Simply Moscow

Hungry for blogging

I've been back in Moscow for a month already and it's time for a new post. I love posts, don't you? This one is about my favourite thing in Moscow: Food. It's a constant adventure. A step into the unknown. I feel like Laika that dog that they shot into space that died and often I am taking the same risks with my life. So me and Tim are looking for a place to get a decent meal, a 'business lunch': 3 courses for a decent price. The place we found had like a BILLION staff leaning against the bar. (It's always too many or too little) and we sat down to enjoy a delicious meal of some fishy thing, some soup and some goulash. Well, my friends, it was poor. On a scale of one to shit it came out as shit. The goulash was cold so we had to send it back. When it finally came back mine was hot, but Tim's was STILL cold. So he had to send it back again. There was also a cat in the restaurant.

All that was just a preamble to the awesomeness to come: So we went for a nice breakfast at Chokoladnitsa. A basic chain of coffee shops. Think Costa with table service. We have had the 'city-fm' breakfast a number of times: Juice, Coffee 3 slices of toast, ham, cheese and jam. Nice. They have pictures of it on the poster outside and on the menu. It's like dairy-lea lunchables or something. You can construct it anyway you like. It's like stickle-bricks. So I have this weird pancake thing and Tim waits for this breakfast. He gets the juice and the coffee but no food. 15 minutes passes by.

Now I don't know whether you've made toast before but the recipe is fairly simple. 1. Take some bread. 2. Add fire. It doesn't take 25 minutes, does it? So after asking Gdye Eta? and pointing at the picture the food comes.

It's a toasted sandwich.

So Tim gets the menu and points at the picture and then at the sandwich, and the waiter is confused. HE THINKS THEY ARE THE SAME THING! He must think the photograph is some kind of instruction manual. Take these ingredients and then combine them into a sandwich shape. Despite the fact there is no friggin' jam in the sandwich. Only in Russia my friends, only in Russia. And usually to Tim, thinking about it. He has bad luck when it comes to restaurants, I think it's bad karma from taking too long to fucking order.

So I tore out a page in my sketchbook, drew the breakfast and the sandwich and wrote the name of the breakfast in Russian on the top. Then in big letters I wrote DA under one picture and NYET under the other.

We did have a nice italian the other night, though. So it's not all bad.

Tune in again next week. Same bat-time, same bat-URL.

A teary farewell

It's been very remiss of me not to post much on here these last couple of weeks. And now it's all over for the summer. We went out with the students last night and had a laugh as we walked around Moscow not finding somewhere to go. I was tired because Tim had me assessing work on my day off yesterday, but it was still great fun. There were a few tears from Sacha who is off to England for her third year and who said that this has been the best year of her life. Aaaah. They are a terrific bunch of students and if they are reading this. Do some more work!



From left to right: Tutu, Tim, Lilya, Elena, Sacha, Elena, Genia (jackie), Moi, Olga, Genia (in the red shorts), Yulia. You may have noticed the lack of male students at this point. That's because all the boys are in the army.

Here is also a photo of me dribbling water and about to pull off an amazing set of skateboard tricks such as the world has never witnessed in the corridor of the school.



Photo: Reuters

And now I must bid you adieu, for I fly back to england on the day after the morrow, but this blog shall continue in a different guise, packed to the gills with ace things and toast. Love you, bye.

In Hot Water

Here in Mockba it's pretty warm, the temperature got up to 301K the other day. That's 28ºC for you centigrade buffs. One strange custom in the summer concerns the hot water. You don't get boilers in people's homes, the hot water comes through pipes and is controlled by the state. So what they do is, they turn it off for three weeks in the summer! This is apparently some money saving thing, and they stagger it throughout the different regions of Moscow during the warm months. I'm outta here on the 28th for the summer, so I'm hoping the water stays toasty until then. Tim, on the other hand is pretty buggered.

Here is a picture of a shop. The sign says pyechat. Don't know what it means.

Back again

I'm back in Moscow again, its nice and sunny and everything looks a lot greener than a couple of weeks ago. I've just had a bag of crisps out of a machine. Guess what flavour?


That's right! It's the ever tasty mushroom and sour cream flavour. Mmm.

Back soon with more crisp flavours for your entertainment.

A clarification

Tim is a little unhappy with the previous post. He's asked me to make things clear. He washed his jumpers on 60 degrees INTENTIONALLY because he wanted to shrink them. Only it went wrong. He also would like me to point out that he is (in his own words) 'A domestic goddess'. He's gone wrong, if you ask me.

Also I forgot to put a picture on before. Its a good representation of Russian technology coupled with taste. It sums Russia up quite nicely.



Actually, this one that Tim took is probably even better.

The fall of the iron bathroom ceiling

We came home from the pub a few nights ago and the false ceiling in the bathroom had fallen down. Imagine trying to communicate that with a landlady who barely speaks any english. Tim had to phone someone at work to translate the problem for him. Also Boris Yeltsin died. The two events might not be as unconnected as you might think because Yeltsin was actually earning a few extra roubles on the side putting up cheap plastic bathroom ceilings. Ours falls down, he dies. What delicious irony. To be honest no-one seems very bothered about him dying that I've spoken to, and I can't really be bothered to go to the cathedral and check out the mourners. Not my cup of tea.

In other news, we went to this big park with all sorts of old buildings that I can't be bothered to tell you about. Highlight was this man ringing the bells. He was up a tower and was playing them by hitting the ropes that the bells were connected to. He could teach some of those jazz idiots a thing or two I reckon (about playing bells up a tower really annoyingly for about an hour).



Ps. Andre has not heard of Pacman.