Our apartment here is quite nice. In fact, it's roomier than our apartment in America, and three times roomier than our first apartment, which anyone who's been there can tell you it was the size of a shoe closet. A rich Manhattan women's shoe closet, with plenty room for a wall of heels and a wall of boots, but a closet nonetheless.
A cool thing about Moscow, and other prominent cities in Eastern Europe, is that the water is heated by the city. This means you could potentially spend an eternity in the shower with the hot water never running out. Also, this heated pipe system works for heating our rooms. The sound of running water is constant as the hot water tries to heat our apartment now that snow is on the horizon. Bitter Russian winter, here we come. The pipes snake through the bathroom and double as "towel heaters" so you have a nice toasty towel to wrap yourself in once you're done with your eternally heated shower. In China, my water was icy cold for the first two months I was out there, and the space for showering wasn't separated from the rest of the room by a porcelain tub. Instead, a mere shower cutrain uselessly blocked you off from the rest of the room. Showering in China meant you might as well scrub down the toilet and the sink because they're getting just as sopping wet as you are--a horrible predicament since our sink had a cabinet under it made of wood. It's a nice turn around to be in Russia where your bathroom might as well be renamed a sauna. The Blessed Sauna of the Holy Heated Towels. Something like that. My towels always got wet in China.
Tomorrow we're going to see Lenin, whose body has been embalmed for public display for the last 85 years. I might need to shower after.
