The Dude in the Kitchen

Back in May '07, I visited a friend of mine who moved from Holland to Georgia 5 months earlier. At the time he was living in a not-so-chique typical run-down Soviet style apartment on Tamarashvili, a busy street in Saburtalo (a district of Tbilisi). There were more needles than people on the street there. But as usual in the Georgian capital, it was a rather relaxed scene and the junkies didn't pop out until after nightfall.

In that crappy apartment, in a run-down and patched-up Georgian kitchen stood an Orsk. A What? An Orsk. An old Soviet brand of refrigerators. My friend told me when he first moved in, it creeped him out as the thing seemed to come alive at night. The thing in that kitchen must have been at least 30 years old. But it worked.



In fact, it did more than that. The thing seemed to be alive. It made noises, it moved around a bit and it experienced mood swings (especially after a power cut). Sitting outside on the balcony, you would hear some sort of grunting sound coming from the kitchen. Checking up the thing seemed to have moved a few centimetres.

Orsk was also an insomniac. In the middle of the night, he could make a little jump up in the air and shake. The shaking movement was felt throughout the apartment, transported by the Soviet-quality wooden floors.

In any case, the darn thing was quickly named "the dude in the kitchen".