Sunday 6 November 2011

Musings on the metro, spooks and weather

Travelling by Metro is the only way I can get round Moscow and you get to see some sights.  Normally its either drunk people sat next to you at 11am or commuters at rush hour. This week I felt I had to comment on it as this woman was a sight to behold and if I had had a phone with a camera on it I would have put the picture of her on the blog and words would be superfluous.  She was in her 30s I would say, and first of all I thought she was wearing a fur cropped jacket over her top but taking a closer look it turned out it was a coat, the top half and sleeves fur and the bottom half and arms were like a thick chain mail.  I thought she may have been a Xena Princess Warrior fan but the pointy toed, patent knee high boots dispelled this notion straight away.

As you know I am a member of a choir and the rehearsals are held round different choir members apartments so  for me it has been great to see different areas of Moscow and how the trailing spouses live. The most interesting so far has been S.  She and her family live in 'building 28'.  What makes building 28 special?  Well for a start the actual building does not have any numbers on the outside of the front door so you need to know the number of the apartment to ring.  Was this an oversight? No it wasn't. It dates back to the cold war and the KGB.  It  was built for returning KGB couples who had been spying overseas (their children were put into orphanages while they were overseas). All the apartments are 2 bed but it is probably in the safest building in Moscow!

On Friday it was Unity day and the day before they had shut down the whole of the Red Square and surrounding areas.  There were lots of tanks and even 'ello, ello' mini tanks.  Will post some pictures tomorrow when my internet connection is a bit faster so that I can download them.

Had a Lost In Translation  moment with L this week in my lesson.  We had just finished doing Relative Clauses when she asked if we could play a game.  I thought I had misheard her and that she was swearing at me.  It kind of came out like 'bashiiits' you could hardly hear the 'battle', then she started to explain and it twigged. 'Battleships' I said and she was looking at me as if that was what she had been saying all the time.  We did have a good laugh about it when I explained it to her.  I didn't want A to think I had been teaching her daughter swearwords.

The temperature is dropping in Moscow.  Today it was 0 deg C and in this evening -3 deg C and typically I would end up losing a glove.  Normally I have a habit of losing umbrellas but this time it is gloves, so going to have to stock up on them.  


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