Communist bloc(k)

A cold bright walk to work this morning. I've decided it's not the cold itself that I find odious about British weather, but the insidious dampness. Those ten degree drizzly grey days available all year round are a lot worse than this bright clear sub-zero weather.

Most aspects of life must have changed immeasurably here when the Cold War ended. More marked transformations than we could have experienced in Western Europe in recent decades.

One thing that has remained constant is the communist era tenement block. I've stayed in these in multiple eastern and south-eastern European cities and there are always similarities. Austere hallways and stairways, often with trip hazards or holes. A mixture of dilapidated and grand. Maybe a spare puffer jacket or a vase of fake flowers left behind in a cupboard. Usually someone called Bogdan on a mailbox or on hand to usher you in. Always cozy, with effective Cold War heating systems. About a hundred times more spacious than anything you could get in the UK for 250 Euros a month, where that price point doesn't exist.

The project apartment I'm staying at this time excels at central heating, leaving you rasping and the contents of your nose to flake away. Past the cloying cooked cabbage smell in the hallway it's toasty and the forest rangers who lodge there and I can grunt at each other as we shuffle past in the corridors. They can laugh at me for buying cereal and yogurt while they tuck into salty slanina, which I sampled today.

I may gingerly return to the yogurt over the fatback.