tweezers, starbucks and moscow: day one

I left my flat today for the first time since my arrival. I had to, really, because I had accidentally left my tweezers in London and it was a stark choice between either venturing out into a world of Cyrillic to find a replacement pair or growing my eyebrows out and eschewing the possibility of making friends here. So there I was, on a road, map in hand, and there it was.

Moscow. Wow. How often as a little girl did I dream of one day living in an enormous, noisy city full of traffic, militia and alienation where no-one understood a word I said, everything was written in code and every fourth woman on the street was tall and whorish? But years of hard work and arbitrary life choices later and finally, finally, here I am! It just goes to show, doesn’t it.

The map was in phonetic Russian and the street signs were Cyrillic and I had no brilliant ideas about where to start so I wandered about hopelessly for a while, stopping every so often to squint at street signs, side-stepping the Muscovites charging past me, looking from map to street sign and back to map, enunciating letters very slowly to myself and wandering around more or less in circles until I happened upon a Starbucks, felt a disappointing surge of pure joy, and skipped inside.

Dangerous amounts of sugar and cream and caffeine later, everything seemed wonderful. Sod the map, I thought, thrusting it back into my handbag with wild abandon. It’s not like it has an arrow on it labelled ‘shop that sells, amongst other things, tweezers’ – in fact, it’s totally incomprehensible and all it’s really telling me is that I’m in Moscow, and I have definitely come to terms with that fact now*. I’ll just walk! And look around! And maybe go into that clinical-looking, mint-green-coloured shop that is clearly a chemist! And yes I will inevitably be forced to mime plucking my eyebrows to a bemused member of staff, but I will embrace this deeply awkward and embarrassing encounter as a delightful quirk of my new life in Russia, and I’ll also be able to buy some toothpaste at the same time, and that will qualify today as a resounding success story.

Generally though, I think I might be facing the weirdest six months of my entire life. Just one day of relentless confusion and I’m totally exhausted. Philip gets here on Saturday, by which time I hope to have:

1. successfully navigated the metro system at least once;
2. befriended the daughter of an oligarch;
3. completed a week at work without offending or alienating anybody; and
4. found out where the supermarket is.
   

Although, realistically, I can probably strike off 1 and 4 right now.


*This is a lie.