The Brin family lived in a three-room apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother.[9] Brin told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted", but Brin only picked up the details years later after they had settled in the United States. In 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, Michael Brin announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. "We cannot stay here any more", he told his wife and mother. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were not 'monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave."[9]