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January 29, 2005
House of Dust
Gorodets Labour Camp: July 20th - 29th
If anything was plenty in Gorodets, it was dust. First, we slept in room #8. When we arrived, it was clean… but after a “sleeping bag” fight, it was dirty again. And to make matters even worse, we got our sleeping bags dirty as well. Then we slept on the “tree house” in the attic. It wasn’t really a tree house, because there was no tree - but it reminded me of one. You can call it a jungle gym if you like. Sleeping in the basement was fun as well - it was cold and dirty, but had no flies.
After Konstantinov left, Anton replaced him as our supervisor. Anton made life much easier - he insisted in doing all the cooking and cleaning himself and we quickly became lazy. Konstantinov had two batteries, one of which powered his laptop (craptop by our standards) and the other powered his keyboard (the musical kind). Anton was an expert organ player, and we enjoyed his performances very much. Anton told us that last year a kid wanted to sleep on the water tower, and that the supervisor at that time had to sleep up there with him. Life was fun.
How big are the fish? I ask a guy how big are his fish? And he says <—- this big —-> stretching out his arms. All’s well, except when you show someone a dimension, you keep your arms still.
Fifty bucks: Janos is afraid to get lost (Its Russia). What will he de do? What will he say? Most locals doesn’t speak English. So he is thinking: What will they say? “Fifty bucks?” Janos will give them the fifty bucks. They will take it and say “Fifty bucks?” again - because thats probably the only thing they know.
Swim away: We swam in the river. There were no showers, so it was our only source of becoming clean. The current was fast in the middle, so Konstantinov forbid us to swim there. When Anton came, the first thing we did was to swim across. That colony on the other side had electricity and broadband (Russian edition). Did I say Anton was an expert swimmer as well?
Cooking: Konstantinov had very nice frying pans. He bought them on the cheap - they had defects (the company could not sell them, so employees stole them). They were extremely heavy and almost impossible to clean (but Konstantinov managed to do that anyway). One time, I had nowhere to put the frying pan, so I put it inside a plastic bucket of water. Man, that was ever stupid. The sides of the bucket melted and glued themselves onto the frying pan. This ruined the bucket - but that wasn’t the real problem - someone had to clean the plastic off the frying pan. That someone was the ever-helpful Anton.
Posted by Oleg Ivrii at January 29, 2005 02:17 PM