Chapter 15 – The Money Pit

For the first two months of my time here I had to deal with a babushka who was only hosting me to get the money. I donÂ’t blame her really, pensioners get very little here and for the inconvenience of letting me occupy her second room, she was able to get enough dough to redo the wallpaper in her kitchen and fix up the bathroom a bit too. However I wasnÂ’t quite so keen on the deal since I was expecting to have a bit more socializing time (to practice my Russian) and also just have a nice environment to come home to. Since that wasnÂ’t the case I decided to move into another flat that my friend was renting while she was away all month at the summer language camp.

This new flat had two rooms and no babushka. It was only on the 4th floor instead of the 10th and had a little balcony. The only major disadvantage (or so I thought at the time) was that the water boiler was a manual gas thing. Meaning every time I wanted hot water, I had to light the boiler myself. Some people informed me that this was a great advantage because as it often happens here in summer time, in buildings with central boilers, the hot water is turned off for a while. Of the ‘minor’ disadvantages, the bathroom reeked of a foul, unidentifiable smell that was easily mitigated (for a while) by running the water down the sink. And the beds were not the usual Soviet style futon, but two actual twin sized beds, which unfortunately sank about one foot in the middle concave-like.

So I adjusted to my new environment, sleeping on the couch in the ‘living room’ because the two beds in the bedroom were disastrous. I learned and became fairly accustomed to the water boiler after accidentally once turning off the water before the gas – the biggest no-no that the landlady insisted I not do. After a while I began to enjoy all the space to myself and invited Sasha (translated as Alex), a student from my school, over to my flat to drink tea and fix my computer. It was alright until the day a strange man knocked on my door and told me something very emphatically in Russian.

“Hslnapoine ankdjo woclknls kj;ioie!!!”
“Что?! (What?!)”

Luckily Sasha was there that day and he was able to translate for me the fact that the strange man was my downstairs neighbor and water from my flat was leaking down into his flat… great… Well what could I do now? Call the middle-woman from the school who deals with the landlady and tell her the problem. That done the landlady came over and we waited for the plumber. I wasn’t allowed to use the water in the kitchen, more specifically the hot water tap in the kitchen, I could still use the cold water tap as that was in a different pipe that wasn’t leaking. So what did I do when I needed to take a shower?! Certainly not take a freezing cold one. I found the biggest pots in the flat, filled them with cold water from the bath tub, put them on the stove and heated them up. Then I put the water back into the bathtub and took a bath. If I had felt like a pioneer woman before with the manual gas boiler, now my transformation was complete with the old-school bath preparation. Luckily I only had to do that once as the next day or a day later the plumber came back and ‘fixed’ the plumbing (for the second time, I might add).

Finally things were okay… for a while. One day I accidentally poured my loose leaf tea leaves down the kitchen sink drain (kitchen sink is also from circa 1952, and therefore more of a large, shallow metal basin than a ‘sink’ as we have in the West). Suddenly then my sink didn’t want to drain anything and instead leaked out another hole, this time I was able to catch the runoff in a bucket before it bothered my neighbor again. Unable to use that sink however, I was forced for the last two weeks of living there to wash my dishes in the sink in the bathroom (the one with the nasty smell, remember?). This time I went to the landlady myself. I found her at her job in a bazaar down the street. Working my way through all the shops and whatnot I was able to find her and tell her the problem (having prepared what I needed to say in Russian beforehand). She promised to come back that week and have it taken care of, but I was already moved out of the place before the problem was corrected.

I lived in the Cold Mountain (Холодно Гора) neighborhood for a total of three months. A day or two after I moved into the money pit flat described above, a student from the school offered me a room in her flat as her roommate had suddenly moved out. I accepted thinking it would be great experience living with someone again, this time younger and having more in common with me. [That experience will be described further in subsequent chapters.] Point is – I had promised to move in with her at the beginning of July and thus only stayed one month in this terrible, water-leaking-foul-smelling-depressing-bed-but-with-two-big-rooms-and-a-balcony flat. Thus ends the story of my pioneering daysÂ…


Look forward to the next adunraveled in Ukraine: Unravled -
Chapter 16 – The fool: Tarot Readings in Russian
Chapter 17 – Trip to the Zoo
Chapter 18 – Staryi Saltov
Chapter 19 – Liberation Day, 23 August
Chapter 20 – Дай Бог Здорова!
Chapter 21 – Ukrainian Woodstock

and much much more!!!.....