Tuesday, 6 April — former Soviet office

This is a different kind of métro, boulot, dodo experience from any I’ve had before.

After waking up in my delightful plush hotel and having a perfect breakfast, I get picked up by the company driver (who speaks virtually no English, so I get to exercise the Russian a little) in a dented minivan, who proceeds to drive me out of the beautiful baroque pedestrian zone, through the iron curtain, and directly into the eastern bloc. Wow! He has to slow to a crawl at times to avoid wrecking the car in the huge potholes; some areas we pass look as though they’ve had recent experience with artillery or huge iron brickovores; drab, block-long, multistory slabs of former industrial power stand alongside building sites that look as though construction was temporarily halted in 1962.

The driver dodges a few last craters and pulls up next to one of the lesser monoliths — just slightly less industrial, it looks as though it might have been some kind of institute in the Ukrainian SSR — this is the office. The entrance is an unchained gap in a corrugated iron wall; he tells me I’m going upstairs, so in I go through the iron fence, up a few steps, and in through the front door. As I enter, a smiling old lady pops out of a doorway to make sure I’m for real; the broad concrete stairs are covered in concrete dust and lead up in a square spiral five floors. On the gravelly ground floor, between the iron handrail and the watchbabushka, stand an ATM and a coin-operated coffee machine.

Five flights up, and there’s a fabulous middle-aged woman wearing that same blue lab frock coat I’ve seen in the old movies; with a knowing and satisfied smirk on her face, she’s idly sweeping outside the rather flash and modern wooden door to the office itself. Beyond the door is a security turnstile, and beyond this the office manager is waiting; a lovely young woman who speaks great English and helps me with all the details of getting set up.

I share an office with a couple of other members of my team from the US; it’s a charmless rectangle that might have once housed a hospital bed. The view out the window is partly construction site, partly wrecking yard — I’m honestly not sure exactly what I’m looking at — against a backdrop of Brezhnev-era apartment blocks. But there’s WiFi and hard ethernet cable, the ping times to the California servers are acceptable, and the folks I came to work with are here, so we get to work. And they’re the nicest folks — always concerned that I have everything I need and making sure I’m taken care of.

We go out to lunch, which means walking past a huge building that looks almost abandoned but apparently still manufactures a few television sets, dodging the mudholes and loose cobblestones (only I seem to notice) until we approach a doorway with a little restaurant sign over it. We open the door and step from Soviet 1970 into, well, Soviet 1970 but now it’s a warm, almost cheery little dive with folks having lunch. The menu here is transmitted orally, so I go along with my host’s program and have borshch, a mixed green salad, and a delicious dish that is called something like “beaten meat” but is really a pork schnitzel with mashed potatoes. And a bottle of Georgian mineral water.

Well nourished, we go back out through the rainy sovietscape, climb the dusty concrete stairs, and get back to work. After a series of meetings, file transfers, edits, bug tracking, status conference calls back to the US and Asian offices, and other lively features of my work life, it’s time to call it a day.

I’m told that the view from the office is nicer nowadays than it used to be. The construction site is apparently a recent addition, replacing various smoking piles of tires and other features from a Simpsons cartoon hell scene.

The driver dodges more potholes, we pass back through the iron curtain, through the 9th arrondissement‘s twin, back through the beautiful old town, and back to my hotel — where the maids have turned down my bed, fluffed my feather pillows, and placed an exquisite chocolate truffle on my nightstand.

These contrasts are fabulous. Delicious.
Maintenant à dodo. À demain, chers lecteurs…
Da zaftra.