15.01.2006: wishful unthinking

Do you, by any chance, know what a "Maxi Frange" is? No? Me neither.

I ask because I saw the expression on a billboard tonight and went "huh?". I looked it up on dictionary.com when I got home, but it just asked me "did you mean Grange?" and then went on to suggest such helpful alternatives as "franker". All I can really say is that "franging" might have something to do with eyelashes (which were pictured rather prominently on the Maxi Frange advert). More speculatively, my guess would be that it's a verb, as in "Bugger! I franged for hours before I came out tonight and he still didn't notice me!" And I guess it could be related to the adjective "frangible" (capable of being broken), though why anyone would advertise that fact about their eyelashes is beyond me.

Tell you what I do know, though. I know where I live.

Mm-hmm, it's true. I can now say with confidence: "I live in Chertanova". And this, believe it or not, is a small triumph.

See, the question of locality is a tricky one in Moscow. The concept of a 'suburb' doesn't really appear to translate, to the extent that I've given up teaching the word to my students on the grounds that they'll probably never use it. Instead, you mostly hear talk of oblasti, which are large-ish regions not unlike Sutherland Shire in Sydney, or possibly like the 'burroughs' of New York. Alternatively, people tell each other where they are by naming the nearest Metro station.

To add to the fun of this, the oblasti are pretty ill-defined, and they can be the topic of lengthy debate. Pick a street at random and ask three native Muscovites where it is; most likely, your first Muscovite will tell you it's in Oblast X, your second will swear it's in Oblast Y, and your third will ask if they can 'phone a friend. And then there's the fact that the whole of Moscow is sometimes referred to as a single oblast. Where that leaves us, I'm not entirely sure.

Meanwhile, on postal addresses you don't use suburb or oblast names at all. Which amazes me, frankerly, since it implies that every single street in Moscow requires a unique name for the city to function (a fact confirmed by my 'Moscow Atlas', as the street directory is called here). And one helpful person I spoke to in a post office a while back told me that some parts of Moscow actually "don't have a postcode yet". Weird, eh? I mean, in a city whose population is reckoned to be somewhere between nine and fourteen million people – a number which itself is in hot dispute – how does anyone find anything under these circumstances?

(Btw, in case you're thinking that was a rhetorical question which I'm about to answer, it isn't and I'm not. I really have no idea. I often fail to find things on the first try, and I don't expect that to change.)

Anyway, here's one consequence of all this confusing nomenclature: when I first arrived in my neighbourhood I was calling it "Prazhskaya", because that's the name of the local Metro station, the local English school and so on. A while back I realised that this is, in fact, entirely wrong, so I modified my description from "I live in Prazhskaya" to "I live near Metro Prazhskaya". Most people seemed to understand this, but somehow it just felt unsatisfying not to have a name for my area.

So how was it that I finally came to discover the correct name? Well, one of my favourite Muscovites, a Bavarian/Russian woman by the name of Astrid, arrived back this week from her sojourn in Ukraine. Tonight we went out to a restaurant bar in the north of town, and on the way there Astrid realised we were going past the house of an artist friend of hers called Sasha. She asked me if I'd like to meet him, and I said "yes", so we called in for introductions, coffee and a brief chat before going on to dinner.

Astrid has been living in Moscow for seven years and she knows the terrain well, so over dinner I asked her what I should be calling my neighbourhood. She considered this for a while and said she thought it was part of Chertanova (which, as you can see, looks a good deal funkier in Cyrillic and sounds more elegant than any transcription I could manage). But she wasn't sure. So later, when we met up with Sasha again, the two of them had an in-depth conversation about it, and Chertanova emerged as a likely winner.

Much later still, as Sasha was seeing me to a taxi, he asked what street I lived on. When I told him, he said "aaaah, I grew up on that street. Definitely Chertanova." So there it was – I'd learned how to tell people where I live. And it only took four-and-a-half months!

My other lesson for the day: when in Moscow, be careful what you wish for. The weather here has been mild for the last week or so, hovering around freezing point and rarely dipping more than three or four degrees below. I've actually been jokingly complaining about it ("What happened to this Russian winter I'm supposed to be pitting myself against?" and so on). But I've spoken too soon, apparently. The forecast low for next week: -30C.

Yes I know, it's only a forecast. And it does sound a bit far-fetched, considering the weather we've been having up till now. But I don't know ... the last temperature plunge was about a week-and-a-half ago, and one of my students predicted it a week before it happened. Her actual words were "I was watching the weather on TV, and next Tuesday it is minus 17." And sure enough, the temperature bottomed out at exactly 17 degrees below zero on the following Tuesday. So that worries me a bit. I mean, who knows what kind of weather forecasting equipment Russian scientists might have perfected during the half-century or so when they were working out of sight behind the Iron Curtain? By the time Ronnie and Mikhail had agreed to bury the hatchet and put Russia up for sale in the late 1980s, we could've been Cold Fighting a nation of people who knew exactly when to bring their washing in from the line, and not even known it.

I have to tell you, I'm a tad concerned about -30.

Actually, no, that's way too understated. Here's a short excerpt from a conversation I had at Sasha's house, which gives a more accurate account of my feelings on the subject:

Sasha:       "Next week we will have minus 30."
Astrid:      "I'm going to stay at home."
Anthony:   "I'm going to die."

Yep, that's right. The winter I've been waiting for is finally here, and I'm at least half-way between merely 'nervous' and actually 'terrified'. But the other feeling I'm experiencing is excitement. I mean, how's it going to feel, being outside in that kind of cold? What will I need to do in order to, you know, not die? It's all a complete unknown. I can't wait to see what it's like.

The irony here is that this whole entry was originally going to be about snow. Specifically, I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed it during the very snowy month of December and how much I've missed it since the weather has warmed. Although, on second thoughts, maybe that isn't the biggest irony that comes to mind in relation to the Russian climate. That award would have to go to my comment during a telephone conversation just a few days ago, when I was heard to say to a fellow teacher: "Where's this damn weather they promised us?"

Yeah, good one, Anthony. Wish us a blizzard, why don't you?