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.