Ludmilla

Here's some advice for those who might be considering an extended stay in Moscow. Don't bring any clothes you can't squeeze out in the sink at night. Seriously. Learn from my experience.

Ludmilla is one of the many women upstairs who work for KinoTraffic. There's also the odd dude but they mostly sit around waiting to do whatever the women tell them. Ludmilla has hair of a color that I can't quite pin down. But she seems to be the one assigned to help us out the most. She has no English skills whatsoever but she gets a kick out of my furtive attempts at Russian. For some reason she finds me very amusing but I don't know why because I have no idea what she's saying. She's also an effective blur of competence. Just gets everything done, done well, and done quick.

Which brings us back to the clothes thing. I have these five shirts and a smoke encrusted sweater that I needed dry cleaned. Don't get me started on the whole dry cleaning thing. Whoever heard of clothes you can't wash yourself? Really. Give it a think. If you can't wash your clothes yourself, if you have to pay someone to do it, then aren't you really just renting your clothes? What a racket.

So I've been working like a coal miner to get someone to point me in the direction of a dry cleaner. But dry cleaners are a rarity here. I pointedly stuffed my shirts and sweater into a grocery bag and brought them into work so that everyone can see them each and every time they come in the door. Finally I got the call; it's time to go to the dry cleaners. Ludmilla comes down armed with maps printed off the internet. I don my coat and we get in a car being driven by one of the dudes-in-waiting from upstairs.


So off we go through the traffic-clogged Moscow streets until we finally arrive at a small storefront.


Inside begins what appears to be the greatest negotiation since the Dayton Accords. Every shirt is thoroughly examined. Everything is documented in extremis. All I can do is stand by while Ludmilla and the counter woman discuss the situation. For the love of god it's just five shirts and a smoke encrusted sweater!


Then there was the paperwork. Closing a loan isn't this complex. I don't know what was being written but a shirt would be examined then a voluminous note was made, fully annotated and cross-referenced to a separate document.


Here you have to pay in advance. It's not like in the States where you can just throw your shirts out the window of a moving car and someone will dry clean them for you in good faith. After a lot of punching on a calculator, Ludmilla spun it around for me to see. 1875. At first I thought I was looking at the date of the coronation of Nicholas I. But no, this was Roubles. Roubles! That's $75!

I counted it out and handed it over. As the counter woman punched away on her register long enough to have written a modestly-scaled Russian novel, I picked up one of the store's brochures. Lots of images of wrestling polar bears.


Apparently for $75 my shirts are going to be airlifted to the Arctic Circle where they'll be given to specially-trained polar bears that'll tussle over my clothes until they're clean.