Bad Blogger...

Sorry for the long absence! It's not because nothing's happening, but rather because too much is happening. I've also been planning to write a blog post on the epic story of moving that I've been through, but the story keeps on going...I think it's finally over, so I'm going to go ahead and tell the story as if it's over, with the hope that this won't jinx me!

At the beginning of February, Kate and I signed a lease on a fantastic apartment in downtown Ulan-Ude. It's amazing - spacious, well-lit, and much more coherently decorated than most Russian apartments. The location is amazing - I'm a five minute walk from pretty much everywhere that I work, although for some reason I still continue to be as late for everything as I was before. It already had internet and cable already hooked up. Things like that can be a real chore to turn on here, so this seemed almost too good to be true. The owner, Taisia, seemed nice, normal, and relatively on top of things. When we signed the lease, we payed both the first and second month's rent. Taisia promised that if we did this, she would leave the enormous shiny refrigerator that dominated the kitchen. This seemed a little odd, but paying people ahead to cover moving costs is pretty standard practice here, so we went ahead.

Moving day rolled around, and Taisia called us right before we were planning to bring the first load of stuff over to let us know that she was still moving her things out. She asked very nicely if we'd be willing to wait a day to move in. It seemed like the nice-person thing to do, and we're nice people, so we agreed. Her request for another delay the next morning seemed a little excessive, though, so we got a little more assertive. When we got to the apartment, it all seemed in decent order....except the big shiny fridge, which was not working at all. She promised that she would send a repair man over to take care of it right away.

Three days later, a repair man had still not come, although we'd already called her once to ask what was going on. Her response, of course, was that someone would be over right away. Days went by, and rolled into weeks...one week, two weeks...she stopped answering out phone calls after a while. Meanwhile, the temperature outside got warmer and warmer, making our stopgap measure of putting all of the food on the windowsill and leaving the window less and less reliable. After three weeks without a refrigerator, we got so irritated that we called the realtor who had helped us find the place. I have no idea what she said to Taisia, but the next day, Taisia's son and nephew dragged in a battered old Soviet refrigerator that stank, but still worked. One step at a time.

This wouldn't have been so bad by itself, but when combined with her default on a number of debts, the overall situation looked pretty grim. A week after we moved in, Kate was at home one afternoon when she got a knock on the door from the hot water company. Apparently Taisia had not paid the hot water bill for somewhere on the order of a year, and owed them over a thousand dollars. We found out later that this is pretty common practice - most of our acquaintances don't actually pay their hot water bills. And because the company is legally prevented from turning off the largest part of each apartment's hot water use, the heat, the worst that can happen is that they'll turn off your hot water taps. On March 8, International Women's Day, they came to turn off our taps. In order to do this, they have to get into your apartment, and Taisia sounded shocked when she found out that we had actually let them in, but what did we know? So they came in, went into the bathroom and there was some clanking and then we had no hot water.

Kate called Taisia, who was simultaneously shocked, angry (?!) and apologetic. Instead of actually paying the debt, she called an acquaintance of hers over at the hot water company who called the hot-water-turner-offers, who marched right back over and turned our hot water back on. She may not have money, but at least she's got connections! But we are now under strict instructions to not open the door for ANYONE. Which of course would have meant that we wouldn't have opened the door for the hot water people when they showed up again to turn it on, but since it's ridiculous, we don't pay any attention.

Other people who have come looking for Taisia include

1) the electric company
2) a credit service which she had told to contact her at our home number after she had moved out
3) the municipal court multiple times for some sort of action against her husband
4) a policeman

We also had our cable turned off because it turned out that she hadn't payed the bill since December, and had our internet turned off because she listed it under a name that was not hers, and didn't tell us about that, which meant that the phone company credited our payment to the wrong account.

She doesn't want to tell us where she is living now because she's afraid that we'll tell someone who is looking for her, since we've made it clear that we have no problem giving her home phone number to all of these people who come bugging us looking for her. So she has to come here to pick up the rent herself. Now, it's pretty clear by this time that she needs the money, so you'd think that she'd actually show up to pick it up. You would be wrong. She called for four days telling us that she would be by "in the afternoon" or "after seven" to pick up the money, but we didn't see hide nor hair of her. Finally, she came by at 11 pm on a Wednesday evening nearly a week after she had originally promised to come by and went through a ridiculous and slightly insulting process of trying to check all of the math on the deductions we had made out of the rent for the bills that we'd paid for her. As the woman from the credit service said when I explained to her that we had been living here for months and Taisia had given her the wrong number, "zabavno," which roughly translates as "what a piece of work."

So next time all you renters out there are complaining about your giant rental companies, remember my tale of woe! Actually, now that the refrigerator crisis is a distant memory and we have our hot water back, it's mostly just funny.