Our New Apartment

On February 10 we moved to a new apartment. It is located about 1 mile from our old apartment. Our old apartment was a typical Russian apartment consisting of a small kitchen a living room and a bedroom. In Russia this would be called a two room apartment as the kitchen is not counted. We moved to a three room apartment and now have a small 10’ x 10’ room which we are using for an office/study. We have a place to keep a computer set up all the time, a desk and a real bookcase. The apartment is nice and sunny and has windows on both sides of the apartment, so that in the summer we will have a cross breeze. We also have full use of the small balcony, something we did not have at the old apartment because the owner had it full of his stored junk.

We liked our old neighborhood. For Russia it was reasonably clean and well kept. The two maintenance people worked hard at keeping trash picked up and our block was the only one that never had snow accumulate on the walks. Every morning you would see the two maintenance people (a man and a woman in their 50’s) shoveling the driveways and walks, and cleaning up trash. We had built some good relationships with several local people and will miss seeing the grannies who sell produce and flowers outside the building in the summer. The old flat was also on a convenient bus route where we could easily catch buses to nearly every area of the city.

The new apartment is in a pretty decent neighborhood but the view is not as good and the maintenance people don’t keep the area so clean. We need to walk several blocks to catch a bus and we don’t have as many options for bus routes. Despite this we are happy with the move. We are pleased that our landlord is a believer. We enjoy having the extra room and for some reason our two cats seem more relaxed in this apartment. We can walk to a small grocery store only one block away, and there are three supermarkets, and two small malls within three blocks of our apartment.

We hope to host a Sunday worship service here every other week in the near future as we work toward an official church plant in Nizhny Novgorod.