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