And now to Crimea

After two months in the capital, I’ve finally moved down to Simferopol, Crimea to begin working on my project. That's me there in the middle:

Thanks to Lyuba for the picture, on which she tagged me on Facebook :)

I arrived yesterday morning on the train from Kyiv and my landlord Sergei met me at the train station. I originally got in touch with Sergei through Austin, who just finished his Fulbright year in Simferopol a few months ago and lived in this same apartment. Interesting side note - Austin taught English a few years ago at the London School in Bishkek, where I studied Russian last spring. Yes, he also gave me a list of his friends on the peninsula so I totally take over his life completely here.

So I come off the train with my 10 months of clothes and books and other necessities and make a little mountain with my baggage on the platform. Dad- imagine what I looked like when you drove me to TVC plus winter clothes and an overnight train ride. I waited not one minute before seeing a friendly looking man in a “Birch Street Elementary School” gray hooded sweatshirt holding up a sign reading “E L I Z A B E T”, looking at me but trying to pretend he hadn’t already pegged me as the American student with a year’s worth of baggage looking around clueless.

As we drove to the flat he told me about his previous tenants over the past 6 years - they’ve all been Americans. The first found him through a real estate agency, and worked for two years at a local museum before returning to Baltimore. Since then the apartment has been handed down by word of mouth, good for us in the line who didn’t have to go through a real estate agency to find accommodation, and good for Sergei, who prefers to rent to Americans because they’re аккуратные. And of course we don’t mind paying in Dollars. But I am quite lucky to have Sergei as a landlord, who seems like a really nice guy. I am comparing this to my Kyiv landlord, who called all our mutual acquaintances, told them I stole antiques, left blood in the refrigerator and wrote all over her walls, and tried to get them to pay her for the "damages." I suppose I've been busy lately and didn't have time to blog about that...

The place is more or less how Austin described it. The building itself is typically post-war, and the entry way and courtyard formed by the surrounding apartments look exactly like the area I lived in Bishkek, except in the middle there is a common laundry line instead of a playground. A kid about 14 years old sat on the stairway to the building and played Russian rap from the tiny speakers of his cell phone.

Inside the kitchen has plenty of space, getting bonus points for the oven and microwave. The bathroom has a nice large bathtub. The living room is large and has all the necessary furniture. There is a television, but when pointing it out Sergei sighed and said that it only gets Ukrainian programming. “Watch it and you can teach yourself Ukrainian!” he laughed. The bedroom is actually a storage unit mostly full of boxes belonging to Sergei’s mother who now lives in New York. But there is a large comfortable bed in the corner and what’s left of the space is still considerably larger than my Kutlu Sokak flat where I had to get dressed either in the kitchen or standing on my bed.

In about a hour and a half I have my first lesson with my new Russian tutor, Laryssa. We're meeting at my house because all the schools and universities and Ukraine are closed in preventative quarantine due to the swine flu. I don't have internet at my place yet, so I'm blogging and catching up on email at the Hotel Imperial near my house, in their cafe decorated only in pink.