Categories: "Russian life"

Prices

June 26th, 2012

One of the things that is interesting, although difficult to make final comparisons on, is prices between the US and Russia. Here are a couple I have made today.

Item US Russia
New iPad 32 Gb 4G $729 $1100
Samsung Galaxy S III (unlocked, no contract) $800 $1000
Jack Daniel's Old No. 7, 750 ml $30 $56

That selection of items doubtless seems odd, but these are things I've given as gifts or considered giving as gifts.

Other things are much cheaper in Russia. For instance, unlimited internet on your iPad 3 you can get for about $8/month. Phone service is cheaper. Some food products are cheaper.

Here's why

July 4th, 2012

Russian students still have to learn handwriting.

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It reads:

Nail,

You've got a leak. It has flooded our ceiling. The stucco is falling off. It might be from the room opposite your main entry door.

Ildar

Nail and Ildar are Tatar names, not Russian names. Nice to finally know some of the neighbors' names, even if I've never seen them.

Alas, the note has been posted on the neighbor's door for over a week...

Click on the picture if you want a larger view.

Cold showers

July 8th, 2012

Dear Residents!

The hot water will be turned off in your building from 25 June 2012 through 15 July 2012 due to maintenance and pressure testing of the heating systems.

Yup, cold showers every day.

This is standard during the summer in Russia. During the winter it's a matter of life or death to have the hot water running, so summer is the only time you can really do maintenance.

Amazing student cafe

July 8th, 2012

Our students in Kazan this year will be in classrooms at the Institute of Economics, Management and Law. I inspected their newest building a couple weeks ago and mentioned that their student cafe was remarkable, done up as a cityscape of Singapore. My friend Lesley requested some pictures, so here they are. I'm afraid that the small photo format of this blog wouldn't do them justice, so I'm posting larger pictures here.

Iron (part one)

July 11th, 2012

This morning my iron threw globby black crud onto one of my favorite shirts. I had noticed the black stuff on day one here, and I had tried the iron out first on an old towel to see if the stuff would come off. For the first two weeks none did. All seemed well. But today I had to take action.

Probably I should have just called my mother and asked her what to do, but I'm in Russia so the idea didn't cross my mind till too late. I tried Google. Lots of different pieces of advice, and the most common ones seemed to center around white vinegar and salt, the latter presumably for its abrasive qualities. On my shelf there are two bottles of acetic acid, which we all know and love in salads as vinegar. 70% strength. Cool!

I pulled out two shot glasses. Poured the vinegar in one. Poured salt in the other. (That's right: my apartment came equipped with shot glasses. I'll save that for another entry.) I placed the whole assembly on a big plastic plate. I pulled out a spare toothbrush and began to scrub the bottom of the iron, alternating vinegar with vinegar salt. After ten minutes of rubbing it look like this.

That actually looked like an improvement, but it was taking way too long, so I pulled out a couple of sponges with nylon scrubbing surfaces and used them instead. It was immediately obvious that something was blackening the liquid, but the results were very, very slow. After an hour's scrubbing it looked like this.

Now that's a drastic improvement.

But let me tell you some of the things on the way that I had sort of not thought about. First off, the smell was nearly overwhelming. If you have ever run a bottle of vinegar through a coffee maker to de-lime it and been foolish enough to do it inside the house, you know what I'm talking about. Second, I have no idea whether the vinegar actually helped. Stuff sort of came off slowly when I used water as well, but of course the sponges still had leftover vinegar in them, so who knows. And did the salt particularly help? I have no idea.

And then something else should have crossed my mind. Normally when you buy vinegar—and I did not realize this when I started—the acetic acid concentration is 5-8%. This stuff was ten times as strong, which means I now have minor acid burns on my fingers, and the black stuff under my fingernails looks as if I have tried to dig myself barehanded out of an untimely burial. I even pulled out that dopey nail scrubber from my dopp kitt to decontaminate my fingers.