Tver's Trouble with Trash

One of the quirkiest adjustments that we have had to make since moving into our apartment is the lack of any trash disposal facilities within our building. Oftentimes, within the main corridor of an apartment complex is a trash chute which tenants can drop their trash down to be collected on a regular basis. Or, like many complexes in the States, sometimes there are dumpsters which can be used by the renters.

Well, in our circumstance, neither of these two options is given to us. When we first met our landlord, Nicholi, he told us that our building has no real trash disposal capabilities. Instead, he suggested, walk around the neighborhood and find people with trash cans and dump our trash in their can. Or, he mentioned, there is an open square directly adjacent to our building with lots of little trash cans which we can use to dump our trash.

To be honest, neither option was (is) very appealing. As I walked around our neighborhood there were three things I noticed: first, in all of the new apartment complexes (see the picture on the previous post “Tver Pics 2”) either are gated or they have their trash cans behind the building—I have yet to see a trash can available for use. Second, there is an old, extremely run down, abandoned house that has become a dumping ground for people within our neighborhood (probably some of our neighbors, in fact.) Third, on those desperate times that we had trash piling up and no place to put it, I would take some out to the square and deposit it into those small receptacles. Well, let me tell you, there is nothing quite so humbling as having all the people in the square watch you deposit trash into bins that we not made for such use. It was quite embarrassing to do….

…Thankfully, we found our answer to our trash dilemma. There is one street, actually a boulevard with a path running between the two one-way lanes, that has the monopoly on dumpsters. In all of our meanderings through Tver so far, I have yet to run into any other dumpsters; yet, on this street I counted 11 in a 3 block span. I don’t know how or why this is the case, but it is relatively close and only a block out of the way on our way to language school, so it has become our dumping ground of choice.