sofasurfers

“When you come out of the Metro, you’ll see a supermarket, then we are house 36…Please be there at 8am as I have a very hard day.”

And so these were our instructions for our second Moscow couch. Simple, surely…

Ha - of course not. Who could foresee how vague this might be until arriving there… Until too late.

So, metro - check. Supermarket - check. Time check: 8.10 (small whoops). But House 36? House even? We are entirely surrounded by row upon row of dirty white Soviet housing blocks, all set back 100m on both sides of an uncrossable dual carriageway. We trawl up and down, squint this way and that. Not a single house number to talk of. We text our host for another clue. The blocks are so far off the road, the ground floor isn’t visible and we don’t know which side of the road we’re supposed to be on. It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Laden with all those rocks in our rucksacks, we quickly surrender to our £1.60/minute call charges and call the host - it’s now 8.45 (big whoops). He gives us our next instructions (but isn’t that the sound of a man freshly woken? No wonder no response to our text). Finally we make it into his 7th floor apartment where he at first seems surprised that it took us so long to find his place, only then to recount a much-loved Russian film by the director Ryazonov, with a title that seems to translate roughly as The Joke of Your Life, where a drunk Russian mistakes a Soviet flat in St Petersburg for his own Moscow pad, as the addresses coincided, the appearances coincided, and even the interiors coincided - this mistaken identity as a result of Soviet homogeneity is something of a national joke, apparently. And today, it’s on us. (FB)