Riding the bus

The past month and a half or so I have been riding the bus to work every day. I used to ride TRAX all the time when I was still going to school, but hadn't taken public transportation much since then. So what do I think so far? I love it. I love having time to read in the morning on my way to work and then have time to unwind on the way home. By the time I get home I have practically forgotten about everything and can relax and do the things I need at home.

The big drawback is the number of routes/times that the bus runs close to my house. I'll admit that the public transportation in Utah is nothing compared to Russia. There is only one route that comes by my house (fortunately it's like 100 yards from the house), and it only runs twice a day (twice to downtown, twice back to my house). The good thing about that is it keeps me on a very tight schedule.


In terms of cost, it is $75 a month (at least in February) and that is for a pass on any bus. Honestly, I would spend about that same amount on gas, so not having to buy another car, it saves a lot of money (not to mention that my work reimburses me since they don't have to pay for a parking space for me). I plan to keep riding the bus even when I do have a car available for driving.

So what's the point of this post? Ride public transportation if you can. It's not only a great way to help the environment, but it's a good way to get to know people who live close by to you and also to have some extra time to read or unwind as the work day comes to an end. Highly recommended if you it's an option for you.

Putting it all together

The computer is basically done. I am finishing up getting all of our documents and pictures over to the new hard drive but that is just clean up work. I had a few people ask me why I was building a new computer and the main reason was because our old computer was almost dead. It took about 10 minutes to startup, and then if it sat for more than 10 minutes then you had to reboot the machine because it froze up. With all of the Photoshop and Sai Paint Tools stuff that my wife does, she couldn't handle it.

Also, I couldn't really just upgrade the system because the old machine was an eMachines system that was running on DDR Memory and didn't have any SATA support (that's right, we were on DDR and PATA. For the non-techies, that is old stuff.

I had never built my own system before by buying the parts, but I thought it would be a fun adventure. The most work was figuring out exactly what I needed. Putting the system together wasn't too much work. I put the system together following this step-by-step guide. Also, I did a lot of research on one of my favorite sites using this thread where people were very helpful in answering questions.

Here are a few of the pictures from my build (I am not going to give all the steps as you can find those using the guide that I posted above). I took these pictures with my cell phone so please forgive the quality:


The Parts






Putting it together












Booting Up




Overall, it took me about 4 hours to get everything together and running (the last hour to hour and a half was just setting up Windows). The system works great and so far there are no bugs. I will definitely be building all of my machines in the future because for the price you can get a way awesome machine. If anyone needs or wants help building their own machine then let me know and I would be more than happy to help you out. See the final build parts here.

Russia - What to eat

Like any foreign country, Russia has its own unique cuisine. Russian food seems to be a secret to a lot of people. The Russian diet is nothing special with lots of vegetables being consumed. Most people eat a lot of potatoes and macaroni. Most meals will contain one of the two. The one food that is at practically every meal, if not every meal, is bread. If you don't eat any bread then people think you're sick because bread is a must. I am not sure why but people ask me every time "Why aren't you eating any bread?" (Что хлеб не едите?). Following your meal, usually tea is served. I find it odd, but that is because we didn't do either of these things when I was growing up. Anyways, here are some of the common/unique foods of Russia.

Black Bread - The number one food of Russia (I think). Bread is served at basically every meal. Bread is made fresh daily and available at any store. Russian bread is much tastier then any of the bread sold in American stores.

Dried Fish - Fish is a common food for most Russians. A lot of times fish is boiled and put into soup. The other common way that fish is eaten is dried (as seen in this picture). The fish is dried with all of its scales and bones still in place and when you buy it, you remove the scales and eat the dried meat right off the bone. I've never tried it but I hear it is really tasty...

Piroshki - A pastry of sorts. It is like a bread or a roll with either potatoes, meat, or cabbage inside (they put other things inside as well but these are the 3 most common). My favorite is with potatoes but the others are pretty good as well. After putting the filling inside, the bread is either baked or fried. Fried are definitely my favorite.

Borsht - one of the most famous Russian soups. Borsht contains potatoes, meat (any type), cabbage, carrots, and beets which gives it the red color. Tastes best with sour cream. Soup in general is very common and made by some variant of boiling together meat and potatoes and some other vegetables.

Shashliki - Like a shishkabob. It is meat roasted over hot coals. These things are very tasty and found at small street vendors or when going on a picnic.

Pelmeni - Russian dumpling. A noodle type outer layer filled with beef and pork typically (sometimes with chicken). Usually these dumplings are boiled and eaten with mayonnaise or kethup. Russians do not fry them, but I think they are tastier that way.

Salad - A typical Russian salad does not contain any lettuce. You won't find a head of lettuce in Russia (you can find leaves of lettuce) so when you see the word salad anywhere you can know that you aren't getting a typical American salad. Usual salads are a mixture of rice or diced potatoes with other diced vegetables such as carrots, peppers, peas, etc. and some kind of meat all mixed together with mayonnaise or sour cream. Some can be really tasty and some can be not so great. The other common salad is sliced up tomatoes and cucumbers with onions and mixed together with mayo, sour cream, or oil (yes, vegetable oil).

Pastry - Like the bread, the pastries are fresh too. Usually the pastries are filled with a fruit jam or condensed milk. Condensed milk is used in a lot of things and is very tasty (and super fattening as well).

Blini - Russian pancakes or crepes. These are typically eaten with some type of filling inside. The above picture is a blin filled with cabbage and eggs. Other common fillings are jam, condensed milk, and fruit.

A standard Russian meal. As soon as we flew in, this was the first thing that we ate. Macaroni with fried chicken with mayonnaise for the topping. Mayonnaise and ketchup are used very often and rarely do Russians make a tomato sauce for macaroni, rather just use one of the two or both.


Sharuma - Russian fast food (kind of). This is a common food made in several cities throughout Russia. The best sharuma I have ever eaten were in Saratov with beef, tomatoes, and cucumbers but these ones are pretty good as well.

Russia - Copyright

Doing a quick search for Copyright laws in Russia bring back several sites that talk about bringing Copyright laws up to standard with other countries. I am not quite sure what they are talking about though. Here is what I've found in Russia.

There isn't really any enforcement of copyright laws at all. Well, I guess that isn't completely true. It looks like Microsoft got in with someone and so most Microsoft products are legal copies. However, most everything else is pirated over and over.

How can you tell if the movie/cd/software that you are looking at is pirated or a legal version? Price of course. Good quality pirated DVDs are around 100 rubles or just over $3. You can expect to pay about $15 for a legal version of the film. You can find even cheaper films as well but the quality is very lacking and leaves a lot to be desired.

A CD will usually go for about $2 and sometimes you will find CDs of MP3s from an artist for the same price (there is usually about 100 songs on a cd like this). You can expect to pay about $5 for a pirated computer game. Xbox and Playstation aren't really popular in Russia so I don't think I've seen any "illegal" copies before.

DVDs, CDs, and computer games for sale on the rionok.

DVDs and computer games for sale in Russia.

Shelves of pirated DVDs for sale inside a store in Russia.

Like I said, I am not sure if there are copyright laws in Russia or what but they aren't enforced if there are. If you do decide to buy films in Russia though, whether official or unofficial copies, you will want to make sure that you have the correct region encoding or else you will be out of luck.

Also, Russian websites also have lots of pirated movies, cds, and games that can be downloaded. However you have to know Russian on most any of these sites. A lot of them are locked down to Russia only as well (for good reason).

One other thing that isn't unique to Russia but I find interesting is that ratings aren't given to films. No R, PG-13, PG, G rated films. Really there isn't any rating or way to know what the film contains without doing some research on your own. It's pretty tough to explain to someone the rating system (believe me since I tried to do it several times).

Russia - Street Food

Today's post will be quite short. Also, the next couple will probably be shorter and I'll be missing a few days as we are getting ready for the long trip back to the United States. Stay tuned however.

One of the other ways to get your food and drink in Russia is from the local street vendors. Vendors range anywhere from people selling ready to go food, all the way to people selling nuts and other such products. People sell anything and everything you can think of and it can be anywhere on the street (not just at the rionok). Some of the sellers have little huts that they are in (often found at the bus stop) while others are right on the street with their stuff. Here are some pictures.

Small shop where fruits are sold.

Grandma selling piroshki (yummy russian food).

Women selling nuts on the street.

Small cakes/pastries seen through the window of a vendor.

A vendor selling russian root beer (kvas). It doesn't taste like root beer. I am not a fan.

Buying anything on the street should be done with care if you are buying prepared food. You never know what they may have put in those piroshki with meat...I've heard some pretty nasty stories about dogs and cats being used in them.

Russia - The Magazine

So obviously the rionik isn't the only place to buy things. There are stores all over the place where you can buy stuff. However, the stores in Russia have some distinct differences from those in the United States.

I am going to look at grocery/food stores to start, but I will cover a little bit about other stores as well. One thing that I love about Russia is that no matter where you are, there is almost always some type of store (in Russian the word for store is “magazine”) within a short walking distance. The nearest store to our current place in the United States is at least five minutes by car. I sure wish we had one closer than that.

Магазин

Magazine in Russian.

Magazines differ in size and can be super small to decent size. Expect to find small magazines all over and larger ones more spread out. If you walk into a small magazine you can expect to find a sales person (typically a woman but not always) who will give you what you want. In other words, you don't touch anything without asking the sales person to let you take a look at it (sometimes this is a real pain and I am not a big fan of this setup). Many of the items sit behind the counter and you can say that you either want to buy it or look at it. Other things sit under glass that is the counter...you'll typically find chocolates and other treats here.

Waiting to buy meat and cheese.

Walking into a larger magazine usually entails leaving your bag behind that you have brought with you. You generally can't carry it into the store for theft reasons. Basically, watch out for the lockers to put your stuff inside or else the security guard will ask you to put your stuff in them. Once inside the magazine, it feels much like a typical American store other than the products are probably pretty foreign to most Americans.

Lockers sitting outside the magazine entrance.

One thing that is a staple in the Russian stores are alcoholic beverages. No matter where you go, you are going to find plenty of choices on what you want to drink. In the smaller magazines, expect to find from about ¼ to ½ of the magazine to be only alcoholic beverages. In larger magazines you can expect a smaller percentage but still enough to make you realize that you aren't in Kansas anymore.

The wine. Beer and vodka are on the next isle.

Magazines for clothing are much like American stores and you can usually walk in with your bags and other things, but expect to be watched pretty closely. In most magazines that I have walked into people keep a good eye on what you are looking at and what you are doing always. For some reason, magazines with food products always seem to watch you the closest...

Also magazines for other things such as electronics, school supplies, and other stuff are typically under the locked down policy as well. In other words you have to ask to be able to touch something. This isn't always the case though and there are a lot more electronic magazines showing up where you can touch what you are looking at, but school supplies are typically under lock down...so no stealing any of those good looking notebooks you want.

Waiting to buy school supplies.

One other thing is that a lot of clothing stores our found in areas kind of like the mall in a sense (called a “torgovi center”). Basically, it is a bunch of small shops found next to each other one after the other. This is different from the rionik though because all of the stores are indoors and at night you don't have to take down your shop like on the rionok. Each shop is different on whether or not everything is behind the counter or not.

Russia - The Market

Shopping in Russia is a different experience than going to the local supermarket in America. Shopping is done in a few different ways and I will cover those over the next few days. To start off, I wanted to cover one of the funnest ways to shop in Russia as an American – the rionik.

A very non-busy day on the rionik.

In a lot of countries outside the United States there are similar outdoor markets where goods and food are sold right on the street. The rionik is just an outdoor market where lots of people come together to buy what they need. Rioniks in Russia vary in size and can serve a very specific purpose, such as only have shoes or boots, or can be a smorgasbord of anything and everything (I like to call these your outdoor Walmarts).

Most cities have one to two major rioniks (Moscow of course has lots that I don't know where to start counting), and are an exciting place to shop. The rioniks are open daily from about 7:30 until about 4:30. The rionik closes for a couple of holidays during the year and when the weather drops to -35 and below. During a recent trip to the rionik we purchased some food (halva for me), socks, and sunglasses. We checked out other clothing and looked for nailclippers as well but didn't buy any.

Shirts on the rionik


A walk down the rionik in Russia.

If you are looking for something of nice quality then the rionik isn't the place for you (I call it the outdoor Walmart for a good reason). However, if you are looking for a good deal then the rionik is definitely the place to go. You can usually get prices lowered down if you try to (however I have found that for some reason most natives don't try...Americans always do though). Maybe that is one of the reasons that I love the rionik so much is because if you want a sweet deal, then you can make it.

For example, when I was in Moscow a few years ago I was looking for some Matroshki dolls. Since Moscow is the best place to buy the dolls on the rionik or at the street vendors we started walking around. After visiting about 10 stands and having each one make some kind of offer, I finally made my final purchase of 10 matroshki for about $90. Considering the starting offer of $250 that they were asking for, I felt pretty good and I could probably sell the dolls for a pretty penny in the United States for them if I wanted.

One thing we never did though was to buy meat at the rionik. Let's just say that it looked scary enough that I never do. However, that's not to say that I don't eat the meat from the rionik because where I am staying now they normally buy their meat from there and so far I haven't gotten sick (keep my fingers crossed). Vegetables are super cheap during the summer season and you can usually get a kilogram of tomatoes for under $1 (that's under .50 cents a pound for fresh ripe tomatoes).

Meat inside on the rionik.

Fruits on the rionik.

Another shot of a row on the rionik.

Overall the rionik is a fun atmosphere and if you visit on the weekend then expect the crowd. If you plan on visiting Russia though, definitely make some time to visit a rionik while you're in the country in order to get a good taste of Russia.

Another video on the rionik.

Russia - Living Space

People who live in their apartments and homes either own or rent them. During the Soviet Union, the government owned everything including the homes and the land. While there were apartments before the Soviet Union, they were quite rare compared to the landscape now. Before the Soviet Union, most people lived in homes like the one pictured in my previous post. People built these homes and lived in them. However, the socialistic years brought about many changes. The government built the apartment buildings and replaced a lot of the regular homes. You were then given an apartment according to the number of people in your family and some other factors.

When the Soviet Union fell, people held on to their apartments and homes and thus most people own their apartments or homes where they live. In fact, most of them don't pay anything besides the standard utilities (water, gas, electricity, other) so they are quite fortunate in that sense. Prices to purchase an apartment in Russia are quite high. A one-room apartment in Moscow will cost you about $400,000 (I'll explain apartment sizes lower). For the younger generation they typically stay with their parents or rent because purchasing is almost not an option.

Having lived in America my whole life, I realize how spoiled I am when coming to Russia. I know that in Europe and other countries as well housing sizes are much smaller than the United States. Apartment sizes in Russia range from one-room to as large as five room (this is rare) and almost always have one bathroom (I am not sure I have been in an apartment with more than one bathroom in Russia). Houses are usually slightly larger, but the bathroom is usually seperate from the house so it gets nice and chilly in there during the winters :).

In the United States houses are measured by bedrooms. For example, we have a three-bedroom house in America. However, apartments/home sizes in Russia are measured by number of rooms. So, our house is a 7-room house in Russia (3-bedrooms and 4 living/dining rooms). Bathrooms and kitchens don't go into the room count. I am not sure how they'd count a garage...

Upon entering a typical Russian apartment, you will find a place to remove your coat or other outer garments as well as a place to take off your shoes and leave them at the front door (I have never been inside a Russian's living area where it is alright to wear your shoes). From there, you will typically be able to get to each room from the entrance or a hallway. Typically Russians live and sleep in the same room (which makes sense since most of the apartments are one to two rooms). This means that most rooms have large bookshelves and garderobes in each room to hold stuff. They put everything away and in closets every morning (blankets and all), so they need somewhere to put it.

An entrance to an apartment.

A standard bookshelf.

Another bookshelf.

My wife lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her Mother and Grandma. The three of them lived in one room and they rented out the second room to students (typically they had 3 students in the room). While this is usually more than people had in such a small place, it makes you realize how much you really have. If you have more rooms than you have people living in your house than you are almost always living in a larger space than Russians.

The bathroom in each apartment is typically split into two rooms. The bathroom is in one room and the bath and sink in the other room (this makes sense since there is almost always one bathroom per apartment). Typically the kitchen is pretty small and you will find a fridge and stove. Dishwashers are basically non-existent and if a washing machine is owned then it is typically in the kitchen. Microwaves are becoming much more common but usually food is reheated on the stove.

The typical Russian toilet/bathroom.

The separate washroom. The tubs are usually bigger than in America :).

A russian kitchen. The stove is new so it looks nice.

The fridge.

Most apartments will have a balcony. A lot of the balconies have been closed in with glass to make for extra space to store different things. They are too cold though to sleep in during the winter though.

A closed in balcony.

Another shot of the closed in balcony.

Apartments are heated by the water heater that is on the wall. You don't have any control over the temperature or when to turn it on or off. In the small homes, you typically are able to turn on or off the water (as long as the water is already running) to give yourself heat. The homes also usually have a wood burning stove to keep it warm for the icy winters. During the summers a fan is used to keep the air circulating. Central air is half a world away and air conditioners are also pretty rare.

An apartment heater behind the curtain.

The condition inside an apartment ranges pretty largely. A lot of people hang a rug on the wall to keep the warmth in. Walls and floors in a lot of the older apartment building is pretty bad unless the owner has done repairs (even then the repairs can sometimes be pretty “Russian”...meaning super glue and cement probably shouldn't be used together for redecorating).

I don't know if I could live in Russia in such a small area my whole life. I am sure I would be able to cope but I definitely have way too much junk and I like to keep my sleeping area pretty private and out of sight of people. I think that such living conditions force a person to better know their family (parents and grandparents since they typically share a room). After being in Russia though I am extremely grateful for the many blessings that I enjoy.

The biggest apartment I was ever in was 5 rooms. It was huge (probably smaller than our house now though). But the people who lived there were loaded which was obvious when we saw the beday in the bathroom. That was the one single time I ever saw anything on a level close to what a lot of people I know in America live in.

I found an interesting discussion on this forum about Russian apartments.