Brrrrrrrr.  I guess fall has arrived in Russia! The low last night was 44F, and highs for the next week are in the 50s, with overnight lows dropping into the 40s. It's also been raining hard for the last two days. The leaves are even beginning to change, which is happening about a month earlier than where I'm from. Fall is my favorite season, although fall in Russia is a short, rainy season that just doesn't compare to the glorious autumn of the northern US, replete with crunchy leaves, crisp days, cross country, apple cider, Indian corn, and Halloween. 

One of the traditions of fall is to shuffle to the thermostat while making some remark about the weather forecast and turn the heat on, knowing that once that step is taken, it will be a long time before the furnace is quiet and the windows are open again. Pretty soon the smell of overheated dust fills the house, and with it begins heating season.

Unfortunately, this tradition doesn't happen in Russia. My apartment doesn't have a thermostat, and I have no control over the heat in my place. In Vladimir, the heating season begins on October 1 and ends on May 1, regardless of the weather conditions. On that first day of October, hot water will begin to flow from the giant central heat plant out to all the apartment buildings, offices, and factories. Your apartment is warmed to whatever temperature the bureaucrats in the central heat plant think is appropriate, give or take the heat loss and broken pipes that are all too common. The radiators in my apartment are all directly piped into big risers that travel through all nine floors of the building. That means that if I were to want to turn the heat off in my room, all the other radiators on that riser would go cold as well. That's just a hypothetical, though, because there's not even a valve on the radiator to control it. 

Lately it's been pretty chilly in the apartment at night. Hopefully we come out of this cold snap for a little while before heating season starts. But once the heat is on, it is really on. Usually apartments are way too hot for my taste: The thermostat at my house in the US was always set to 68F during the day and to an arctic 60F at night, saving energy but making getting out of bed on winter mornings quite unappealing. The apartment building that I lived in with my host family was brand new and at the very edge of the city, so it didn't get all that hot, which was nice. But I'm sure that my current apartment building will be toasty. Think indoor temperatures of like 78F. That's why most Russians leave a window cracked in the winter. Talk about energy efficient.