For peace of mind, when I arrived in Russia I went for an unexciting but predictable & safe international chain hotel. My room in Moscow was a mirror of but otherwise identical copy of my room in St Petersburg, an edible and plentiful breakfast was available every morning and there were English-speaking staff on hand 24/7. In hindsight, choosing to move into apartments in lesser-touristed cities like Murmansk and Ekaterinburg might not have been a bright idea, or the right way round to do it.
You already know about my trials and tribulations getting into my Murmansk apartment. It all went easier in Ekaterinburg, apart from that I was roaming a too-lively city alone in the dark. My landlady in Ekaterinburg had WhatsApp and the Google Translate app. I had a message giving the precise address to meet her when I landed and she was waiting outside looking for me, with a full screen picture of my WhatsApp profile photo so I knew she was specifically looking to me.
Getting in: Murmansk 0, Ekaterinburg 1.
I was in an ordinary working home in Murmansk. The building was grubby and dark and the landings small. In Ekaterinburg, I got the impression this was more of an apartment-hotel, with few permanent residents, modern and shiny. I was on the seventeenth floor and there were three mirrored lifts leading up to shiny light landings so big that if I forgot which lift I’d been in, I couldn’t figure out whether to go left or right and had to literally walk the landing in a circle looking for my door.
I had a proper metal key for both plus an electronic fob to get into the main downstairs door – in Ekaterinburg that also opened the gates to the entire apartment complex. But I had to turn my double-sided apartment key four or five times to unlock the door which felt either like I was unlocking a bank vault or like there was something out there I should be scared of. It was a big bulky door, too. In Murmansk I had two doors – a chunky metal security one and then a more normal front door. I’ve not seen Serious Doors to apartments anywhere else.
And then there’s inside. Oh, the contrast!
So, in Murmansk I had a very pleasant ordinary apartment. I had a bathroom with a bath and a washing machine, a living room with a pull-out double sofa bed and a couple of small armchairs. I had a separate kitchen with a little table and I had a long bedroom with two narrow twin beds at one end and a wardrobe at the other. Quite frankly, either it hadn’t been redecorated since the 1970s or the owner has very old-fashioned tastes. It was like being in my grandparents’ houses. Lots of brown, lots of loud patterns, lots of decorative curtains. Functional, fine for a few days – or longer than a few days. The decoration isn’t to my taste but there was no reason I couldn’t live there. Except the curtains. I found only figure out how to close them in the bedroom and when I pulled them, the hooks collapsed. There were net curtains everywhere so fine for privacy but impossible to get it dark enough to sleep properly – and Murmansk is far enough north that’s it’s going to have 24-hour daylight in June and July.
Ekaterinburg was somewhat different. I had an open-plan kitchen & living room, divided by a breakfast bar. The sofa was a big battered cream leather one and the décor was a lot less 70s Soviet and a lot more kitsch. I had weird ornaments everywhere, a water feature plant thing, a massive TV system. An oven! No oven in Murmansk, just an electric hob.
I had a small balcony and city views over glass skyscrapers and wide boulevards. The bedroom was something of a white lace boudoir until you pulled back the decorative cover and discovered the blue stripy bedding of every 19-year-old student’s uni room. Which suited me far better than the white lace, actually.
But the star of this place was the bathroom. I had a jacuzzi! A massive triangular corner jacuzzi with lights and jets! True, it took an entire bath to figure out how it worked and it was so noisy I rarely switched the jets on for fear of upsetting my neighbours. But a jacuzzi!
And it didn’t end there. I had my own sauna! A tiny one, to be true, but a sauna! In my bathroom! After all that, it was hardly worth noting the bidet. I’d had three sets of towels in Murmansk but here there seemed to be another towel on every hook and every shelf, some of them quite big.
I think those two apartments are the two cities in microcosm. Functional, brown, old-fashioned vs flashy playground. I adored the Ekaterinburg apartment (give or take bamboo blinds that block out even less light than Murmansk’s net curtains – is darkness not a desired thing in Russia?) but I wasn’t keen on the city. Display fireworks launched from the tram tracks in the street below at 4.35am and make bellow-chanting all night will have that effect. I know I’m a nervous tourist in a very strange land but it’s impossible to tell whether the noise is laaaaads watching football with too much beer or whether the Revolution is coming. Add explosives to the mix and you can see why I refused to leave the apartment at 5am when it was still dark, even at risk of missing my train.
Murmansk, on the other hand, was a perfectly pleasant city where people tried to make friends with me and show off their home.
That said, I still miss that jacuzzi so much…