dacha, schmacha

Last Tuesday, much to our delight, the pile of excess junk in our apartment was finally removed. Hooray! No more oodles and gobs of lamps! To our disdain, however, we still haven’t received the rest of our stuff. We’re still waiting, not-so-patiently, for the day when everything will finally be settled. Sigh.

In the meantime, we decided to take a long-anticipated weekend at the dacha.
For those who are uninitiated, a dacha is pretty much a summer home/cabin in the woods. A dacha is more than just a place, however; it’s usually accompanied by a certain aura. Surrounded by nature, close to a body of water; slightly rustic, but still has some comfortable amenities; a place where you can feel completely away from the city- breathe some fresh air, take a sauna, get some sunshine, grill some fish. A dacha has an air of purity and relaxation.

At least, most dachas do. Ours did not.

This dacha is owned by our office. It was apparently included in a lease for another building, and so it was decided that it would be a nice little perk for employees to enjoy on weekends. This perk has been in place for some time, but recently it has been deemed a waste of money. First thing to go was the dacha keeper, a sweet little old lady who lives near the dacha and takes care of it during the week. You know, trims the shrubs, vacuums, makes sure things are in good working order. About 6 months ago, the office decided that paying her, oh, $50 a month or something ridiculous was an unnecessary expense. “Surely our employees can clean up after themselves!” Perhaps, but when you go up for the weekend to relax, are you really going to mow the lawn and caulk the cracks and dust the shelves? Um, no. Most of the Americans here have hired housekeepers for their real apartments. Who was the genius that thought on their day off they would suddenly feel like cleaning?

Armed with this information, we took a few precautions. We brought a set of sheets and our own towels, but we figured otherwise things would be pretty neat. It’s not like we work with total animals, right?

Wrong.

The dacha was a pit. First of all, the poor lawn is embarrassingly overgrown. The neighbors must be worried about their property value. It looks like white-trash central. Second, it seems that people can’t clean up after themselves in even the slightest capacity. Thank god we brought sheets, because when we went to the bedroom, we were greeted with hairy pillowcases on the bed. Ew. Thank god we brought flip-flops, since the floors were dingy. Yeesh. Thank god we didn’t plan on cooking while we were there, since even the “clean” dishes were slimy, and we didn’t see much in the way of cleaning materials. Actually, the lack of sponges and soap led us to throw away two glass baking pans. When we opened the fridge, we were greeted with these two pans, which were uncovered, had been in the fridge for god knows how long, and were filled with greasy-looking potatoes and watermelon. Oh, and a fork was still stuck in one of the potatoes. How thoughtful of the last person- making it easy for us to just dig right in! Mmm-mmm!! Lest we be blamed by the next visitors as the culprit, we decided to chuck the whole business before it came to life.

Besides this grossness, you can tell that what repairs were attempted were shoddily done. For example, someone tried to spruce it up several times by giving the inside a fresh coat of paint; however, they didn’t bother to scrape or sand first, so now there’s this thick, chunky layer of paint on the walls, making them look deformed, and where it’s cracked, all 9 layers are coming off at once, so an inch-thick piece of dingy paint curls away from bare wood underneath. Classy. Also classy were the piles of dead wasps on the windowsill in the bedroom.

These pictures don’t do it justice. I tried to be nice to the poor dacha by framing it nicely and using low lighting. I swear to you it was filthy. You can tell by looking at it that it used to be nice, which makes it even more depressing.

The front of the building…



The overgrown lawn...



The grass-stained, peeling-paint-covered back of the building...



The dingy living room.



Well, we said to ourselves, at the very least, we can get some fresh air, some sunshine, and a good meal. We decided to start with a good meal and fresh air, and began walking to some restaurants we saw on the drive in.

The fresh air was a joke. The walking trail, which leads to the beach, the restaurants, the occasional store and more dachas, was sandwiched between some trees and a highway. Which means you’re in the shade, but as you walk, you’re breathing in the fumes from diesel-engine, run-down, non-emission-standards cars and trucks. Greeeeaaaat. As for the good food, the restaurants were extremely pricey and didn’t have anything more than standard cheap bistro fare. No fresh fish? We’re 10 feet from the Gulf of Finland! C’mon! We’d soon learn why there’s no fresh fish. First, though, we found an affordable place and had a mediocre meal, and decided that for dinner that evening, we’d save money by getting a frozen pizza. We bought one and a couple beers from a produkti and headed back to put them in the fridge.

All is not yet lost, we told ourselves at this point. There’s still the beach. We’ll wade a little bit, sit in the sun and read a book. We gathered up our beach blankets, some reading material, and headed toward the beach. As we walked along the trail to the beach, breathing in the pollution, we couldn’t wait for that fresh sea air. We saw the beach getting nearer…



And took a deeeeep breath of.... RAW SEWAGE!!! Mmmm!!

It was then that we looked to our right…



and our left.



Apparently locals don’t take any better care of their surroundings than Americans. Well, we thought, okay, it will get better as we get closer to the water. We pressed on, and… nope. It wasn’t the trash that stank. It was the WATER. The lime-green foam washing up on the beach was all the confirmation we needed. My god, how polluted can the Gulf of Finland be? Apparently, really, really polluted. With a deep sigh, we trudged through the mockingly white sands back to the exhaust-ridden walking path.

On the walk back we did encounter a small bit of nature that hadn’t been destroyed somehow. First we came across a hyper-color caterpillar on the trail. I’m wondering if we found some new species of caterpillar made technicolor by hanging out near the filthy gulf too long.



Also, since the air is moist from being next to the gulf, there were a ton of snails around. We had a good time watching them slime up the foliage.





And, at least we still had the sauna. It seemed to be the one place in the whole dacha that hadn’t been destroyed somehow. Probably because, by their very nature, saunas are clean, which means that the dacha’s previous visitors stayed far, far away. We also had a working oven, frozen pizza, a TV, VCR, and a very bizarre selection of videos left by past vacationers. We took a steamy sauna, then settled into to pizza, beer, and Home Improvement reruns, complete with 15-year-old commercials. Good times.

We left the dacha in better shape than we found it. Besides throwing out the health hazards in the kitchen, we washed the sheets and towels so they wouldn’t be hairy for the next people. There wasn’t much else we could do. Rather, there was MUCH more that could have been done, but it would have been futile. As it turns out, the office has decided that renting the place at all is too much of a perk for its employees, so after the lease runs out this fall, it will return to the hands of its owners, who have a LOT of work on their hands. Guess that means no more drunken revelry for our coworkers; they’ll have to confine their filth to just one place. As for us, we’re not sad about seeing it go; only sad that we won’t have, and apparently never truly did have, a place to just get some fresh air.