The Dorm at Tyepli Stan

Now that I’ve moved to a third dorm here, it made me think about the previous ones. It's funny how universities here are so international, but not Valencia or Amsterdam-like international. It looks like Moscow is a different hub. During the two and a half years I've spent in Russia, I've lived together with people from at least ten different places in Africa, Australia and mostly Asia.

I moved in the dorm I've just left when I got transferred from the Peoples' Friendship University to MGIMO in September 2008.

At first I hated it, and I was scared to death by my roommate. She was a very traditional girl from Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a prude and a bore. The other room was shared by two Kirgiz girls, and a Mongolian spending her senior year at MGIMO. She hated everyone except me for some reason. She desperately wanted to leave Moscow for Tokyo where she was planning to get a masters degree at the United Nations University.

Slowly I got used to it. The building was in quite bad condition, but the neighborhood was as green as it can be in Moscow and there was a park nearby where I could go jogging. Also, another Hungarian girl lived there already, and we fast became very close friends during the first couple of months of my stay. We were both suffering badly from trying to keep up with the rest in our groups (she studies law, I study political science), we would stay up until 2, 3, 4 a.m. in the morning or not sleep at all, waking up each other from time to time when one of us fell asleep on the kitchen table. We didn’t have any energy left to think about the low life standards we’d got used to without even noticing.

The girls from Bishkek amazed me with their stories from Kirgizia; it was an entirely different world they were telling me about. They told me, for example, that in most families custom is that grandmothers and other elderly women gather in front of the door of freshly married couples’ new home and they listen all night long to get proof that everything happens that night that should. Yet these girls were so full of life that whatever they told me they did so with a mischievous smile, which made me feel they were not so different from me after all.

When they understood that I must have already had sex in my life, they couldn’t hide their curiosity. They had dozens of questions, clearly they couldn’t wait to try it but they feared it more than anything. 
One of them seemed particularly interested, telling me how wonderful it must be and how brave I was, and she blushed. In a couple of days she came up to me saying she had to tell me something in private and I learnt that she had lost her virginity a couple of months before. She told me in tears that this was the greatest shame she could think of and to anything I said her answer was that I couldn’t understand the way people thought in her country. Next time I saw her, she was standing on the corridor flirtatiously talking to a group of Kazakh guys, which made my discomfort ease a little.

I got used to the Tajik girl too. She turned out to be so simple it entertained me. Also, she had skills that none of my friends or acquaintances even. She would bake bread at home, she could clean things no one would even want to even look at, and when there was a Muslim holiday she invited her friends over and she put a feast together that made me forget I was in a dorm. When she noticed that her hair began to fall, she started to wash her hair two days a week with a mixture of onions and raw eggs. 
She told me there was a guy she liked but since she didn't like his mother, she didn't want to go out with him. After all, in Tajikistan, once you get married, you have to live with your husband's family.

Also, sharing a room means sharing your privacy with someone, and once you shared it, you feel attached to the other, too. And once she confessed to me that I was her closest friend in Moscow - vanity is capable of incredible things.


This is where I made my very first Russian friend too. We agreed we would to move to the other, better dorm together, so that we could share a room. I got the permission at the university immediately, so I moved in right away. Two weeks later her application was rejected, so here I am with a stranger again. She's Korean, she seems fine, but I haven't quite decided yet if I have the energy to get to like her.