sofasurfers

So why don’t we see many people reading newspapers in Russia? “The most common news in Russia is rumour,” says Polly. “During the Soviet Union, people couldn’t get information, so the only way was through rumours. The most common thing was to meet in the kitchen and talk about politics where you’d be absolutely sure that no one would go to the government and tell them. It still exists now – people don’t want their brain to be – what’s the word? - pressed?”

Subtitle: Political Incorrectness is Perfectly Preserved in Russia

“I don’t like Turkish people – they’re lazy and stubborn”

“I don’t like Italians because the men stare at Russian women like we’re prostitutes”

“The warmer a country is, the more stupid the people are”

“The philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome were the last Greeks and Italians to do anything intelligent”

“Women shouldn’t carry heavy things – men should do this for them. It’s very unhealthy for women to carry things before they get pregnant”

“Women make bad drivers. They find it very difficult because they are able to do lots of things at once where men can only do one thing, so they find it easier to concentrate on the road”

Polly isn’t due to arrive until 5pm the day after we arrive, as she’s been on holiday with her parents in a “rather fashionable” hotel in Turkey. We spend the morning in an internet cafe, couchsearching in China, but Sasha and her friend Albina (really!) want us to get home just before 5pm to be part of the surprise – they’re blowing up orange balloons, slicing oranges into segments (orange being Polly’s favourite colour), and carpet-bombing a pack of Post-its onto Polly’s breakfast table into a shape of a giant… can it really be?! Surely not! “Da!” says Sasha, “It’s a ‘pennis’!” Err, why? “It’s our fantasy!” she giggles. We are all to sign it. Who is this girl, I wonder to myself, to get such a homecoming after just a two-week holiday? Yet another example of Russian open-heartedness? And the “fantasy”? Hello Ollie!!!

And so we wait for Polly… Eventually, a glossy black Range Rover with blacked-out windows pulls up outside her kitchen window – given that we are surfing in the smartest flat yet (think Malmaison hotel suite decked out in Ikea), albeit within a standard-issue Soviet building. My eyes lock onto the car in anticipation. Sure enough, out pops an impish girl wearing oversized, tomato-red Rayban Wayfarer-esque spectacles and looks up to her apartment – I wave to her, she waves back (ironic that we as her guests are here to welcome her home). Next, she’s back in her flat, all the girls are hysterically screaming and jumping up and down, the rat is scooped from its cage and positioned onto its accustomed spot on Polly’s shoulder, and The Polly Show begins – what is to be a three-hour soliloquy on Life as Polly. With a slide show and everything. Edited highlights next….

Latitude: 56 degrees North Longitude: 60 degrees East

As the train slows down coming into Ekaterinberg - the town where the last Tsar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and some 1,814km and 30 hours from Moscow – my heart speeds up. We’re due to meet Sasha. We know nothing about Sasha except that she doesn’t speak much English (her confirmation sms reads, “O, yeah. I,m meet your of course!”), she is about 20, and she is not a couchsurfer. She is the friend of Polly, our third Russian couchsurfing host who happens to be on holiday still. And – obviously – we have no idea what Sasha looks like. We scan the busy Friday platform for young Russian girls.

It’s a redundant task – immediately outside our carriage is a pretty young girl who could be none other than Sasha, on account of a pink, a yellow and a green balloon that she is coyly holding in the air. She sees us, we see her, and suddenly we all quite naturally find ourselves giggling together in a group hug. After a near-on physical wrestle between us and her over our bags in her insistence to help, plus a non-starter conversation about “Polly’s mother’s wife – her mother’s wife? Her mother’s wife? Da? Da?” and concomitant exchanges of quizzical looks, we head to the tram stop for the next leg, much sign language, dictionary (or “diary”) reference, and confused, yet eager communication…

As we’re packing up our possessions that have ricocheted around our host’s high-rise apartment, it occurs to me that, as a host now on his 14^th set of guests, Max must have something of a collection of objets oublies. “Ach yez, cluck cluck cluck,” he says, convulsing in laughter (as he is prone), “It’z like a muzeum here, cluck cluck cluck. I have towels, I have trousers, I have toozbrushes…. cluck cluck cluck.” Well, maybe we’ll bequeath something to the British wing –we say in jest, we hope.

Another thing that occurs to us is that it’s hard to be selfish as a couchsurfing guest. We are in a major hurry to leave Max’s place as there’s lots we have to do before we catch the Trans-Siberian Express to Ekaterinberg – like going to MacDonalds (for its free wifi, honest), buy a new camera (we didn’t break one, honest). But Max won’t let us go until he has burned a disc on his computer – he won’t say what it is.

Juzt 10, maybe 15 minutes, guys! And I can copy your photos?

But Max, we really can’t….Ok, sure - here’s our smart card.

Ollie and I exchange looks with bitten lips – it’s impossible to say no to someone who took a day off work to take us round Moscow but time is really tight and we are already late. ‘Yes’ is easier than ‘no’ in this instance. Finally, it’s finished, and Max presents us with a copy of Ryazonov’s Joke of Your Life film with English subtitles - the Russian film shown every new year about how easy it is to confuse one Soviet apartment block with another (a recurring theme for us, it turns out).

And, as we later discover, we have indeed bequeathed my microfibre towel and Ollie’s gel pack for cooling his broken leg to Max’s museum - happily if unwittingly traded for the film.

Is this another joke on us, or simply the extent of boundless Russian hospitality? Our host already has a permanent couchsurfer (his jobless friend), who presumably has first dibs on couches, so here we are, squeezed into the 7ftx7ft kitchen. See - it’s just us, sofabed and kitchen. Not an inch of floorspace for anything else. Apart from our host’s wall-to-wall smile in the morning (NB: we quickly learnt it’s the latter - cf joke vs hospitality). (FB)

And here - finally- is the evidence.

Go on - have a jolly good laugh

“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)

A new psychological syndrome has just been identified - Couchsurf Guilt Complex (CGC). Here are the symptoms:

- nagging sense of indebtedness to host for agreeing to mother us for three days for free with no contracted returning of favour

- vain and costly attempts to compensate for host’s troubles. This entails repeated purchases for each of her Random Acts of Kindness (book for her initially agreement, a meal for tolerating our two-hour imbecilic behaviour trying to buy our train tickets, flowers for electricity, and <insert suitably lovely gift here for having hosted us> - we depart for couches new tomorrow)

- near-starvation caused by our own martyr-ish refusal to help ourselves to host’s larder, despite her kind invitation. (On concluding that this behaviour was unnecessary and over-sensitive, a quick lesson was learnt when I helped myself to some liquid yoghurt only to find my body spontaneously propelling itself to the sink, in order to dispense of said, dead drink - ie fizzy and fermented)

Prescription: we’re thinking that perhaps some discreet diving down the back of hosts’ couches might be able to fund our guilt habit (FB)

And what of Ollie, you may wonder, and the ponytail putsch?
Bad news, I’m afraid - very bad news: despite the hair salon being a ladies’ salon, and despite Ollie having such luscious lady-hair, all he got was a wagging finger.
The campaign continues. (FB)

Minimally equipped with the Russian for please, thank you, yes and no, plus two able signing hands and a Russian hair magazine circa 2006, I went and got me my Moscow mullet. Well, mullet wouldn’t be exactly the right word, but it’s irresistible alliteration, and tis also true to say it’s longer at the back than at the front, and, I gather, pretty unfanciable. You want a picture?! Can’t have one.. yet - we’re still Photoshopping out my tears.

Of laughter. How exactly do you explain irrepressible smirks and stifled hysteria to your kindly stylist when in front of the mirror ‘aving a do? With a language barrier. I couldn’t obviously. It was all going so well until I was instructed to stick my head upsidedown for the blow dry - after which point, I was well and truly Russki-ed. We’re now off to roadtest it down the Bolshoi Circus. I’m hoping they’ll spot me in the crowd as one of them. Image coming soon in the next thrilling instalment… (FB)

Moscow, 11th October

Instructions… “Outside Tverskaya station, you will see the Pushkin statue. There are a couple of benches near the statue, that’s where I will be waiting for you…”

We have no idea quite what we’re expecting to find here (cf her profile pic of Lake Baikal), but at least we’re pretty conspicuous - fresh off the boat, berucksacked, bewildered… We arrive in the square (confession: no idea what Pushkin looks like). There are 20 or so random Russians hanging around. Eyes akimbo, we scan the horizon, and shrug. Then, out of nowhere Tanya appears… Now what?!

Fast forward to Sunday - it’s 6pm, we’ve been up for about five hours. We got through a bottle and a half of vodka and 25 new friends. We’d been whisked to a couchsurfing party, where the first four people we met had been made redundant and talked of travel, pastures new and doing the things they had always dreamed of but never dared to realise because there were jobs to do and mortgages to pay. In the climate of economic doom, one guy even had couchsurfing (on Ollie’s couch) third on his wishlist after seeking work and excitement in Kabul and Northern Iraq.

That’s what.
Vodka count: 1.5l