Playing House Rather Than Just Playing Doctor

After living here for nine years, you'd think I'd be used to how filthy it is, but I find myself a bit taken aback by it.

For the Real Russian Experience, take a piss in a full garbage can and let it sit for a week, and then smell it as you look at these pictures:



This is what $500 a month gets you by way of an apartment in provincial Russia. (This would be considered basically a middle-class type of apartment and it's actually in a pretty good area.)


The apartment itself isn't so bad, although it's been redecorated recently "euro-remont" with cheap Chinese crap that doesn't work very well, and the washing machine has been placed in front of the toilet in a fairly impossible and uncomfortable way.

However, the apartment does include a small cute blonde girl. . .

Yes, that's right: I'm shacked up.

I'm living with the girl that I went to Egypt and Dubai with. She's pretty much the opposite of most girls I know, apart perhaps from being blond -- she doesn't drink or smoke, she's kind and honest and a bit shy, and so far hasn't revealed much in the way of greed or neediness. (I should say I met her only shortly before I left Vodkaberg in August of 2009)

So there we go! Surprise! For the last two weeks in Vodkaberg, I've mostly been going to bed at ten or eleven p.m, have only drunk to excess twice, and been having sex with the same woman every night. (Well. . . almost every night.)

Co-habiting does not exactly come as second-nature to me, but I thought I should try it before the world ends in 2012. The longest I can remember a girl living at my place, consecutively, is about 3 or 4 weeks. (Co-habiting is not exactly second nature to girls in Vodkaberg, also -- it's pretty rare before marriage, in fact.)

As it happens,most of the girls and English teachers I know here are also married or shacked up, or just working a lot to keep up with the insane cost of living, and the temptation to go out and raise hell is considerably lessened.

Still, for me this is like Adventure Tourism -- the thought of living with somebody scares me a lot worse than a safari or some shit.