Water, Water Everywhere

Never a dull minute here in Peter (as the locals call it). This morning, I had two back-to-back meetings at the JDC office across town. When I got home around 3, I was thinking of grabbing a snack, relaxing a bit and changing into shul clothes. But alas, when I opened the door, I discovered that my apartment had something else in mind for me.

Our kitchen sink and its Soviet-era pipes decided to rebel. The sink was filled and overflowing with nasty water with small brown flaky chunks (yum!). The floor was quickly filling with water. I threw off my coat, shoes and socks, rolled up my pants and started bailing water into empty trash cans as quickly as I could. I threw down old towels to keep me from slipping on the wet floor. In the span of an hour, I had filled 6 buckets with water and dumped them into our tub to drain. Fortunately, our local JDC staff jumped into action when I called, sending over two plumbers from YESOD as well as our friendly security guy, Raf. It was an added bonus that they gave Matt a ride home, too. So Raf chatted with us in simple Russian, asking us about our trip to Israel, while our two resident plumbers went into action. Less than an hour later, the sink has been repaired, although the plumbers refused to say that it was "fixed." They said it was "better," but that it might happen again. Good thing it didn't decide to do this while we were away -- I can't even begin to imagine how gross that would have been!

Off to finish the clean up efforts before Shabbat begins. Shabbat shalom and happy Tu B'Shvat!