01-III-1978.
In Kiev. Having still lots of rubles, we threw a party, in our room, as it's at the far end of the hall. Had a lot of that champagne. At some point, the dežurni for the floor came to calm us down, the guests are complaining about the noise. Who's complaining, this half of the hall is just us. He calmed down when he got some twenty rubles in his pocket, even smiled. Eh, smiled, he was friends with us right on the spot.
waiting in the hotel lobby, all packed up, waiting for the shuttle bus to get home. One guy sells his boots at the, like, last minute, for dollars, with the buyer taking him in a cab to somewhere nearby to buy shoes to go home in. While waiting for someone else we see the staff carry a bedsheet full of bottles of Beloe polusuhoje sovjetskoe šampanskoje vino (white halfdry soviet champagne wine) from our room. That was some party we had last night.
The weather is quite foggy. Kiev is south enough for this to be thaw time. The shuttle bus is not coming, we're getting info that the airport is closed until the fog lifts, take your room keys and go back to unpack. The stay here is courtesy of JAT.
Now there's a problem - we're supposed to stay another day, and we spent our last rubles. Well, that's easily solved, we all still have something to sell. I had the extra wide-legged jeans I bought in Germany last summer, and brought some old old jeans to wrap the vodka so the bottle doesn't break in transport. Well, vodka will go, I'll take the old jeans on me, and these wide jeans will go... for 125 rubles. Wow. Rich again. These guys didn't care much about the price - they are taking the risk when they leave the hotel with the goods, that's when it becomes contraband, and for that risk they'll charge their end customer handsomely, perhaps double. A beginner engineer downtown would have 120 ru/month; in Syberia he'd have 600, but nothing to spend them on. So if the visible market wasn't free of state directives, the invisible market worked.
The state circus, with its big fancy building, was just visible down the street, and some folks went there. The rest of us mostly rambled around the rooms, drank (more slowly this time, who knows how long will this last). I actually don't remember much of this day and the next.
Mentions: dežurni, in serbian