Sorry for the Group Email

LOCATION: Pretty good. About five minutes from the nearest Metro and shopping centre. The mall has an internet café and a supermarket in the basement. I wouldn’t spend too much time in the surrounding area on my own at night, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe. Rather, I am a wimp.

INTERNET: The administrator’s office doesn’t have a computer, so there’s not much chance of anything else. The café in the same building has wifi, but you need to buy a card from somewhere else to get it to work. There’s an internet café in the shopping centre, which will also provide you with ad hoc wireless access for 50 rubles.

CLEAN? Yes. The shared toilets, as ever, are hit and miss, depending on who drank what the night before.

TURN DOWN SERVICE? No. Our room was untouched in two days. Luckily we’re clean-living folk.

TOWELS? Yes. One hand-towel and one shower towel.

TV? Yes, a 14in effort that may in fact date from Stalin’s time. Russian TV, luckily, is nothing special, unless you’re a particular fan of dubbed episodes of South Park.

SECURE? A tricky one, this. On the one hand, no-one got robbed. On the other, the building is shared with a number of offices, which means random people are coming and going all the time. The rooms lock, and there are a number of places to hide bags and so on, so you’d be an unlucky victim of chance to get robbed. You should, of course, keep anything you can’t bear to lose with you.

FRIENDLY? Pretty much. They warm up as you go. We were allowed to use the office phone, for instance, when we had to phone our bank up to try to get them to stop messing us around.

WARM? Yes.

COMFORTABLE? Yes. Surprisingly so, in fact.

ENGLISH SPOKEN? Not really. You’ll be doing well to squeeze more than a few words in English from anyone who works there. This will work wonders for your efforts in Russian, besides being a good chance to practice your mime skills.

BREAKFAST? Yes. For free, no less. I personally steered clear of the mystery meat and grey eggs, but others ate them to no ill-effect. There was some kind of fruit pie every morning and plenty of fromage frais-style things to keep you going.

VERDICT: A good place to stay. There’s nothing spectacular about it, but it’s comfortable, and the people are friendly once they get going. Those concerned about security should bring their own padlocks or chains.