Berlin, my New Flat and Moscow during Winter

Every three months I need to renew my visa for Russia, because the Russian government only offers one-year-visa for students or workers, but not for volunteers. Therefore, I had to interrupt my work in Moscow for one and a half weeks to fly to Germany to organise a new visa. Fortunately, my organisation organised everything including the flights, the visa and also a place to stay if I hadn’t slept at a friends place. In adavance I had arranged that I would work at the House of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, because it is cooperating with the Holocaust Centre in Moscow. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to work as much as I had hoped for, but I found some interesting books for our library.

I flew back to Moscow already before Christmas and it turned out that this had been a very good decision, as I needed to move out of my old flat on 26th December. Therefore, my christmas days weren’t the merriest of all, because I needed to pack and I had to listen to the conflicts between my former host family and the land lord. Nonetheless, I had a stress free and enjoyable Christmas Eve. I went to church with a friend where we sang many meditative songs, then we went to a cafe and I had the evening come to an end on a party with some other friends.

So, let’s now turn to the supposedly most interesting part of this blog entry: my new flat. I now live in a beautiful, quite big, sunny room with an own balcony. The flat is owned by a very nice, very intelligent and intriguing (80 years) old lady. Up to now it seems to me that we really like each other. And living together with her really improves my Russian, because I now speak Russian regularly and intensively. Last week we went to a classical concert together. Nevertheless, I believe she still thinks I haven’t experienced enough culture in Moscow yet. She often talks about various museums and then asks me whether I had visited theses museums already. And when I negate she reminds me that I have been living in Moscow for already 4 months and that it is really about time to experience Moscow’s manifold culture. The flat is located at the circle line of Moscow and it’s therefore a very central place to live. And I pay the same amount of money as I did when I relatively lived far away. My work is only a stone’s throw from here (one metro station), which, however, doesn’t hinder my from coming late to work. Overall I’m really really happy with my new living situation.

Finally, just shortly something about the winter in Moscow. The streets are very often unbelievably slippery because a snow layer on the pavement had frozen. I already tumbled twice, which wasn’t really the nicest experience I had so far, because all Moscovians then stare at the stupid tourist who went too quickly. When it started to thaw last week it was quite dangerous to walk through Moscow, because quite frequently snow or enormous icicles fell off the roofs. I had aready started to believe that it was going to be warmer in the next couple of weeks. But since Sunday we have -14°C again in Moscow.

Volgograd

First of all, I have to apologise for not keeping my blog up to date in the last months. This was due to several trips to other cities and the fact that I moved to another flat in Moscow. In early December all volunteers of my organisation who work in Russia had their first country seminar in Volgograd, which was in former times called Stalingrad. All volunteers, except the volunteer working in Volgograd, met in Moscow to take the night train to Volgograd. During the more than 19 hour train journey we ate all the food we had prepared in advance and talked a lot about our experiences in out projects. When we arrived, our country coordinator was already waiting for us to take the bus to our final destination at a German Protestant congregation. This was the first time we noticed the unbelievable dimension of this city. Volgograd extends itself along the river Volga and is therefore extremely long (80 kilometres). I heard that it is the second longest city in Russia (only Ekaterinenburg is longer). On the other hand however, Volgograd is not very wide but rather like a long stripe. Therefore, it took us always more than 40 minutes from our accommodation at the protestant congregation to the city centre of Volgograd.

During our seminar we spoke about our experiences and problems at work, about Russian history, but the biggest part of the seminar was devoted to the exploration of the city and its immense historical importance for Russian history. All over Russia one can find traces of World War II and Russia’s big victory against the Germans. One of the most crucial victories took place in the battle of Stalingrad. Thus, there are hundreds of monuments remembering this big victory in Volgograd today. These monuments, however, do not make Volograd a very beautiful city in my opinion, although the museums and monuments were very interesting (if not a little bit too patriotic and war-glorifying). We had a very good guide through Volograd, unfortunately, it was very very cold and wet so everyone was freezing, especially because we stayed outside for a very long time. Furthermore, it was very dizzy on that day so we couldn’t fully see the beauty of the most important sight in Volgograd - the impressive Rodina Mat (Mother of the father land) which calls the Russian people for the war against the German troops. Although we we were standing directly in front of the statue, which is bigger than the statue of liberty in New York, we could only see her feet and the silhouette. At the end of the tour we visited a soldier grave yard with German and Soviet soldiers. It was the first time for me to see a grave yard with German soldiers and one could see that Germany had given much more money for the German grave yard than the Russian side. On several stones the names of soldiers were engraved who fell during the battle. Among others I also found a soldier with my surname. On the next day we visited a very old ethnic German lady who lives in Russia (like many other ethinc Germans in the Volgaregion do) and talked with her about her life, we sang songs and she read out poems.