POSTING #52

Saunas in Dog River Ontario, and Siberia

During a swim this week at the Brock University's pool I noticed that the men's sauna was back in operation. It is one of those saunas in which a few rocks are heated by electrical elements. Despite large signs warning us not to, someone periodically throws water on the rocks thus destroying the elements.

I was reminded of some saunas I have known, saunas of the real kind with piles of rocks heated by wood fires

A Sauna in Dog River Ontario

I heard this story while I was working in the summer of 1956 as a labourer-teacher for Frontier College at Dog River, a bush camp west of what is now Thunder Bay.

There were no indoor bathroom facilities at Dog River. Men used a 5 hole privy out back (I don't know anything about the privy for the 6 or so female cooks and cookees---cookees were the women who helped the cooks and served the food in the kitchen).

We went to a wash house to shave and wash our faces. We would fill an enamel basin with hot water dipped from a huge cauldron and after we had finished we would rinse out the basin, wipe it dry with our towel and hand it to the next person.

All-over-washes (you couldn't call them 'baths') took place in the sauna, a good-sized wooden building on the shore of the Dog River. As one entered the sauna there was a 'cooling room' and then beyond that the hot room, the heart of the sauna.

The practice was to hang ones clothes in the cooling room, go into the hot room and sit on one of the tiered benches, going higher until one found a heat level that was just right. If even the top bench wasn't hot enough, one threw a scoop or two of water on the stones.

After a spell in the hot room, the hardy ones ran through the cooling room, onto a short deck and then jumped into the river.

The rest of us went into the cooling room, got a bucket of warm water and soaped, shampooed, scrubbed and rinsed off with the water draining between the boards onto the ground below.

(While I was at the camp, the younger workers started a campaign for in-door plumbing---I will write about that in another blog.)

Sorry for all this description but I needed to provide some background for the story that---finally---I can tell.

The previous summer, one of the accountants from head office spent a few weeks at the camp reviewing the books. When his 12 and 10 year old sons got out of school he decided to bring them to the camp, to give his wife a break.

There was nothing organized for the boys to do, so they just wandered around the camp looking for adventure and more often than not finding mischief.

The men working in the camp, pulling logs from the river and loading them onto trucks, were bothered by the boys tricks and worried that they were going to get hurt.

Complaints to the accountant didn't do any good.

Finally, a couple of the men decided to teach the boys a lesson.

They asked the boys if they would like to have a sauna. This was something new and the boys quickly agreed. They put on their swim suits, and entered the sauna.

The men explained that really tough people used the top tier bench but if that was too hot they could cool things down by throwing cold water on the stones.

The boys nodded impatiently and said they would be OK.

The men shut the door to the hot room and quietly moved a bench against it so the kids were blocked in. Then they sat down quietly to wait.

One of the kids said that it was too hot and threw some water on the steaming stones, which, of course, just produced more searing heat.

The fellows in the cooling room heard the kids muttering and moving down to the middle and then to the bottom tier. Then the splash of yet more water.

Finally, the kids tried to get out of the hot room but found they couldn't open the door.

The fellows gave them a few minutes and then opened the door.

The boys were lying on the floor, trying to suck cool air from the cracks between the boards.

Later that day, the boys told their father that they were bored with the camp and wanted to go home. After dinner, the dad drove them home.

Tough love?

I guess so, but they were safe at home, not running behind trucks and heavy equipment.



A Sauna in Siberia

My interpreter, Yuri, and I were on a state-owned farm in deepest Siberia in 1996 as I continued my travels from Moscow checking Russian employment offices to see whether they could be converted into model offices by Canadian consultants.

I had checked out a proposed model office in a nearby city and since there was no decent hotel in the city we were staying on the farm---in very comfortable rooms.

After dinner with some of the farm managers, they invited us to join them for a sauna evening.

The sauna was very similar to the one at Dog River--- a genuine wood-fired sauna---with a couple of exceptions. There was no river or lake to jump into so the farm had built a deep, indoor pool filled with cold water, just off the cooling room. The other difference was that there was a table in the cooling room covered with beer, vodka, smoked fish, cheese, and cut tomatoes and cucumbers. The Dog River camp as with all Canadian bush camps banned alcoholic beverages.

Yuri and I joined the managers in the hot room. Yuri, having had more sauna time than I, was able to go higher up on the tiers. One of the hosts brought out a pail of water with fresh poplar branches and offered to swat our backs, to get the circulation going. It felt good.

After turning lobster red, we jumped in the cold pool for a few minutes and then returned to seats in the cooling room to have some vodka toasts, and food.

Then the cycle was repeated: hot room, pool, cooling room.

During a session in the cooling room, one of our hosts told a story about a Moscow bureaucrat who had come out to inspect the farm during the Gorbachev era.

Gorbachev had decided to move against the Soviet Union's massive drinking problem with many measures to ban or at least limit the use of alcohol.

Government officials who were used to long official lunches and dinners with copious amount of vodka, wine and beer were upset but, of course, couldn't object.

I was told that the rules about drinking were tightly enforced in Moscow but the further one travelled from the Kremlin, the less they were followed. Moscow officials loved, therefore, to travel.

This particular Moscow official had a lot to drink at dinner and could hardly make his way to the sauna for an evening of further comradeship. His hosts were almost as drunk as he was---they had had to appear to keep pace with him, glass for glass.

After ten or fifteen minutes on the top tier of the hot room, the Moscow official stammered that he was going to jump in the pool. People helped him get down from his perch and he stumbled into the cooling room on his way to the pool.

The farm managers chuckled about how drunk he was. One of them said that the cold water would sober him up.

Then, someone said, "Oh, my god, the maintenance people drained the pool today!"

Sudden horror.

If something had happened to him, how would they explain that to Moscow---that they weren't following the official policy of alcohol-free meals. Although their heads were fuddled with drink, terror was sobering them up.

They stumbled into the cooling room, opened the door to the pool, and expected the worst.

The Moscow official was spread out on the bottom of the empty pool. Someone clambered down a ladder and went over to the body.

After a moment, he said, "He's snoring."

The Moscow official had done a belly flop, and then fallen asleep.

Our hosts told us that they got him out of the pool and into bed.

And then on a plane back to Moscow the next day.

As he got on the plane, the fiercely hung-over official thanked them for a very pleasant evening.

New Year Wishes

Pat and I would like to wish everyone a wonderful, story-full 2010!


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See you next Sunday for Posting #53 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.

POSTING #51

Christmas Memories from Arthur, Golders Green, and Virgil


Christmas Memories from Arthur

One December when I was about 11 and my brother Chuck was about 8, we decided to go into the woods and cut down a Christmas tree.

In Arthur at that time no one bought a tree----a farmer friend would bring one in as a gift, or invite you to visit his bush and cut your own.

The idea of paying for a Christmas tree would have seemed as bizarre to people in Arthur at the time as the thought that someday people would be paying for bottles of water.

Trees were everywhere.

Carrying our family's rusty hand saw and a hatchet that was battered from chopping ice off the sidewalk, we set out along the railway tracks for Cameron's, a farm about two miles west of Arthur.

Walking along the railway tracks wasn't as dangerous as it might sound. There were only a couple of trains a day and we knew the times by heart.

Reaching the farm, we decided on a nice bushy tree that was 7 or 8 feet tall. We set to felling it (that's bush lingo for 'cutting it down').

One of us would attack it for a time with the blunt hatchet, and then the other would take over with the saw. Then we would try to push or pull it over.

Finally the tree broke free.

Then we dragged the tree home, over the railway ties, and the gravel between the ties.

We felt proud of ourselves. We had done it.

When we got home, a relative who was visiting looked at the tree and started to laugh, "It's all flat on one side!"

Of course, dragging a tree along railway tracks for a couple of miles will do that to a tree---something we hadn't counted on.

Mom quickly moved in, "It's just fine, we'll put that side to the wall."

And dressed with lots of lights and tinsel it looked just great.

Every Christmas, I remember Mom's quick and kind response.

Christmas Memories from Golders Green

In 1964, we DID buy a tree.

Pat and I were living in Golders Green, an area of northwest London that was almost entirely Jewish.

We lived in a house rented from a Jewish couple, with a mezuzah on the frame of the front door (we had only one child at the time and he liked to point at the object and say 'zooza'---one of his first words).

We debated about having a Christmas tree and then decided that if people were offended they would probably say, "Oh, it's just those Canadians. They don't know any better."

In fact, we noticed that people passing on the sidewalk would stop and look at the tree in our front window.

They didn't seem to mind at all.

Judging from their smiles, just the reverse.

ooo

There was a church (Methodist, I think) in Golders Green that according to the sign out front had a pastor named the Reverend Goy.

This was strange because the Yiddish word 'goy' means, of course, a Gentile, or someone not of the Jewish faith or people.

When we told Jewish friends in the States about the Reverend Goy in Golders Green, they didn't believe it.

The husband had his own story about the word 'goy'.

He said that when his solidly Jewish firm decided to hire a non-Jewish person, they joked that it was because they needed a 'whipping goy'.

Christmas Memories from Virgil

We got out our boxes of Christmas tree ornaments this week to decorate our two, three-foot-tall artificial trees---the green one is on a table on the front porch and the white one on a side table in the dining room.

We noticed again how the decorations mirror the different stages of our family.

There are red toilet rolls with pipe cleaner antlers, and sheets of red and green paper with squiggly letters wishing everyone a Merry Christmas.

And there are hand-made plaster angels with red ribbons that can hang on the branches of the trees.

Among the decorations are two colourful rope circlets that are used to hold on the traditional Arab headdress, which I brought back from a 1969 trip to Beirut.

I am not sure how they ended up on our Christmas trees, but they did, year after year, slung over a branch.

The branches of the artificial trees are not strong enough to hold a circlet, so we have hung one on the drawer knob of the side table.

Some traditions must be preserved!

Holiday Wishes

So there you have it, Jewish and Arabic memories mingled with our own.

It somehow seems appropriate as we celebrate an event that happened in the Middle East 2009 years ago.

Pat and I would like to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season.


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See you next Sunday for Posting #52 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.

POSTING #50

Dishwasher Problems;  Looking for an Apartment in Moscow (Conclusion)

Dishwasher Problems

When we were looking for a new home, one of the absolute requirements was that everything had to be brand new---the house, the furnace, the air conditioner and the appliances.

We had fixed up three houses---one in Ottawa and two in Grimsby---and felt that we had done our bit for preserving Canada's urban landscape. More prosaically, we had swallowed enough plaster dust, and negotiated with enough contractors and repair people to last us for the rest of our lives.

Our Virgil home met all those requirements, and we have enjoyed the luxury of a trouble-free life (there was, of course, the construction of the basement rooms, and a small flood from the water line to the refrigerator, but who is counting).

Then a couple of weeks ago, we noticed that when we emptied the dishwasher, the dishes weren't very clean. We studied the trouble-shooting part of the handbook and couldn't see a solution.

As I got ready to deal with the dishwasher people, Pat happened to say that she had noticed that the current bottle of dishwasher gel was more liquid than usual. We assumed that the company had changed their formula but when we checked a recently purchased backup bottle, the gel was thick.

When I called the company's 1-800 number and gave the clerk the batch number from the bottle of the gel, she immediately apologized and said she would be sending a coupon for a new bottle.

I got the clear impression that ours wasn't the first complaint.

It kind of boggles the mind how with all the quality control measures that companies supposedly take that a whole batch of watery gel could leave the factory.

I tell this story in case any reader has been feeling that the dishes aren't coming quite as clean as usual.

Looking for an Apartment in Moscow (conclusion)

Last week's posting ended with my feeling blue because I couldn't find an apartment in Moscow at a rent I could afford.

Gennady, the real estate agent, had come up with another apartment, which a number of westerners had already looked at and rejected because it had not been modernized.

Although the asking rent was beyond my means, perhaps the owner would be prepared to negotiate a lower price.

We agreed to have a look at it.

The places I had been looking at had all been in low-rise apartment buildings but this was in one of Stalin's Seven Sisters, a group of skyscrapers that Stalin commissioned after a trip to New York after the War. He is supposed to have said that communism needed some skyscrapers to show that it was capable of doing anything that capitalism could do.

Stalin used Russian architects to design the buildings but most of the construction was carried out by German prisoners of war whom he refused to return to Germany after the War.

Two of the buildings became  hotels, another one housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one became the main building of the University of Moscow, and one became an administrative centre. Two of the hotels became apartment buildings, one for senior party people and one for cultural heroes. Click here for an article about the Seven Sisters.

The apartment that Gennady had in mind was in the last building, the one for cultural heroes, called the Kudrinskaya Square Building, which is located near the US Embassy. 

(Here is a quote from Wikipedia about the apartment building: " Designed by Mikhail Posokhin (Sr.) and Ashot Mndoyants. 160 metres high, 22 floors (17 usable). The building is located on the end of Krasnaya Presnya street, facing the Sadovoye Koltso and was primary (sic) built with high-end apartments for Soviet cultural leaders rather than politicians.")

There was a locked door with a combination to the lobby but no guard. The lobby must have been spectacular in the Soviet period with marble columns, high ceilings and lots of gilt paint but it was now tired and in need of sprucing up.

But it was clean and there was no smell of urine.

The apartment, on the 13th floor, had a heavy oak door, not steel, with two locks. Inside, the kitchen was large, with older but serviceable appliances, and a splendid view of the Russian parliament, the so-called White House.

The bathroom had a deep tub, huge porcelain sink with a pedestal. The bedroom was not large but would work.

The living room and dining room were combined into one large room with an enormous crystal chandelier hanging from the 12 foot ceiling, and fine views of Moscow. The table and furniture were well-crafted with simple lines, not the overstuffed items I had seen in other apartments.

The oak parquet floors were sprinkled with fine carpets.

I liked it.

Turning to Gennady I asked, "What's the matter with this one?'

After a perplexed silence, he replied, "That's what you're supposed to tell me".

Then muttering with distaste, he added, "This could be the set for a 1950s movie".

I asked him to find out if the owner would come down to my price level. He said the owner was a widow with a son at university studying medicine and the rent would be her only source of income.

But, he mused, for a single tenant she might come down a little.

The owner insisted on meeting me to discuss the rental. She came with her son to the meeting. She was in her late 50s and was the daughter of the senior military officer who had first acquired the apartment. Her son was in his early 20s, tall with dark hair, We met,  negotiated a price I could afford, and I finally had an apartment.

Pat, who came over for five visits, said that she always felt at home in the apartment.

And the groups of Canadian consultants, who came to Moscow on their way to their assignments in the provinces, always came for a pizza and beer evening in the apartment. (They always stayed at the KGB residence.)

In the summer of 1996, our children and their spouses came for a two-week visit and used the apartment as the base---they too stayed at the KGB residence.

The apartment worked out very well.

ooo

During Pat's first visit we discovered pencil marks on the kitchen door jamb. Looking at them we realized they were height marks, made over the years for the young man who was now studying medicine. There were short horizontal lines made, we assume, as he stood with his back to the jamb, and then the date.

The markings made me smile. During the Cold War, when we were so worried about what the Soviets might do, the original owner of the apartment who was a senior military officer---and proud grandfather---was recording the growth of his grandson.

ooo

The apartment had a cable TV connection but no TV. I bought a set and then spent weeks trying to get someone to activate the cable. Yuri finally called the owner and she successfully intervened with the building management.

I was finally able to get CNN and the BBC.

I was told that the delay was caused by the fact that the cable signals came into an antenna on the roof and my apartment had to be connected to the antenna. Also on the roof were numerous eavesdropping antennae pointed at the US Embassy a few hundred yards away. Only people with the highest security screening, I was told, could go up on the roof.

However, looking back I suspect that if I had offered a good bottle of cognac things might have moved faster.

ooo

There is a story that I was told about the US Embassy. During the Cold War when part of the embassy was being rebuilt, a number of KGB agents worked as labourers, their task being to plant bugs in the walls. The Americans realized of course that the KGB would attempt to plant bugs so they had inspectors watching the work.

(The US General Accounting Office included this sentence in one of its reports at the time about the Moscow Embassy, " The State Department considers Moscow to be one of the most technologically hostile intelligence-gathering locations, requiring the highest level of security.")

At one point, a KGB operative was about to plant a key bug when an American inspector appeared. Another KGB fellow seeing what was happening threw himself off a scaffold to create a diversion.

In the confusion that followed this 'accident', the bug was planted.

The KGB agent, who survived but was badly crippled, was celebrated as a hero by the Soviets but after the end of the USSR he was ignored. A Russian friend, who was no fan of the Soviets, argued vigorously that the nation should not have turned its back on someone who made such a selfless sacrifice.

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See you next Sunday for Posting #51 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.

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.