Our apartment
The toilet room stinks. It smells like a much-used and rarely-cleaned public bathroom. Ew. Luckily the shower is located in another room, along with the sink & mirror I use daily. I'll clean the toilet when I finally buy cleaning gloves--I bought cleaning supplies, but no gloves. My extremely dry skin cracks and bleeds in cold, dry weather, and right now I don't feel like putting my hands anywhere near cleaning solution. I haven't bought lotion yet either, which would really relieve my skin. Hey, I haven't gotten around to buying laundry detergent yet! There was something in my cupboard when I arrived that I thought was detergent, so I didn't buy any. Upon closer look, I'm not sure what it is--it's crystallized, whatever it is. My ancient Russian-English dictionary does not translate it so well. It translates the words for "quality" and "price" but not any words that tell me what it is. One word transliterates into mayonnaise. Now, I know that's not mayonnaise!
My wardrobe has three huge, heavy sliding door, one with a full-length mirror on it. It looks really nice, however the door with the mirror became unhinged yesterday, and it took all my strength to put it back on. However, I must not have done a good job because it came off again, and rather than dealing with the hassle of putting it back on, or worrying about it falling and the mirror shattering, I laid the door on its side by my wall. Just moving that thing without dropping it was a lot of work. I told my principal today, who will tell my landlady.
I learned that the heat in apartment buildings is centralized--it all comes on at the same time and you can't control it. So our apartment is warm during the day when the sun warms it, and at night it gets very cold. Sophia is freezing. She also is sneezing and coughing a lot, and I doubt being cold while at home helps. The landlady had mentioned something about the windows having drafts and needing to be fixed; I also mentioned this to the principal. He seems really nice and concerned, and I trust him to do his best on all the things I come to him with. (Whether that meas the landlady will have the things fixed soon, is something else.)
Valerie, the American teacher, still hasn't received the mattress for her bed. She and her fiance are sleeping on a pull-out sofa, which is not big enough to fit them both and highly uncomfortable. Neither her fiance (who is from Uzbekistan and speaks Russian) nor the principal was able to get ahold of the guy who was supposed to deliver the mattress. The principal suspected that they guy had taken the school's money and ran, as the school had already paid him. Valerie told me today that her fiance had managed to get in contact with the delivery guy, who had apologized and said that he had had a family emergency and had spent their money! He really did take the money and run!
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