how to connect to this VPN, but since Ukraine is not Mac-friendly (like the rest of the world outside the US), the instructions were for Windows only. I figured out where to do the configuration on my Mac, and tried plugging in all the right numbers and codes given on the instruction sheet, but alas, success has eluded me. Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating. I tried calling the rep from the company today to see if he could help me, but he didn’t answer. I’m going to try to get a hold of him tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be up and running in the next couple of days, or at least before heading to Kiev on Wednesday. If all goes well, I’ll be able to post this from my own computer before I would even get the chance to make it back to the internet center.
So, yesterday was spent mostly dealing with internet stuff. Around noon I was about to head out to do some more exploring of the city, when literally as I was putting my shoes on to go out the door I got a call from the internet people that said they would be coming by in an hour to install the cable. So, that kept me at home. The guy came by in his big utility vest and box-o-cable to check out the apartment to see where to run the cable, then headed to the roof to take care of business. Since these old Soviet apartment buildings obviously aren’t wired for this sort of thing, the way the install things like internet or cable TV around here is to just hang a long wire from the roof along the side of the building and into the window of the apartment. There are a few other cords that run past my balcony window to apartments below mine. So, while Johnny cable-run was up top doing his thing, my landlady called to say she was bringing round the new landlord (which I had been told about when I signed the lease) in fifteen minutes or so. I thought it might get crazy with them and the internet guy all here at the same time, but the guy was really taking a long time up on the roof, so the others came and left well before he came back down. My new landlord is a guy named Alexander (real original), and he seems pretty nice. He checked out the apartment just to get a sense of his new investment, I guess, and seemed to be contemplating taking my TV. Did I mention I have a TV? I do, and it is kind of nice being able to watch sleazy Russian music videos every now and then. Thankfully a women who accompanied my landlord and who I can only assume is his wife seemed to convince him to leave it for my sake. The landlord was also given a set of keys to my apartment, which makes me a little uneasy, but I guess that’s pretty standard, huh?
After my new and old landlords left I stuck around waiting for the internet guy to come back down. He was seriously up there for about three hours, and I was beginning to suspect that he might have left. The cable was there, and I could bring it into the apartment, but it didn’t have an end piece on it so I assumed he wasn’t finished. Eventually he came back to wrap everything up. He drilled some holes, strung the cable into the apartment, and put the proper end piece on, and that’s when all my connection problems started. I eventually gave up and finally got a chance to leave my apartment that day, and only to head over to the market to buy some food to cook. I didn’t want to buy a lot of stuff, so I just got some pelmeny and sour cream, along with a little vodka for good measure. I had a nice pelmeny dinner, then did a little drinking while finally watching the movie Pulp Fiction, which I had copied from Netflix before coming. Of all the movies that I haven’t seen but should have, Pulp Fiction has always been the one that has confounded people the most, and so I kind of feel like more of a real person now for having seen it. It’ll be nice to never get that shocked and disappointed reaction from people when they hear I haven’t seen it. My verdict: pretty good. While I was watching it, I started hearing bangs and seeing flashes outside, so I went onto the balcony to see what all the commotion was and determined that there were fireworks going off somewhere. They sounded to be very close, but they were going off on the other side of the next apartment building over, and the side of the building was blocking my view. I could only see the flashes from the fireworks bouncing off the cliffs and trees across the street. I have no idea what the occasion was, but it was kind of fun in a pseudo-scary way, like the city was under attack or something (hopefully this was as close to that scenario as we’re going to get!) Oh, on Friday I also finally spoke to my local advisor/professor on the phone, and we arranged to meet on Monday to talk about what it is exactly I’ll be doing here. I’ll let you know how that goes.
Today was fairly productive. I headed downtown mainly to use the internet, but since I couldn’t figure out which marshrutka would take me there directly, I just decided to take one to the train station and walk again from there to downtown. Actually, it wasn’t on a marshrutka, but on a trolleybus, which I found to be almost four times less expensive than a marshrutka (60 kopeks vs. 2 grivna, or about 12 cents vs. 40 cents). The internet club was filled with noisy teenagers playing computer games, exactly like the Lonely Planet guide’s description. This kid next to me seemed to think that if you click the mouse repeatedly as hard as you can it will get things to work faster. After using the internet I wandered around the immediate area, discovering the Silpo Center, which I had ready about. It’s a small shopping center with a western-style grocery store. It may or may not come in handy in the future. For now I’ve been having pretty good success getting everything I need from my small local market. Some of the vendors there are even starting to remember me! I wandered around behind the center and discovered two orthodox churches and the Russian consulate, which will come in handy if I decide to take a trip to Russia while I’m here (it’s not really near the top of my list of places to visit this time around, though). I was getting tired and cold so I caught a marshrutka back home to my part of town. Before heading home I stopped at the market to pick up a few things to make dinner. I got some potatoes, onions, peppers, eggs, lavash (kind of like a super thin tortilla), cooking oil, and salt (a whole kilogram and a half no less), and along with the cheese and sour cream I had from yesterday I made delicious breakfast-style burritos. I have a feeling I’ll be making this kind of dish a lot. I needed a shower, and decided it would just be easier to take a straight-up cold shower than to try dealing with the pot of warm water like last time. It was easier and more efficient, but far less pleasant. I really hope the hot water comes on soon. Since then I’ve been doing some reading and blog writing. There appears to be a party of some sort in the apartment above me. Hopefully it won’t go on for to long. I’ll stop there.
-Austin
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
ещё без интернета
Hiya. It’s now Thursday, and I’ve been moved into my apartment for about three days now. So far it’s been pretty good, and I’ve spent time the last couple days gathering all the things one would need in their apartment. You know, cooking and eating utensils, cleaning supplies, spare light bulbs (well, light bulbs to replace the four that were burnt out), etc. Probably the most exciting thin I bought was a Brita-style water-filtering pitcher. The tap water here is awful and not recommended to drink, so I figured a filter would be a good investment and alternative to buying tons of bottled water all the time. It cost about $16, fits perfectly in my tiny fridge, and appears to work just great!
The landlady and her assistant or whoever have helped me out with domestic stuff as well, although it did take them a little while. My first night here they were supposed to bring over some bed stuff (sheets, blankets, etc.), and they said they’d bring them over around 5:00, so I waited around at 5:00 and kept waiting for a few hours, but nobody ever came. I fell asleep waiting and then realized I’d have to spend the night without the bed stuff. Luckily there were a few pillows lying around, but I had to use my coat, my hoodie, and my towel as makeshift blankets. It wasn’t so bad, except for the bed itself. I guess it’s about a queen size, but it consists of two separate twin-sized pieces laid side-by-side into a frame, so there’s a big dip in the middle where the two meet. Each piece is basically a board with foam padding held in place by the outside fabric, so it doesn’t offer a lot of support. After a night sleeping on it, I figured I’d need to buy some sort of extra padding to go over it, but luckily the landlady had the bed problem taken care of. Her assistant finally arrived with some bed and kitchen stuff the next day, but I was surprised to find with him a couple of burly movers hauling a brand new mattress up the stairs as well (I live on the fifth floor, so it took a lot of huffing and puffing for them to get it up). There was, however, another problem: We couldn’t get the mattress through the door! See, My front door and my neighbor’s front door are in a little nook that is closed off by a steel gate that we both have keys to. My door is on the left once inside the gate, and my neighbor’s is across from the gate (there’s no door on the third [right] side). My door opens out towards the gate, and the neighbor’s opens out towards my door, and so we weren’t able to either get the mattress through the gate and then around my door, or conversely backed into my neighbor’s apartment and then forward into mine (because his door would be blocking my door, you see). So, the only way to do it was to take my door off its hinges, but since they didn’t have the right tool to do that, we had to leave the mattress inside the gate until the next day so the movers could return with the right sized Alan’s head screwdriver and finish the job. The mattress propped up inside the gate made it difficult to get in and out. Luckily, the movers returned today and took care of everything. I was late getting home because I had gotten on a marshrutka heading the wrong direction, and thus had to ride it to the end, turn around, and ride past where I had initially gotten on in order to go the right direction home. I let them in, they took down the door, put in the new mattress and hauled away the old ones. I was kind of hoping they would leave the old ones so I could keep them on the balcony and I’d have something to offer future guests to sleep on. As it stands there is nothing else besides the bed to sleep on in my apartment (though the bed could easily accommodate two), so I’ll probably have to buy some sort of pad before I have any guests stay the night. As the movers were leaving, one of the movers was hinting at a tip, but I half played dumb and half was dumb and didn’t know anything about tipping procedures in this situation, so he soon gave up and the movers left grumbling. I set up my bed with the sheets and blanket I bought earlier today, and now I have a right proper bed to sleep on, and it’s quite comfy to match; with real springs in it and everything! The landlady’s assistant had brought a blanket the night before, but it was really old and musty. The first thing I thought when I smelled it was, “that smells like the Soviet Union.” It is nice having a back-up blanket, though.
Besides shopping for and setting up my apartment, I’ve spent some time exploring the city. Simferopol isn’t exactly laid out in a nice grid, but it’s been fairly easy to figure out just from wandering and looking at maps. So far my favorite feature of the city is the Salgir River running through the middle and the nice paths running along side it. Sure it’s really just a creek, and it’s kind of smelly in places, but the path is a great alternative to walking along the busy streets. Best of all, the river is about a two minute walk from the door to my building, so it’s quite convenient. I spent most of the day Wednesday walking along the river path. There are lots of nice little sitting areas and even some gardens and parks along the way. Today I finally explored the downtown area and the area around the train station. There was something very exciting about being at the train station for me, because this is a place I had been before, Two years ago while I was studying in Russia, some friends and I took a trip to Sochi and then over to Crimea and Yalta, and although we didn’t really spend any time in Simferopol, we come here to catch our train back to Saint Petersburg. So, this is really the first time I have returned to someplace abroad that I have been to before, and being at the train station again made it sink in. It seemed like such a travel milestone: to not only visit a place, but to revisit it as well. I ate some street food from the vendors around the station, bought a nice detailed map of the city, and wandered towards downtown. There’s a really nice pedestrian-only area with some cool old buildings and fancy shops (though for a pedestrian-only zone it sure did have a lot of cars parked in it). I didn’t even get to see all of the downtown area yet, but between it and the train station, Simferopol seems pretty bustling and metropolitan. My part of town, though not too far from the center, is a bit sleepier, so it was nice to finally see where all the action is in town, and now I definitely feel better about spending the next ten months here. To be fair, my neighborhood does have some good perks: I’m right next to the bus station, which means it will be really easy to catch rides to other towns around Crimea; there’s a small but useful market right across from the bus station, where I’ve been able to get almost everything I need for the apartment so far; the university is really close as well, though I haven’t been there yet; there’s an awesome hill with cliffs right across the street from me (of which I have a great view), and I’m looking forward to going up there sometime soon and checking out the view; there’s a Crimean Tatar / Central Asian restaurant about 15 minutes away by foot, where I’ll be able to satisfy my craving for lagman, manty, and plov. I’ve eaten there once so far, and the lagman was pretty decent. In case you were unaware, lagman is an amazing Central Asian noodle soup with mutton and vegetables. As some of you already know from reading my last blog, I became something of a lagman snob while living in Kyrgyzstan. I don’t expect to ever find a lagman as good as the lagman at the resturant Nooruz in Bishkek, but I’m sure the stuff here will hold me over until the day I’m somehow able to return to Bishkek and have that heavenly soup one more time.
So, what’s on the docket for the next few days: I should be getting internet in my apartment very soon. The guy Sergei who first picked me up at the airport has a son who works for an internet provider, and he brought him over to et the ball rolling. His son Dima was very slick with his leather jacket, sunglasses and fancy Bluetooth headset (apparently a traditional accessory in this family). I showed him my Airport Express router that I brought to set up wifi in my apartment, and he was intently interested in it. He looked it over several times, and then took a voice memo on his cell phone explaining what it was and reading off some details from the information written on the side. He said it would work fine with their services, and that they’ll be able to run a cable into my apartment sometime this week. I’m also supposedly getting a washing machine sometime in the next week, but I’ll have to let both the landlady and the internet people that they’ll need to do it before Wednesday, because that’s the day I’m heading to Kiev (sorry, but being in a Russian-speaking area I’m just going to have to stick with the Russian spelling in favor of the Ukrainian and seemingly more PC “Kyiv”) for the Fulbright Ukraine orientation. I’m really looking forward to catching up with the other Fulbrighters, and getting to explore the big city a bit. Hopefully before that, though, I’ll get a chance to head down to the beach (most likely Yalta) and go swimming in the Black Sea before the weather and the water start getting to cold. It’ll be a lot of fun going back to Yalta as well. I’m shooting for Saturday or Sunday to do that. I’m also planning on meeting with my advisor/supervisor/professor at the university for the first time on Monday. I talked to her on the phone briefly the day I arrived, and she said I should just worry about getting an apartment and getting all set up before I head over to the university and get down to business, so that’s what I’ve been doing this week.
I’ll likely upload this post from an internet center on Friday, but hopefully soon after that I’ll be set up with internet in the apartment and I can start doing more frequent posting. Drop me a line!
-Austin
The landlady and her assistant or whoever have helped me out with domestic stuff as well, although it did take them a little while. My first night here they were supposed to bring over some bed stuff (sheets, blankets, etc.), and they said they’d bring them over around 5:00, so I waited around at 5:00 and kept waiting for a few hours, but nobody ever came. I fell asleep waiting and then realized I’d have to spend the night without the bed stuff. Luckily there were a few pillows lying around, but I had to use my coat, my hoodie, and my towel as makeshift blankets. It wasn’t so bad, except for the bed itself. I guess it’s about a queen size, but it consists of two separate twin-sized pieces laid side-by-side into a frame, so there’s a big dip in the middle where the two meet. Each piece is basically a board with foam padding held in place by the outside fabric, so it doesn’t offer a lot of support. After a night sleeping on it, I figured I’d need to buy some sort of extra padding to go over it, but luckily the landlady had the bed problem taken care of. Her assistant finally arrived with some bed and kitchen stuff the next day, but I was surprised to find with him a couple of burly movers hauling a brand new mattress up the stairs as well (I live on the fifth floor, so it took a lot of huffing and puffing for them to get it up). There was, however, another problem: We couldn’t get the mattress through the door! See, My front door and my neighbor’s front door are in a little nook that is closed off by a steel gate that we both have keys to. My door is on the left once inside the gate, and my neighbor’s is across from the gate (there’s no door on the third [right] side). My door opens out towards the gate, and the neighbor’s opens out towards my door, and so we weren’t able to either get the mattress through the gate and then around my door, or conversely backed into my neighbor’s apartment and then forward into mine (because his door would be blocking my door, you see). So, the only way to do it was to take my door off its hinges, but since they didn’t have the right tool to do that, we had to leave the mattress inside the gate until the next day so the movers could return with the right sized Alan’s head screwdriver and finish the job. The mattress propped up inside the gate made it difficult to get in and out. Luckily, the movers returned today and took care of everything. I was late getting home because I had gotten on a marshrutka heading the wrong direction, and thus had to ride it to the end, turn around, and ride past where I had initially gotten on in order to go the right direction home. I let them in, they took down the door, put in the new mattress and hauled away the old ones. I was kind of hoping they would leave the old ones so I could keep them on the balcony and I’d have something to offer future guests to sleep on. As it stands there is nothing else besides the bed to sleep on in my apartment (though the bed could easily accommodate two), so I’ll probably have to buy some sort of pad before I have any guests stay the night. As the movers were leaving, one of the movers was hinting at a tip, but I half played dumb and half was dumb and didn’t know anything about tipping procedures in this situation, so he soon gave up and the movers left grumbling. I set up my bed with the sheets and blanket I bought earlier today, and now I have a right proper bed to sleep on, and it’s quite comfy to match; with real springs in it and everything! The landlady’s assistant had brought a blanket the night before, but it was really old and musty. The first thing I thought when I smelled it was, “that smells like the Soviet Union.” It is nice having a back-up blanket, though.
Besides shopping for and setting up my apartment, I’ve spent some time exploring the city. Simferopol isn’t exactly laid out in a nice grid, but it’s been fairly easy to figure out just from wandering and looking at maps. So far my favorite feature of the city is the Salgir River running through the middle and the nice paths running along side it. Sure it’s really just a creek, and it’s kind of smelly in places, but the path is a great alternative to walking along the busy streets. Best of all, the river is about a two minute walk from the door to my building, so it’s quite convenient. I spent most of the day Wednesday walking along the river path. There are lots of nice little sitting areas and even some gardens and parks along the way. Today I finally explored the downtown area and the area around the train station. There was something very exciting about being at the train station for me, because this is a place I had been before, Two years ago while I was studying in Russia, some friends and I took a trip to Sochi and then over to Crimea and Yalta, and although we didn’t really spend any time in Simferopol, we come here to catch our train back to Saint Petersburg. So, this is really the first time I have returned to someplace abroad that I have been to before, and being at the train station again made it sink in. It seemed like such a travel milestone: to not only visit a place, but to revisit it as well. I ate some street food from the vendors around the station, bought a nice detailed map of the city, and wandered towards downtown. There’s a really nice pedestrian-only area with some cool old buildings and fancy shops (though for a pedestrian-only zone it sure did have a lot of cars parked in it). I didn’t even get to see all of the downtown area yet, but between it and the train station, Simferopol seems pretty bustling and metropolitan. My part of town, though not too far from the center, is a bit sleepier, so it was nice to finally see where all the action is in town, and now I definitely feel better about spending the next ten months here. To be fair, my neighborhood does have some good perks: I’m right next to the bus station, which means it will be really easy to catch rides to other towns around Crimea; there’s a small but useful market right across from the bus station, where I’ve been able to get almost everything I need for the apartment so far; the university is really close as well, though I haven’t been there yet; there’s an awesome hill with cliffs right across the street from me (of which I have a great view), and I’m looking forward to going up there sometime soon and checking out the view; there’s a Crimean Tatar / Central Asian restaurant about 15 minutes away by foot, where I’ll be able to satisfy my craving for lagman, manty, and plov. I’ve eaten there once so far, and the lagman was pretty decent. In case you were unaware, lagman is an amazing Central Asian noodle soup with mutton and vegetables. As some of you already know from reading my last blog, I became something of a lagman snob while living in Kyrgyzstan. I don’t expect to ever find a lagman as good as the lagman at the resturant Nooruz in Bishkek, but I’m sure the stuff here will hold me over until the day I’m somehow able to return to Bishkek and have that heavenly soup one more time.
So, what’s on the docket for the next few days: I should be getting internet in my apartment very soon. The guy Sergei who first picked me up at the airport has a son who works for an internet provider, and he brought him over to et the ball rolling. His son Dima was very slick with his leather jacket, sunglasses and fancy Bluetooth headset (apparently a traditional accessory in this family). I showed him my Airport Express router that I brought to set up wifi in my apartment, and he was intently interested in it. He looked it over several times, and then took a voice memo on his cell phone explaining what it was and reading off some details from the information written on the side. He said it would work fine with their services, and that they’ll be able to run a cable into my apartment sometime this week. I’m also supposedly getting a washing machine sometime in the next week, but I’ll have to let both the landlady and the internet people that they’ll need to do it before Wednesday, because that’s the day I’m heading to Kiev (sorry, but being in a Russian-speaking area I’m just going to have to stick with the Russian spelling in favor of the Ukrainian and seemingly more PC “Kyiv”) for the Fulbright Ukraine orientation. I’m really looking forward to catching up with the other Fulbrighters, and getting to explore the big city a bit. Hopefully before that, though, I’ll get a chance to head down to the beach (most likely Yalta) and go swimming in the Black Sea before the weather and the water start getting to cold. It’ll be a lot of fun going back to Yalta as well. I’m shooting for Saturday or Sunday to do that. I’m also planning on meeting with my advisor/supervisor/professor at the university for the first time on Monday. I talked to her on the phone briefly the day I arrived, and she said I should just worry about getting an apartment and getting all set up before I head over to the university and get down to business, so that’s what I’ve been doing this week.
I’ll likely upload this post from an internet center on Friday, but hopefully soon after that I’ll be set up with internet in the apartment and I can start doing more frequent posting. Drop me a line!
-Austin
Monday, September 22, 2008
Здравствуйте от моего нового дома
Well, I'm finally here in Simferopol. I've been here for a couple days now, actually, but I've just now found the energy to write something. Let me tell you a little about the journey here: I left Portland Friday afternoon on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. I was surprised to see a former UO Russian classmate named Cyndi working at the Lufthansa check-in counter. I got a chance to say hello while she was working at the gate.
The flight itself was a bit of a bummer. I had specifically chosen a bulkhead seat when I bought my ticket online about a month ago, but alas I was but right in between two people in the middle aisle. When the person next to me with the aisle seat showed up I asked politely if she would mind switching seats, to which she replied, "absolutely not. I'm on the plane to Israel after this, so it's going to be a long flight for me." Instead of calling her on her rude response or pointing out that my next flight was essentially the same length as hers, I instead sought out a better seat, and although there were no aisle seats left, I was able to get a spot in the middle with a vacant seat next to me, giving me a little more room. Still, I got pretty cramped up and couldn't doze off at all. Out of boredom I endured through two awful movies ("Made of Honor" and "Drillbit Taylor"), but at least I retained some semblance of self-respect compared to the guy next to me, who voluntarily watched the movie "RV" on his personal movie viewing doodad.
In Frankfurt I accidentally ended up in line for a security check that I didn't even need to go through because I missed an escalator. In fact, I couldn't understand why anybody needed to go through this security check , because it spit me out in a spot I could have simply walked to without ever going through the check. Seriously, it was like this: either you keep walking down the corridor like normal, or you go through a door to the left and end up in a security line that ends about 50 feet down the corridor from where you entered the door. Needless to saw I was very confused for a bit, until I found the right escalator to take. Instead of walking directly onto the plane from the gate for my next flight, we all had to go down two flights of stairs, then pile into a shuttle that drove us around the tarmac to our plane. This was a flight to Simferopol on Ukrainian International Airlines. I had a window seat and was incredibly cramped and uncomfortable during the entire 3-hour flight. They served a fairly decent meal, though I barely had room to eat it.
Once we landed in Simferopol, we had to taxi along a huge and empty runway for about 15 minutes to actually get to the terminal. After standing in the passport control line for about a half hour, I got my bags (both got there just fine!) and met the realtor Tatyana who I had been told would meet me at the airport. A driver named Sergei took us into town and to my temporary apartment, with a quick stop at a money change booth. The first thing I noticed on the drive into town were two cooling towers billowing smoke, or whatever it is that cooling towers billow. It looked kind of cool, but I imagine after visiting Chernobyl this sight will make me more uneasy. My temporary apartment is pretty nice: two bedrooms, a large living room, balcony, bathroom and kitchen of course, and all pretty clean. The best part about it, though, is that I am miraculously able to pick up two wifi signals! One of them is password-protected and the other is super weak, but it's way more than I ever would have expected to find. So, it's been very nice using the internet here and struggling to keep the connection.
I've been sleeping a lot since I got here. Part of it is adjusting my internal clock, but I've just generally felt tired ever since I got here. Once I arrived at the apartment on Saturday afternoon I took a nap, got up around 10:00 to take a bath (the tub was big enough for me, so I figured why not?), then pretty much went back to bed. On Sunday I ventured down the street to Simferopol's central bus station, where I was told there was a market and a place to buy a sim card for my phone. I found the market and had a lunch of savory pastries and Fanta (oh, how I've missed it), and bought myself a new sim card. Actually, I ended up buying a new phone as well, because the card didn't seem to want to take with my old phone from Russia. I had been planning on buying a new phone anyways, so I got the cheapest one in the store (at about $60, it wasn't all that cheap). I did a little shopping for later as well. I got some vareniki (like little pirogies) and bread for dinner, as well as a couple of peaches, apple-grape juice, water, beer, and more Fanta. Still tired, I held up the rest of the day in the apartment, taking another long afternoon nap and waking for just a few hours before turning in for the night.
Today was Monday, and I spent the day apartment hunting with my realtor Tatyana. I met her down the street in front of a hospital, from where we caught a marshrutka to the first place, which was kind of on the other side of the city. The apartment was on the first floor of the building, and I was taken aback to see that it was completely ripped apart (read: "being remodeled"), but the shirtless guy fixing it up assured us it would be ready by Wednesday. It was hard to tell what it would look like completed, but I had a feeling it wasn't going to be great, so we said we'd think about it. The second place we looked at was really big and quite nice. It was on the third floor of a big building right next to a large factory and just a couple blocks down the street from my temporary apartment. It was supposedly a 3-room place, but I only counted two rooms. It was all very nice and I liked the location, but there was a bit of a problem: The rent was quite a bit more than I had wanted to pay. $500/month plus utilities, to be exact. I thought about it for a while while Tatyana and some other middle-person assured me that it was a good place for that price, and that there aren't a lot of good apartments available right now in Simferopol. I hesitantly agreed to rent the place, and headed back to my temporary place to await a call from Tatyana about signing the papers. I thought that was that, but she called me a bit later and said there was another place I could look at that was $400/month, so I thought it would be worth a look. She met me at my place and we walked along the Salgir river (it's really just a creek) to a big hotel near the bus station to wait for another middle-person to take us to the apartment. This place was quite a bit smaller, with only one room, but it did have a fairly large bathroom and kitchen, and a nice balcony as well. The best part, though was that it had a great view of these cool cliffs right across the street that are part of some archeological site I read about. One big drawback, though, was that it doesn't have it's own water heater like the other one had, which means it gets its hot water from the city supply, which is currently shut off for an indefinite period. I was assured that it would come back on at some point, but it could be in a month or so. I liked the apartment itself, and the location near the river, the bus station, and the cliffs, so I decided to take it and just put up with having to boil my own water for a while. We then walked back to my temporary place so I could get some cash to pay for the first month and for Tatyana's commission, then we headed down the street to meet the landlady and her driver at her "office" (i.e., car). She seemed pretty unfriendly, and I hoped I wouldn't have to deal with her personally much, but it turns out someone else is taking over the property in a month, so I won't really have to deal with her. We filled out the contracts, signed everything, and I got my keys and that was that. I wanted to stay one more night in the temporary apartment so I could have time to get all my things together (and to finish downloading the latest episode of Tim and Eric; a process that I had started earlier in the day), so here I am right now. I move in tomorrow around noon, then I'll need to make a list of all the extra things I'll need for the apartment. Apparently they're bringing some sheets, pillows, etc., but I suspect I'll need to buy quite a few more things to make the place complete (silverware, dishes, etc). I'm assuming that finding internet here was just a fluke, and that I won't be so lucky at my real place, so I'll try to update again when I can but it might be a little while. I'm planning on getting internet at my place, but until then I'll probably have to track down an internet cafe or something. See you then!
-Austin
The flight itself was a bit of a bummer. I had specifically chosen a bulkhead seat when I bought my ticket online about a month ago, but alas I was but right in between two people in the middle aisle. When the person next to me with the aisle seat showed up I asked politely if she would mind switching seats, to which she replied, "absolutely not. I'm on the plane to Israel after this, so it's going to be a long flight for me." Instead of calling her on her rude response or pointing out that my next flight was essentially the same length as hers, I instead sought out a better seat, and although there were no aisle seats left, I was able to get a spot in the middle with a vacant seat next to me, giving me a little more room. Still, I got pretty cramped up and couldn't doze off at all. Out of boredom I endured through two awful movies ("Made of Honor" and "Drillbit Taylor"), but at least I retained some semblance of self-respect compared to the guy next to me, who voluntarily watched the movie "RV" on his personal movie viewing doodad.
In Frankfurt I accidentally ended up in line for a security check that I didn't even need to go through because I missed an escalator. In fact, I couldn't understand why anybody needed to go through this security check , because it spit me out in a spot I could have simply walked to without ever going through the check. Seriously, it was like this: either you keep walking down the corridor like normal, or you go through a door to the left and end up in a security line that ends about 50 feet down the corridor from where you entered the door. Needless to saw I was very confused for a bit, until I found the right escalator to take. Instead of walking directly onto the plane from the gate for my next flight, we all had to go down two flights of stairs, then pile into a shuttle that drove us around the tarmac to our plane. This was a flight to Simferopol on Ukrainian International Airlines. I had a window seat and was incredibly cramped and uncomfortable during the entire 3-hour flight. They served a fairly decent meal, though I barely had room to eat it.
Once we landed in Simferopol, we had to taxi along a huge and empty runway for about 15 minutes to actually get to the terminal. After standing in the passport control line for about a half hour, I got my bags (both got there just fine!) and met the realtor Tatyana who I had been told would meet me at the airport. A driver named Sergei took us into town and to my temporary apartment, with a quick stop at a money change booth. The first thing I noticed on the drive into town were two cooling towers billowing smoke, or whatever it is that cooling towers billow. It looked kind of cool, but I imagine after visiting Chernobyl this sight will make me more uneasy. My temporary apartment is pretty nice: two bedrooms, a large living room, balcony, bathroom and kitchen of course, and all pretty clean. The best part about it, though, is that I am miraculously able to pick up two wifi signals! One of them is password-protected and the other is super weak, but it's way more than I ever would have expected to find. So, it's been very nice using the internet here and struggling to keep the connection.
I've been sleeping a lot since I got here. Part of it is adjusting my internal clock, but I've just generally felt tired ever since I got here. Once I arrived at the apartment on Saturday afternoon I took a nap, got up around 10:00 to take a bath (the tub was big enough for me, so I figured why not?), then pretty much went back to bed. On Sunday I ventured down the street to Simferopol's central bus station, where I was told there was a market and a place to buy a sim card for my phone. I found the market and had a lunch of savory pastries and Fanta (oh, how I've missed it), and bought myself a new sim card. Actually, I ended up buying a new phone as well, because the card didn't seem to want to take with my old phone from Russia. I had been planning on buying a new phone anyways, so I got the cheapest one in the store (at about $60, it wasn't all that cheap). I did a little shopping for later as well. I got some vareniki (like little pirogies) and bread for dinner, as well as a couple of peaches, apple-grape juice, water, beer, and more Fanta. Still tired, I held up the rest of the day in the apartment, taking another long afternoon nap and waking for just a few hours before turning in for the night.
Today was Monday, and I spent the day apartment hunting with my realtor Tatyana. I met her down the street in front of a hospital, from where we caught a marshrutka to the first place, which was kind of on the other side of the city. The apartment was on the first floor of the building, and I was taken aback to see that it was completely ripped apart (read: "being remodeled"), but the shirtless guy fixing it up assured us it would be ready by Wednesday. It was hard to tell what it would look like completed, but I had a feeling it wasn't going to be great, so we said we'd think about it. The second place we looked at was really big and quite nice. It was on the third floor of a big building right next to a large factory and just a couple blocks down the street from my temporary apartment. It was supposedly a 3-room place, but I only counted two rooms. It was all very nice and I liked the location, but there was a bit of a problem: The rent was quite a bit more than I had wanted to pay. $500/month plus utilities, to be exact. I thought about it for a while while Tatyana and some other middle-person assured me that it was a good place for that price, and that there aren't a lot of good apartments available right now in Simferopol. I hesitantly agreed to rent the place, and headed back to my temporary place to await a call from Tatyana about signing the papers. I thought that was that, but she called me a bit later and said there was another place I could look at that was $400/month, so I thought it would be worth a look. She met me at my place and we walked along the Salgir river (it's really just a creek) to a big hotel near the bus station to wait for another middle-person to take us to the apartment. This place was quite a bit smaller, with only one room, but it did have a fairly large bathroom and kitchen, and a nice balcony as well. The best part, though was that it had a great view of these cool cliffs right across the street that are part of some archeological site I read about. One big drawback, though, was that it doesn't have it's own water heater like the other one had, which means it gets its hot water from the city supply, which is currently shut off for an indefinite period. I was assured that it would come back on at some point, but it could be in a month or so. I liked the apartment itself, and the location near the river, the bus station, and the cliffs, so I decided to take it and just put up with having to boil my own water for a while. We then walked back to my temporary place so I could get some cash to pay for the first month and for Tatyana's commission, then we headed down the street to meet the landlady and her driver at her "office" (i.e., car). She seemed pretty unfriendly, and I hoped I wouldn't have to deal with her personally much, but it turns out someone else is taking over the property in a month, so I won't really have to deal with her. We filled out the contracts, signed everything, and I got my keys and that was that. I wanted to stay one more night in the temporary apartment so I could have time to get all my things together (and to finish downloading the latest episode of Tim and Eric; a process that I had started earlier in the day), so here I am right now. I move in tomorrow around noon, then I'll need to make a list of all the extra things I'll need for the apartment. Apparently they're bringing some sheets, pillows, etc., but I suspect I'll need to buy quite a few more things to make the place complete (silverware, dishes, etc). I'm assuming that finding internet here was just a fluke, and that I won't be so lucky at my real place, so I'll try to update again when I can but it might be a little while. I'm planning on getting internet at my place, but until then I'll probably have to track down an internet cafe or something. See you then!
-Austin
Thursday, September 18, 2008
первые записки
Hi,
In a couple days I head out to Crimea in Ukraine, where I'll be for at least ten months on a Fulbright grant. I'm going in order to do research on issues surrounding Crimea's autonomous status within Ukraine, which should get pretty interesting in the coming year following the Georgia conflict this summer. I'll write a lot more about the specifics of my research at a later date, but right now I just wanted to make a brief introductory post to get this blog started. For those of you who may have read my blogs from Russia and Kyrgyzstan (see links to the bottom right), you know I have a tendency to write really long-winded and detailed posts that I'm sure most people don't even make it all the way through. I'm hoping to make this blog a lot more accessible by keeping posts to a minimum, and by sprucing them up with more photos, links, etc. Since I have a laptop with one of those fancy built-in cameras now, I'm planning on making video posts from time to time as well. See, in Russia and Kyrgyzstan I didn't have regular internet access with my own laptop, so I would spend a lot of time writing big long posts in word at home and then uploading them with a thumb drive to the blog whenever I could get online at an internet club or wherever. I plan on getting internet set up in my apartment in Simferopol (that's the town I'll be in, by the way), so I'll be able to pop online and make quicker and more digestible posts that way. However, it may be a number of weeks before I'm finally set up with an apartment and an internet connection, so whatever posts I might make until then may resemble the old style. I'll eventually settle into a good system once I get connected. Anyways, I've just been running a few last minute errands around Corvallis this week, and getting everything together. I'm pretty excited by my flight itinerary: Portland - Frankfurt - Simferopol. Can you believe I can get all the way to my final destination in a fairly obscure city with just one connection? I was pretty blown away. I leave Friday afternoon and arrive around 24 hours later (including the time difference), and I'm still not entirely positive what exactly will happen when I get there, but it should be pretty exciting. So, the next time you hear from me here It'll be from Simferopol. Take good care of the country while I'm away (i.e., get Obama elected), and keep in touch!
-Austin
In a couple days I head out to Crimea in Ukraine, where I'll be for at least ten months on a Fulbright grant. I'm going in order to do research on issues surrounding Crimea's autonomous status within Ukraine, which should get pretty interesting in the coming year following the Georgia conflict this summer. I'll write a lot more about the specifics of my research at a later date, but right now I just wanted to make a brief introductory post to get this blog started. For those of you who may have read my blogs from Russia and Kyrgyzstan (see links to the bottom right), you know I have a tendency to write really long-winded and detailed posts that I'm sure most people don't even make it all the way through. I'm hoping to make this blog a lot more accessible by keeping posts to a minimum, and by sprucing them up with more photos, links, etc. Since I have a laptop with one of those fancy built-in cameras now, I'm planning on making video posts from time to time as well. See, in Russia and Kyrgyzstan I didn't have regular internet access with my own laptop, so I would spend a lot of time writing big long posts in word at home and then uploading them with a thumb drive to the blog whenever I could get online at an internet club or wherever. I plan on getting internet set up in my apartment in Simferopol (that's the town I'll be in, by the way), so I'll be able to pop online and make quicker and more digestible posts that way. However, it may be a number of weeks before I'm finally set up with an apartment and an internet connection, so whatever posts I might make until then may resemble the old style. I'll eventually settle into a good system once I get connected. Anyways, I've just been running a few last minute errands around Corvallis this week, and getting everything together. I'm pretty excited by my flight itinerary: Portland - Frankfurt - Simferopol. Can you believe I can get all the way to my final destination in a fairly obscure city with just one connection? I was pretty blown away. I leave Friday afternoon and arrive around 24 hours later (including the time difference), and I'm still not entirely positive what exactly will happen when I get there, but it should be pretty exciting. So, the next time you hear from me here It'll be from Simferopol. Take good care of the country while I'm away (i.e., get Obama elected), and keep in touch!
-Austin
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