- Russians don't believe in indicating. If cars are entering a road or switching lanes they won't indicate. This causes trouble when I'm crossing the road to get to my Metro station
- Russians also believe in parking EVERYWHERE. Literally they park on the pavement, and will drive up onto the pavement and drive along till they find a good spot. They also park double width ways at the side of a road so that the road becomes a single track road. Instead of parallel parking they often park at diagonals to the pavement. It's quite funny to see some of the places they've parked and I'm going to start a photo album of Russian parking.
- Here in Russia in order to drive you need a license. But unlike the UK or US where you have to take lessons and then have a test and finally you pass, usually after failing once or twice, here you don't need to do any of that, you can just bribe your local police chief & pay for a license! As long as you have the permission from your local police chief - which has to be from your hometown, not where you're living at the moment, i.e. where you were born - then you can just pay the correct office and get issued a license. So you don't even need to actually have taken any lessons!!
- In all the shops & the supermarket when you go to the washing products you see a strange set up. Instead of like the West where hair products or body products are organized by brand, they organize them by actual product. So when I was looking for shampoo & conditioner the other day I panicked when all I could find was shampoo (шампунь). Turns out I had to walk along the shelves past washing up liquid & hair colorants and then I finally found conditioner. Weird. But it does have a logical explanation - cue the history lesson - in Soviet Russia they didn't have brands. They just had products. This meant that wherever you were in the СССР you always had the same thing, so the same sugar, same milk, same tea. It was always just "чай" (tea), "молоко" (milk) or "сахар" (sugar). There was no such thing as Yeo Valley or Duchy Originals milk, just milk. No Twinings, Lipton or PG Tips either! This Soviet legacy of no brands has somewhat transferred to modern Russia in that they organize most of their shelves by products and not by brand. To a Westerner this is utterly bewildering but I can understand where it's come from.
- Something I should have mentioned immediately when I arrived - Russians don't put milk in their tea! They drink a lot of tea and I just bought some cheap & delicious lemongrass tea but it's considered almost sinful to put milk in tea!
- There is an abundance of root vegetables here in Russia and a lot of the fruit & vegetables that are not from Россия are usually from countries that the UK would be unlikely to trade with.....just goes to show the difference in international relations & partnerships that Russia has!
- All television is state censored & controlled - this is because it is the most popular means of educating oneself to the news & daily happenings. Newspapers & Radio are somewhat censored but not as much as TV. This is because in Russia newspapers are expensive as are radios and so more people have access to televisions than papers or radios, thus it makes sense for the state to control this medium of mass communication strictly than to bother with others. What surprises me the most is that whilst the TV, Radio & Newspapers are all to some extent censored & controlled, Russia has made no attempts to control the internet. I have not yet found a site which I can't access here in Russia, unlike my friends studying in China who haven't been able to access Facebook for ages! Then again this boils down to the fact that Russia has an aging population & they're not highly computer friendly. Though, considering they have a youth generation who are increasingly being opened up to Western influence you'd think they'd want to watch out for stuff like the internet. Maybe by speculating I'm just fueling ideas for the Russian дума (parliament - the word is Duma from the verb думать (dumat) - to think!!)
- I've seen adverts on the subway trying to persuade women to have at least 3 children because the birth rate is so pants here in Russia and they're facing a population crisis (way more old people who are going to die soon and not enough young people). Basically the government pays generous subsidies to women who have at least 2 or 3 children and you get good social benefits. But this isn't because the government's a crazed socialist government (aka New Labour) it's because they actually have a genuine problem on their hands and so they're trying to solve it. I guess now that Russian women have seen the Western way (no babies or marriage for us, we want careers and such...) they've abandoned the traditional Russian family way of life! Shame really.
- Though when you do see children the parents are SO careful in the way they dress them. The children are always wrapped up warmly - most of them look like they're going skiing in their onesies. It's not about making the children into fashion statements like it is in the UK, they couldn't give a toss about that, it's about making sure the child is warm and protected. The idea of familial protection seems very important in Russia.
- On the subway when the train doors close it doesn't make a noise to warn you and there's no flashing light. It's like the Russians decided to test their people's reflexes & Spidey senses. "Mwahaha, we know when the doors will shut but you don't!" I don't like to run for trains or buses, I like to be cool and leisurely stroll onto them just as the doors are shutting but this way of acting doesn't really work out in Russia because of the fact that the trains don't give me a warning whether their shutting. It's really affecting me!
- Oh and yesterday on the subway to class I saw a woman carrying about 250 balloons and almost being blown away as a train pulled in. Also I had to get claustrophobically packed into a crowd of people trying to get up ONE escalator to change station. We were just shuffling towards the escalator in a sort of zombie like fashion. They had 4 escalators. 2 were working going down and pretty empty, one was going up and the other was "broken", they don't even have stairs or an elevator in the Russian Metro system. Illogical and totally unfriendly towards disabled people or parents with strollers.
I think I had a few others to tell but I can't remember them. I'm always digging out my Moleskine to write down things to remember like this and I'm also always giggling to myself about what I see so I think the Russians just think foreigners are weird.
