POSTING #49

NOTE TO READERS; Tough Times for the Hospitality Industry in Niagara-on-the-Lake; Looking for an Apartment in Moscow


NOTE TO READERS

Next week's posting will be the 50th! Isn't that something.

It has been great fun turning memories into written stories and sharing them with friends and relatives.

But I have felt a little confined by the format that I established at the beginning. I had decided that I would include a story in each posting about Virgil, and another about children and/or pets.

Some weeks it has been hard to come up with stories for these two sections that were interesting and fitted in with the theme of the main story I wanted to tell.

So I have decided to end this self-imposed requirement. I will still have stories about Virgil and about children and pets but not necessarily every week.

Starting with this posting, then, the format will be more free-form.

We'll see how that works.

Thank you for reading the blog, and for your feedback!!

John

Tough Times for the Hospitality Industry in Niagara-on-the-Lake

While 2009 was not as bad as the Shaw Festival and local tourist businesses feared last fall, in the midst of the international financial and economic meltdown, it was not good.

Now that the Shaw has closed for the season and most of the tourists have stopped coming we are beginning to see the fallout from the steep recession, the border passport policy and the general decline in tourism.

The owner of the elegant and beautifully restored Riverbend Inn and Restaurant, and of the Niagara-on-the-Lake Golf Club has just announced that he has placed both of them into voluntary receivership.

He says there is a conditional offer of purchase for Riverbend and he hopes that the deal will close in February allowing it to continue. In the meantime, the bank has appointed someone to manage the business.

The owner hopes that the bank will agree to open the NOTL Golf Course in the spring, but in the meantime the clubhouse and its popular restaurant will be closed during the winter. The course claims to be North America's oldest existing course---it began in 1875---but I understand that the Royal Montreal Golf Club disputes this.

Both businesses have made major contributions to life in the area and we hope they will be able to continue.

ooo

On a lighter note, a sign above the urinal in the men's washroom at the golf course wins a too-many-commas prize:

Please do not put hand,
towels, Kleenex,
or other objects
in the urinal.

Above the word 'hand', some wit has scribbled, "Why would I do that?"

Looking for an Apartment in Moscow

In April 1995, after the World Bank had signed the contract for the two-year project to create model employment offices, I flew to Moscow to launch the project.

The Russian Federal Employment Service booked me into a kind of private hotel that the KGB built during the Cold War to train spies who were to be smuggled into the west. The hotel lobby, dining room and rooms were modeled after those in Western hotels of the 1960s so the KGB recruits could practice their spy craft.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union the training facility was given to a Foundation started by ex-President Gorbachev, the intention being to give the Foundation a lucrative source of revenue. The Foundation ran it as a hotel for government officials and for foreign visitors coming to Moscow to work for the Government or for official conferences.

Unfortunately, Gorbachev apparently criticized the new president, Yeltsin, once too often and the facility was taken away from him and given to an association of accountants.

Russian politics are never dull!

The rooms were a little spartan but clean and the residence had superb security---one could leave computers and cameras in the room without worry and there were no night-time phone calls from hookers, a common occurrence in most Russian hotels at the time.

During the time I lived at the residence, I set up my office in the Federal Employment Service headquarters, hired Yuri as my office manager/interpreter and found a driver (with an old but reliable Lada).

Then I started looking for an apartment.

The project contract allocated a certain maximum monthly rental for an apartment, an amount that seemed huge to me (it was much higher than the income for an average working Russian for a whole year) but the influx of Western business people was pushing up rents.

Yuri found me a young student from the Moscow University who worked part-time for a real estate firm that specialized in rental accommodation. Gennady (not his real name) was slim, blond with a backpack slung over one shoulder who spoke English with an American accent and vocabulary, unlike older English-speakers in Russia who tended to sound British.

And he had an almost New York entrepreneurial hustle---he would get a generous portion of the first month's rent if I found an apartment and he was determined that I should find one.

Gennady asked me what I was looking for in an apartment but it was a little hard for me to answer---I had never been inside a Moscow apartment and didn't know what to expect.

Finally, I told him that I wanted a furnished place that was roomy enough for two of us when Pat came to visit, with a good kitchen because I liked to cook, and close to a metro stop.

And then told him my rental range, expecting him to be impressed.

He wasn't.

Gennady shook his head and said it would be hard to find a suitable place in my price range but he could show Yuri and me a few places that fit my budget.

"Let's go", he said.

I suggested we use my driver but Gennady said it would be faster to use the Metro and buses. I remembered that I had a supply of the plastic Metro tokens---called jetons---worth about ten cents at the time but I didn't have any tickets for the bus system.

We came up out of one of the Metro stations and Gennady told us to run for a bus. We jumped in the back door just as the bus was leaving. I told Gennady that I didn't have a ticket.

"Don't worry', he said, "you'll be OK---there aren't many inspectors at this time of day."

But the thing is that I do worry about things like that!

About being marched off the bus by an inspector who didn't speak English, to some kind of uncertain fate.

But we got off without encountering an inspector, and I quickly bought a strip of bus tickets for the next time.

As we walked to the first apartment, Gennady said that security was a top priority. Yuri agreed wholeheartedly.

He said that the door to the apartment should be steel with two or three deadbolt locks while the best doors had four hardened-steel bars that shot into the top, bottom and sides of the doorway when the door was locked.

Some apartments had an alarm that rang at the local police station but that was a bad idea. It told the police that you had something of value and the police would then sell that information to the local mafia.

He said that the best apartments had a guard in the lobby to screen visitors but my price range wouldn't allow for that.

Second best, was to have a door to the lobby with a combination that the apartment occupant gave to friends, cleaning women, pizza deliverers.

"But", I said, "the combination will soon be all over Moscow."

"Of course, but we have a saying in Russian that 'locks keep out only honest people'."

As we came up to the first apartment, he said that it was very secure because it was over a jewelry store. I didn't see the connection but he pointed to a small car in front of the store with two thuggish looking men sitting in it.

"They're armed guards, they'll be here around the clock to protect the store. You wouldn't have to worry about people breaking into your apartment."

As we entered the apartment building I noticed that there was no lock on the door to the lobby, and that the lobby itself was littered with trash and had a smell of old urine.

The terrazzo steps to the second floor apartment were badly cracked.

This was typical of most of the apartments we saw---the lobbies and stairwells were in poor shape, even if the apartments were basically OK.

Gennady rang the bell after pointing out, approvingly, that the door was steel with 3 deadbolts.

The couple who came to the door were typical of most of the apartment owners we met. People in their late 50s or early 60s who had led a comfortable middle-class existence in Soviet times but had been thrown out of work because of the budget cuts caused by the government's economic shock therapy policy. They all looked beaten down and worried.

The apartment owners had little money coming in but they did own an apartment and in most cases a car. They could survive if they could just rent the apartment to a Westerner for US dollars and then jam themselves in with relatives.

The husband could also bring in some more money by joining the thousands of other Muscovites lucky enough to have a car who were cruising the streets as unlicensed taxis.

The owners were pathetically anxious to rent their apartments. It was depressing and degrading to have their eyes follow me as I checked out the apartments.

If they sensed I was unhappy about something they would jump in and offer to change it.

The dining rooms and living rooms were full of the trappings of a successful apparatchik existence---crowded with large tables, over-stuffed, leather-covered furniture, large, black lacquered cabinets full of fine Czechoslovakian crystal, and carpets from the Caucasus.

But this apartment like most of the others I saw had a small, primitive kitchen and a tiny bathroom with leaky taps and stained tubs.

At the end of the visit I would say that we would get back to them, but they knew and I knew that I wouldn't.

It was sad. They had little chance of renting to a westerner without major renovations--- which they couldn't afford.

After seeing six or seven apartments of this type, I suggested we increase the price range and if necessary I would pay the difference myself.

Gennady showed us one apartment that was well above my allowance and well above what I could afford to add to the allowance. It had a bathroom with a whirlpool, four-person tub and black tiled walls, a modern kitchen with good appliances, Scandinavian furniture and an electric water heater to provide hot water during the month each year when Moscow's central steam plants were closed down for servicing.

I asked if the owners might come down by---and I mentioned an amount--- but Gennady just laughed.

Later, as we returned to my office on the Metro, I remember feeling depressed and wondering whether I might have to stay at the old KGB residence for the two years of the project.

This was a low point in the project for me.

As the train rattled through the Metro tunnel, Gennady was leafing through his list of apartments for rent, shaking his head---then he paused and looked at us.

He described an apartment that might be worth considering. The apartment was small-- just one bedroom---and hadn't yet been 'modernized' (which meant a North American style kitchen and bathroom). The furniture was old-fashioned.

If it had been modernized the rent would have been astronomical but even without that the owner was asking a good bit more than my increased limit.

A number of westerners had looked at the apartment and rejected it. Perhaps the owner would be prepared to negotiate a lower price.

We agreed to have a look at it the next day.


TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK

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See you next Sunday for Posting #50 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@cs.com.