Heat

remember traveling in Russia with my husband in 2000. We flew into Irkutsk from Moscow, were lucky we were able to land because of cloud cover, and promptly took the bus to Listyanka (probably misspelling, it's been awhile). It was either early June. From Irkutsk, we took the train to Ulan Ude where we would spend a couple of days and then train it through Ulaan Baator in Mongolia and on into Beijing. It was a very interesting trip. We had jackets but we were almost always chilly. Yes, it was Siberia but we had thought, June, - got to be warm. In Ulan Ude, we learned about the heating system of former Soviet towns. No one has their own furnace. All the heat is controlled through a central system and pumps the hot water to homes all over the city. And because it is a central system, it has to be turned of and shut off by one monitoring place and they used the calendar system to do so, meaning that the system had been shut off in April. Surely June is definitely warm enough NOT to need heating. So in Ulan Ude, Siberia, Russia, in June, we had no hot water, no heat, and it was dang blinking cold! We had to heat water on the stove, put it in a pan, run into the shower and dump it on ourselves, soap up with the other one of us was busy heating some rinse water. And forgot about just sitting in the apartment at night to read or talk or watch Russian TV. By 6:30 we were in the bed and snuggling under the covers in hopes of sharing our body heat and keeping warm.Now I am back in a former Soviet republic and it is late October and now I have the opposite problem. The heat is back. This is a studio apartment and there are two heaters. Both are running at full blast. Heat was turned on for the city on October 15 and will go until April 15. I suppose for many, it is convenient to know when you will have heat and when you won't whether you need it or not. Both of my heaters have been painted numerous times so that any controls there might have been to regulate the heat are long since painted inoperable. It's full blast or nothing. So during the day if I am here, I sit with both windows wide open to cool the place. When I come in after a tour, I start shedding my jacket as soon as I enter the sauna that is my studio apartment. When I go to bed at night, it is fairly cool outside and cool in the apartment, so I shut the windows then have to get up again in the early morning hours to open them again. I believe this problem will probably chase me throughout my stay in the Ukraine. Now that I think about it, it is a good thing I am in an apartment rather than a hotel because in a hotel, I might not have the option of opening a window. Always have to find the positive side.