I liked to compare our apartments (it never occurred to me as an unusual thing to do for a child): who had a better floor plan, which layout worked best for which family. We never felt scared or uneasy about moving through the building without our parents, playing outside for hours with no supervision or making friends with other children spontaneously. There were many trips in a day between my place and hers, back and forth, for any reason whatsoever, often with the lifts out of order. My best friend lived in the very last apartment, number 108. Our neighbour interaction wasn’t limited to just our block, of course. It may be a relief, perhaps, that you don’t ever have to spend time with your neighbours, except for the polite greeting in the elevator as you travel together for a minute or two as Russians don’t really do small talk. The disadvantage (or for some, an entertaining circumstance) is, of course, that you have other people above, below and to the side of you and, whether you choose to or not, you get to learn about their hobbies (relentlessly practicing playing piano, badly), hygiene habits (running a bath before dinner time every Sunday), relationship ups and downs (passionate verbal declarations and dish breaking), and washing machine malfunction from up above you (when water starts to gush out of your electrical plugs). In a vertically composed building, I argued, if designed right, you are left with more void, more space around it for your eye to appreciate, more space to breathe. Yes, most of the time you would be looking at another apartment block or a commercial building, but generally not at a distance close enough to infringe on someone’s privacy. My argument was that in a multi-storey apartment you don’t see the neighbours when you look out of your windows, you don’t look at their house, what it contains, the soul crushing fence, and so on. My classmates and I compared an experience living in a multi-storey apartment block with living in a detached house. Recently I had a discussion in class while finishing my degree here at Ara. The neighbour who laughed loudly and somewhat uneasily before, much to my horror, going back to his place and shutting the door after I told him about the source of the burning smell (the kasha turned into liquid tar and filled the kitchen with smoke when I got home from school – Mum left the stove on that morning). The neighbour that would flood our apartment, hold late parties with loud music, but who surprisingly would offer an empathetic shoulder to cry on in a moment of need (when I ran out of our flat in socks sobbing after a fight with my brother). Then there was the neighbour my mother would borrow money from (always paying back and borrowing again). I once had, completely spontaneously, such a cup of tea with the consul at the Russian Embassy in Wellington). There were some my mother socialised with over cups of tea (in my country a cup of tea is an invitation to have a decent-sized meal and a heart to heart conversation about problems of life and political and/ or philosophical points of view. Growing up I learned about the different kinds of neighbours. It is a way of life and its description is difficult to condense into writing without applying the context of Russia’s political regime (what they used to refer to as the “practical socialism”) with no class separation between highly educated intelligentsia and working folk, for example. I couldn’t wait to grow up and see the world!Īs it’s a foreign concept to most New Zealanders, people here sometimes are curious about what it is like living in a dense apartment block. I loved it and hated it in equal measures. So there it stood, on a steep bank of one of the biggest rivers in the country, surrounded by forest, rolling hills and old huts, a mass produced tilt slab monstrosity, a Soviet era landmark. You could hear trains in the distance, but no other polluting noise. The sunsets were breathtaking, different every evening, with their rich and overly dramatic colours, yet the descending sun always brought comfort to the soul. We were fortunate: the view of the mighty Amur river out of our windows was spectacular in any season, even in winter (when the river froze over and you could walk to the other side on a calm day).
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