Dubinin's out of Dubinin Dark

The traffic jam in Moscow is bad. The metro is good, but crowded. I read somewhere that the Moscow metro transports 9 million people every day. 

When working in Moscow, we often stay in a 4-star Marriott hotel just a five minute walk from the office. Then we avoid both the traffic jam and the metro-crowds.

At 8 o'clock in the morning, we meet the rush outside of the railway station. Everybody appear to be going the opposite way. Then we cross under the street, through a tunnel with small underground shops, offering newspapers and tooth paste and matryoshkas (the Russian nested wooden dolls).

Every morning the same guy is advertising cheep hostels, the same man sitting on a chair playing accordion, and the same old peg-legged woman is begging for money.

Fashion-flashing women and designer-suit men are hurrying to the law firms and merchant banks.

Moscow has become a modern city in good and bad. The middle-class is growing. The rich are richer and the poor are poorer than they used to be in the Soviet days.

We work long days, and then walk the same way back to the hotel at night.

We often stop by at Dubinin Restaurant to get some food. Up the stairs to the 2nd floor, smokers to the left, non -smokers to the right. TV screens on the walls show soccer games or hockey from KHL (the Russian equivalent of NHL)

Dubinin has become like our regular place. They serve some really good sausages; Dubinin's Meter if you're really hungry, and Munich sausage with sauerkraut. To drink, we order Dubinin's Dark Beer, served in a 1.5 liter jug or a 0.5 liter mug. Very good.

Last week they were out of Dubinin Dark. Sold out. Waiting for the next batch from the brewery. Fortunately there are alternatives, such as Cernovar (dark of course). The Checks know how to make beer too >:)

(I took the picture above on a sunny morning on the way to the office last week. Dubinin Restaurant is the opposite way; behind my back)

Tipping the maid

Last week, in San Antonio, I was sitting in a restaurant by the River Walk with some friends. We were about to pay our bill, and discussed the tips. We're not used to tipping where I come from. For most types of services, it's all included.

I learnt about tipping when we lived in Colorado. You should tip about anyone who provides you a service; waiters, taxi drivers, hair dressers, and room maids (but not room mates). I reminded my friends that they should tip the maid before checking out of the hotel (some of them where leaving the next day).

(In a fair world people like me would be paid less, and the maids would be paid more. I know this sounds like a socialist thing to say, and I guess I'm kind of socialist at heart, at least in theory, and sometimes I even try to practice.)

The maids are doing a nasty job cleaning our rooms, and they don't get much paid for it. I know, because one of them once told me. This happened many years ago in New Orleans, before Katarina destroyed the city.

I stayed in Hotel Monteleone, an old hotel with a historic atmosphere in the French Quarter. One day I returned to my room to pick up some stuff I had forgotten, and I came in while the maid was cleaning my room. She asked where I came from (I'm speaking English with an accent), and then we had the conversation going. She was a cute Afro-American girl, grown up in New Orleans. She had two little kids, and was totally relying on tips to make enough money to keep it going. Her salary was less than $5 per hour (she said).

In the morning the day before I left, I met her in the corridor outside my room. She told me that she had her day off the next day, which was my checkout day (she probably new from her room list). It was a discrete hint that I should leave her the tips one day early. Otherwise it would end up with a different maid.

So, this is what I did: I put $50 on the desk in my room, $10 for each day she had cleaned my room, and wrote on a note that it was her tips (she was a very cute girl). When I came back to my room that night, there was a box wrapped in gift paper on my bed, and a card signed "Best Wishes, Your Maid".

I unwrapped the parcel. In the box there was a small ceramic bathtub with the hotel's logo. She had stolen it in the hotel's stock of bathroom accessories. I brought the bathtub back home, and had it for many years in my office, with pens and pencils in it.

Now the bathtub is lost and gone. I don't know where, but I'm sure I'll book in at Hotel Monteleone the next time I make it to New Orleans >:)

(The picture above has nothing to do with the story above, which took place before the advent of digital cameras. However, New Orleans and Austin both reminds me of great live music, jazz and blues, respectively. The picture was taken by a friend of mine, some years ago, when we happened to spend a night on 6th Street in Austin, Texas.)

Stolen from Hot Nights Hotel

Tonight I found one of these cups in my kitchen, one with a company logo, stolen. I used to have several, when I was younger, cups and gadgets with logos; Schipol Restaurants, Hotel Monteleone, Hotel Metropol, Air Dolomiti. I'm not the only one, that's a nice excuse. It's popular to steel these kind of things, to keep as a souvenir from a nice vacation, a rewarding business trip, a hot night in the hotel room with a local beauty. Once I stayed in a hotel that had a cool twist to it. On the cups it was printed, in addition to the hotel logo; "Stolen from Hot Nights Hotel"