Chayale's report

My trip back to Stavropol

My darling husband has nudged and nudged for a first person report of my return to Stavropol to collect our goods and so with all the love in my heart (and the fact that he is cleaning the entire house in exchange) I shall indulge him. And all of you people interested in our lives.

My mother, G-d bless her, agreed to accompany me. It turns out that chances are if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have returned alive or I would’ve returned with a very unproductive report. She was the absolute perfect person to come along. She was fun, positive, focused and of course took good care of me and more importantly worked her rumpus off.

Ok from the beginning. I flew to JFK early Tuesday morning and spent the day at the Ohel where I got online and used the payphone as my personal line, including a phone call to my landlord in Stavropol in the hopes of getting the key to my apt. Then when my computer died, I returned to JFK and met my mother and father. MY father left me with the extremely wise advice which was to visit Yefim and give him a piece of my mind and also how to scam my landlord. Then my mother and I started our very long trip. We flew to Moscow quite uneventfully and unmoviefully (it was broken….) except for the disaster of leaving my mother’s corn cakes and cream cheeses on the plane (She’s still calling lost and found…).

In Moscow we paid a lot of money to go to the red square where the Taxi waited for us while we walked around. My mother would’ve loved to visit the state museum but slava b-gu for me, there wasn’t enough time. We went back to our cab driver who miraculously did not steal our stuff and went to a different airport for our flight to Stavropol. On the way there was an explosion right next to us that sounded like a gunshot. There was blood and pink mist and everything went dark. Ok we got a bit carried away but we didn’t hear normally for three days.

Thus began our Russian experience. Though it was 90 degrees out, there was no air conditioning in the airport and no air whatsoever on the plane. We were literally gasping for air. As we wiped our faces and fanned ourself with the safety card my mother first asked what would become the trip slogan: “Tell me again, Why did I agree to come?”

We arrived in Stavropol, alive but in very bad shape. We were greeted unexpectedly by Kostya, (who is the new president of the 'new' community) his wife Luda, his new executive secretary, and Alec. I couldn’t believe it for a number of reasons, the main one, embarrassingly enough, being that I could not socialize after what I just been through. We chatted and we went back to my apt with Alec who casually told us that 5 years would Scora be up and we’d be right back! Huh?! But I was too tired to deal…

We arrived home to my apt and were greeted by the best surprise yet. The various visitors to our apt decided that all food was communal property and thus left nothing save for a couple of baking ingredients and spices. There was no water, nothing. We were quite disappointed as we brought nothing with us. I was all emotional about being back without my family and got all teary eyed that I had no way of emailing or calling Zvi. It was so weird to be there without them. Anyway, we were too tired and fell into bed.

Thursday started early with Victoria’s visit. It was so nice to see her, she is such an angel. My former cleaning lady came too to say hi and claim her gifts. At around 2, Kostya showed with his crew plus his daughter Ola and Natasha and Yula from the Sachnut. I got the impression Natasha and Yula came seriously to see what they could get. It was a not a warm and cushy feeling that remained with me when they left. Kostya was very helpful and truly cared. He made a list of everything we needed for packing and went out with Victoria to buy it all.

While he was out buying it all, my mother and I went to Metro. There we found out that our cards had been stopped but they let us shop there one more time. We bought all kinds of stuff to eat and drink and the manager came over to us and in broken English told us that if we needed anything…

When we got home, Kostya came back and managed the team (his wife, daughter and secretary) who kindly packed all of the books. . They were awesomely helpful. My mother worked too and I walked around in a daze trying to look busy.

Friday. Victoria came early again, anxious to order the container by twelve noon. When she called them, the new lady gave us completely new information which is that customs must be cleared in Stavropol not through the shipping company. So we paid a visit to customs. We had to wait in a dingy, creepy building that was falling apart and where, when I asked where the toilet was, they replied “on the street!” After lunch break, we met the customs dude, who I sucked up to by complimenting his English and ended up being very helpful and nice.

We called the shipping company back who needed a lot of stuff which we would not be able to acquire before Friday afternoon so we just left it for Monday morning.
Mid-afternoon, with no prior warning, Kostya and Natasha arrived with a truck to take everything away. They were like hawks coming for their prey and Natasha especially didn’t even look at me, she’s just focused on the stuff. They were in such a rush and just wrapped up the Aron Kodesh with the Torah still inside and started to take it away. I started crying away and told them off about how it’s not the right way to treat the Torah. It was very hard to give over custody of our Torah that we brought to this city.

My mother and I prepared some Shabbos gourmet dishes such as oil dripping fried gefilte fish (no paper towel), potato salad, chicken and potatoes. We had a nice meal together before retiring for the night. It must be said that each night I was accumulating many mosquito bites and so in addition to the 95 degrees was also scratching from morning to night.

Shabbos was the hottest day ever. I wanted to invite ppl over but Netasha said I could not because they all gather in the Sachnut. I wasn’t really in the mood anyway so I just listened to her. Anyway, we just sat on the couch the entire day and read and ate a little. My mother invented this dip made of mayonnaise, tomato paste, mustard and red wine vinegar with salt and pepper. Boy were we desperate!

After Shabbos, we had some down time and then decided to go to sleep. Not a very productive day Shabbos.

Sunday, we worked out butts off packing and at the end decided to go to the mall to hang out. There was only air conditioning on the bottom floor so we bought sodas and played air hockey- my mother won- and chatted, enjoying the break. Then we went shopping for some groceries and came home.

Monday was a very busy day. Victoria came quite early and we set about trying to make our container happen. The people in Rostov or Novo Rossick or whatever wanted all kinds of stuff such as signed contracts, scanned registrations and passports and most importantly of all, Mula. Money ended up being the most difficult part because I don’t have a Russian bank account and they wanted a money transfer. Also, Western Union does not do transfers between people and companies so we were stuck. Finally I got on the phone and asked (begged) the dude to do something to help. He did and we agreed to send money through Western Union to an individual in the company. We had no internet so Victoria and I went off to the internet café to print some of the contracts and instructions for the Western Union transfer. We then went to the bank to take out money which is where things got more complicated. My mother’s bank got very worried about large sums of cash being taken out of the account and proceeded to freeze the account.

Meanwhile, I had told various friends Sunday night to visit any time on Monday because “I would be home all day.” As I’m with Victoria waiting for my mother to call the bank, people start arriving to visit me. My mother speaks not a word of Russian and so hands the phone to one lady Anya Filatova who I told where I was and she came and joined Victoria and I. Then my mother calls my father who calls the bank and they’re all on a conference call when Lena Vanskova shows up. Lena called me to find out where I was and when my mother saw that she was talking to me, she grabbed the phone out of Lena’s hand and start telling me what was happening with the bank situation. Then I told Lena to come back later. Igor Lerner also showed at home for a planned meeting and he too said he’d come back.

So Victoria, Anya, her daughter Masha and I were waiting at the bank for ages. Anya is a total crazy lady in a good way and entertained us all as we waited. She is really a soul sister of mine and we laughed so hard.

Finally the money came through. We rushed through Western Union because…. Oh yeah, I totally forgot to say. The smelliest men on the planet came to dismantle our furniture so it would fit in the container and they needed to be paid plus my mother couldn’t breathe so I ran home to pay them.

We finished packing that night as our container made its way from Novorossick to Stavropol.

Early the next morning, Tuesday, the container arrived and at about 9:00 so did four teenage boys to shlep. They worked so slow and took frequent breaks. We were on a deadline because we had to make the customs office and I didn’t know how to get them to work faster. I yelled at them, no response. Finally they told me that “if I give bonus, they do everysing 10 minutes.” I told them that the faster they work the more their bonus. So they started to work. Except that at the end I went down and looked in the container and behold it was a dump!! They just threw everything into the container with no organization whatsoever. One of the boys asked my Mom “Chow old are you?” My mother said “Old enough to be your mother” and they all laughed.

Finally the container was full, the apartment empty and we set about trying to get the truck out of the parking lot full of cars. It was a very Russian truck and unfortunately getting up a hill was a very big challenge for it. The driver decided he must wait for a bunch of specific cars to move in order for him to get out. Victoria and I are freaking out because the customs close in an hour, we’re stopping traffic, getting the police to help. No such luck. For three hours we tried to get that truck out and..nothing. Finally we called the customs agent and told him the situation. He told us to come. We ran but they were closing in twenty minutes, he said we’d never make it. I cried, he yelled at me (“you have a criminal record lady, you didn’t register within 3 days. We have procedure, you must do procedure.”)

Anyway, in the end he told Victoria to make copies of all my documents and that she could do it for me the next day. Needless to say, Victoria was FUMING. She hates the officials there and is terrified of getting involved in stuff and did not want or need the responsibility. But being the angel that she is, she agreed to do it.
As we left to make copies, the truck showed up! We told him to sleep in the parking lot and Victoria would meet him in the morning. I bought some fruit, we made copies and we went home to a yummy dinner of salmon, roast potatoes and salad prepared by my mother.

My mother then went to the mall ALL BY HERSELF. She is very proud if this fact and when she returned, she forgot which apartment was mine to buzz so she screamed up 7 flights of stairs “Chayale, which apartment is yours???” Very comical. When she got home she made sure to get some great shots of people in the windows pishing, in the building across the parking lot.

Victoria went home, we finished cleaning up the apartment, and went to the Intourist for the night (no more beds!). Alec Bogo picked us up in the AM and we started our trek back.

In the Stavropol airport our alarm clock went off inside our suitcase and everyone freaked out. I thought it was because they thought we had a bomb. It turns out no, they knew it was a clock, it was just annoying them. In Moscow, we took a cab to the Shul on Bolshoi Bronnaya and then to the Marina Roscha. We ordered out yummy food and ate it on the way back to the airport. Flight home was uneventful (and unmoviefull again!) except for the fact that my mother and I had one book between the two of us so we kept trying to steal it and then whenever one was reading, the other one didn’t stop talking. So we played boggle and scattegories.

The food was gross and fleishig so we didn’t eat (9 days) and were starving. Mariashi sent food to JFK for me so I got to eat dinner before boarding to Montreal. Came home and went to sleep after not having slept for 26 hours.

What a trip!