End of first week in Siberia! Dormitory stuff

 So I've now been here for just over a week, and am now getting happily settled in. In order to help you understand the place I've settled into, I've decided to do a quick run-through of the entire dormitory so you can visualise it. Further to this, I need to add that today was good as far as classes go, still sorting out French lessons, which will take place either after the normal lessons or in the morning, we shall see... Today's meal, for those of you who are curious consisted of sausages and frites with a cucumber, tomato and cheese salad which we both prepared.

Sign at the entrance of the residence

View of the residence from behind

View of the residence from the front

At first glance the dormitory resembles a very derelict building which is probably not best entered when alone. A second glance does little to improve upon this. The outside is a rather dark, grim, prison-like structure with paint peeling from the walls and rust on the railings of the balconies jutting out from each of the rooms. At either side of the wooden door which is the main entrance to the dormitory is a line of trees and shrubbery, uninteresting at best, and a tarmac road runs next to the building, although given the amount of mud which litters it, it may as well be a dirt path. Around the building are other high buildings which are either simply unpleasant-looking apartment blocks or other student dormitories (from what I've managed to find out, there are two student dormitories on the road I live on, numbers 132 and 136. Opposite the front façade of the building is an electrical unit, or what I imagine to be one. Probably not the most sanitary place to live next to, but still, it IS Russia, so I guess it is to some extent expected that we get to see a bit of the effect of the industrialisation drive of the late 1920s. and the 1930s....

Not exactly sure what the purpose of this thing is - there' just a lot of metal and buzzing sounds.
It looks really interesting, but may serve no purpose whatsoever...

A quick snap of the slightly dodgy
(at night-time) park...

The skips outside the residence - they're
not divided into different types, but a
man comes along every so often to
separate the glass from the waste

Further along the road is a large supermarket and then the dodgy park which is probably best not walked through at night - what we do when it gets dark earlier is, as of now, unknown, although staying away from that park and walking down the muddy steps next to it is probably a safe plan. Round to the left of the dormitory are a set of skips. We asked, but were answered with confused stares when we asked about recycling and where we should divide our rubbish. Clearly the idea has not yet reached Russia that putting all the rubbish out together (glass and batteries included as well as all of the normal household waste), is not necessarily economically, ecologically sound reasoning, nor is it particularly sanitary! We can see the skips from the windows on the kitchen side (my side) of the building, but they're quite a way away. Quite often you can see tramps rifling through them to see if they can find anything of use of maybe some leftovers that the comparatively rich foreign kids have thrown out.

The 'smoking room' - full of old, broken chairs

As soon as you walk in through the two sets of doors you come into the main reception office where the babushka's keep all the keys to the building - the best idea is just to go and ask them for the keys and then leave - if you try and talk to any of them you'll inevitably be drawn into an incomprehensible conversation out of which the only possible outcome will be them laughing and shaking their heads at the crazy foreigners... Further along the corridor are offices and rooms full of bedding, but those are kept locked and if you want to get hold of anything you have to have a conversation, which as I've already mentioned, should be avoided at all costs. The ground floor in Russia, is also, confusingly, the first floor, so there's a door at the far end of the corridor, through whence I assume people live - I know that there are some koreans living there, I'm friends with a couple of them. The semi-landing between that and the stairs heading upwards is also the smoking area, so chances are there are people there hanging out on broken chairs and smoking. As we're in Russia, again, this is hardly surprising, but still comes as a bit of a culture shock every time someone lights up a cigarette indoors - can't remember when I last saw someone do that!


Next to that are the flights of stairs, the only floor which is labelled is the third floor, so you have guess from there where you're going. I live on the fourth floor, so that's OK, and both the third and the fourth floors are limited to foreigners - so far, 2 americans, 11 europeans, c. 20 koreans. Russians, as I may also have mentioned before, are not allowed onto the top two floors as they might rob from us or something like that... Doesn't stop a few of them coming up to make friends with us though! However, every time they've been up here quite late and we've heard movement in the corridor, we make certain to hide them so that the 'cobra', as they know her, doesn't find them here. Quite funny really!

Even though our corridors are similar in general layout, there are a few basic differences. The Russians, for one, are packed into their rooms like sardines - four or five people per room! Absolutely horrendous in my opinion, especially considering that they put us in the room just above theirs so we're quite capable of finding out the extreme difference in the living conditions of our floor and theirs - however they pay 2.000 roubles (50 euros) for the dormitory for the entire year, whereas we pay something in the region of 400 euros for the same time period. I've only once ventured onto the third floor, and to be honest I was quite shocked - the walls, for one, are far more derelict on their floors - not really any other way of putting it - I'll try and put up a picture so that people can get the general idea of what it looks like compared to my corridor. I've not ventured into their toilet, but considering they share two toilets between about 20 people, I'm assuming they're not the most hygienic... I've been told that the toilets have no toilet seat, which although not terrible, and quite manageable, is also different from ours, which have toilet seats after all. I may creep down there later and snoop around to see what it all looks like and put photos of their corridor onto the blog also...

Our corridor and the floor above are grandiose by comparison, although still not particularly fancy. The hot water was briefly cut off the other day, and then there is obviously the fact that the water has been known to come out black or yellow. For what reason, I'd rather not know. However, as they keep the water running most of the time to prevent the pipes from freezing, the water is almost always warm as soon as it comes out of the tap and we can also have pretty long showers with no fear of cutting off the water for the others later on (especially as they all have morning lectures, so I'm among the last to shower - I let them get in first so that they don't have to worry about being late for any of their lectures) - I'm sure that LH would be happy at the prospect of a never-ending shower...

The drying rack and iron which are in
the bathroom

Our rooms are pretty spacious - nothing on MR-S and my room in first year, but still pretty large, and good enough for the two of us - we have only one desk and stool between the two of us though, but seeing as we have different times at which we do our work, it works out just fine - same with the Internet, I have priority when I'm here, as does AB when he's here, and we're both quite easygoing when it comes to splitting the internet when we're both here. I think it'll work out just fine if we both just share this one connection, and we can probably both managed this and pay half the price of it each, shouldn't be too much in total anyway.

Our kitchen is fairly well equipped, we have a cooker and cupboards for all of us, plenty of cutlery save for knives, and CH bought a number of cups for us to share, so that's quite good for all of us - we all do our own washing up when we can, or else we end up doing it for each other - we're not particularly fussy, but its nice to have a nice kitchen. There's one table and a window looking onto the skips and some of the other buildings around here.

The football pitch visible from my bedroom window

That's as much as I can thing of when writing about the dormitory - photos will follow on this topic shortly, just need the time to take some of them, its just gone dark here so may have to leave it until tomorrow to take the photos. Enjoy!

Also, further to this, I thought I'd add two more links to blogs being written by two of the girls on my corridor. Here is Danya's: http://danyainrussia.posterous.com/ , and here is Corinne's: http://flyingplatupous.blogspot.com/