2005 At A Glance

Jan & Gerry

January

We started the year in New Jersey, profiting from the hospitality of old friends while we worked on replacing the second of our two stolen notebooks and completing the process of sorting out our financial affairs. We got to know winter weather again in New Jersey with deep snowdrifts welcoming us back from Monmouth County to Jersey City. And we worked on finding somewhere to stay after leaving New Jersey and before getting to Paris, where we were committed to arriving in the last week of March. Our choice was Berlin, where we rented a half-furnished apartment from a German-American lawyer.

February

Our first month in Berlin and we have to spend a few days at flea-markets to equip the kitchen and at discount furniture stores to buy bed linen so that we can have guests. Fortunately there is a sofa bed in addition to the bed in the bedroom. We have two sets of guests from Switzerland and Germany and suffer from the temperature which permanently hovers around freezing. That's not terribly cold, but alas our clothing isn't really up to the task and so we just wear everything we own whenever we go outside!

March

We have our third and last set of house guests, from England this time, and are disappointed that the weather isn't warming up at all. By now we have visited almost all of the city's museums and think they are superb. We are regular visitors to the Gemaelde Galerie's free Thursday nights. Jan is getting a good refresher course in German while Gerry is struggling to get his German studies off the ground. We both regret that our apartment does not include a TV and we dare not risk buying a second-hand one because of uncertainty about antenna connections. Having the landlord on the other side of the world has proved difficult.
On March 23, we decamped to Paris to stay in our friend Veronica's apartment. Her apartment is where our world travel odyssey began back in June of 1999 so we are delighted to be back in familiar surroundings.

April

What could be more exciting than April in Paris? In spite of cool, rainy weather, we would say nothing. We had guests from London and Germany and found and lost an old friend from Nancy days. We explored parks and gardens and got frustrated at the impossibility of getting broadband internet installed in spite of massive ad campaigns from several companies promising just that. We managed it in the end, but our success was only partial and unfortunately we had to leave a couple of loose ends that Veronica very kindly tied up for us.

May

The weather was getting warmer and we had more guests from London and Darlington and spent lots of time watching the demise of one pope and the election of another, and followed closely the campaigns for and against the European Constitution. We attended meetings big and small, the biggest was at the Palais des Sports.

June

Our last month and we continued our exploration of political Paris, attending seminars on economics and politics wherever we could find them. We also visited a couple of trade fairs on the edge of Paris and bought tickets to and attended the French Open Tennis tournament at Rolland Garros stadium. Mid-way through the month we started wondering where we should go after Paris. On a trip to Sciences-Po we found an ad for an apartment in Moscow. We contacted the poster and in two weeks with his help, we managed to make all the arrangements for visa, flight, and handover of keys, the latter happening on our very last day in Paris.

July

We spend our first week in Darlington, catching up with Jan's family and then on July 6th take a night bus from Darlington to London and cross London by underground to get to Heathrow about an hour before the three suicide bombers wreak their havoc. Had we stopped to eat breakfast en route, we might have been caught in the tragedy. Moscow is an adventure. Jan's Russian makes leaps and bounds but it is still way below what is needed to really find our way around easily. We find Dom Knigi (House of Books) and Jan starts loading up on paper and audio books so that she can continue her Russian studies even when she leaves. We visit Red Square and Saint Basil's, the Kremlin and the Tretyakov Gallery, and of course the Pushkin Fine Arts Gallery. So much to see!

August

We visit lots of churches and monasteries and royal parks and gardens in and around the city. We are afficionados now of the Russian metro and the bus and trolley system and are constantly surprised at the high cost of food and drink in Moscow even after finding the giant Nash hypermarket. We buy lots of fresh fruit from street vendors, mainly elderly women selling what must be produce from their own garden plots. Best are the blackcurrants (chorni smarodini) that we eat with cereal like blueberries.

September

Our landlord isn't due back until Sept. 10 and he kindly lets us stay on a few days to compensate for the first week of July that we missed. We are getting ready for a leap into the unknown. The few people we have talked to about travelling around Russia have been very negative. How will we manage? We have the LP guide book, so how hard can it be? Hard, but not too hard. Jan's Russian is getting better and we always find somewhere acceptable to stay. The Vladimir Hotel in Vladimir was old-style with bathroom across the hall, but they gave a great breakfast. In Yaroslavl some of the hotels in LP had disappeared, others were full, but a friendly clerk took pity on Jan and called another hotel and made a reservation. We had an adventure to find it, but when we did we had a very nice room in a 4-room "block" that shared a bathroom and toilet. It seemed to be frequented by teachers and students, was spotlessly clean, and once they got over the shock of dealing with foreigners, very friendly. And last but not least was St. Petersburg where we ended up staying in a so-called mini-hotel: a room in a private apartment. It wasn't the nicest room we had had, but we really liked the fact of getting to know Russians and seeing how they lived and getting to talk to them about life in Russia. And of course we saw all the sites of St. Petersburg. A wonderful city!

October

While still in Moscow we had arranged to rent an apartment in Athens for four months. We made a flew from Moscow to Geneva to London and made a brief stopover so that we could get from Moscow to Athens inexpensively by Easy Jet. We bought return tickets but in the end through away the return tickets. We had guests from London and swam in the Saronic Gulf and made our first visits to the Acropolis and the archeological museum. We got dial-up access in the apartment and got familiar with our French supermarket down the street.

November

The weather is still warm for most of the month — too cold to swim but plenty warm enough to eat lunch and dinner on our terrace. We are enjoying having access to all the great Greek olives, feta cheese, tzatziki sauce, and are still getting great fruit in the markets including some fresh figs and persimmons. We do much of our vegetable shopping in a big street market about three blocks from our house.

December

The cold weather hits and Jan buys a warm bathrobe to help keep out the chills. The city is being bedecked with lights and there is lots of Christmas paraphernalia around. We are keeping up with world news via CNN and TV5Monde. We also listen to AIR — Athens International Radio, which re-broadcasts the BBC World Service for much of the day.