I was thinking about what to muse about on this blog today when it occurred to me that something is missing in my life. No, I don't mean love or world peace or any of that token stuff. I'm talking about sirens. You don't realize it, but we are surrounded by sirens in the USA. Fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, volunteer fire fighters, tornado sirens, useless noon-on-Wednesdays emergency siren tests, police impersonators trying to pull people over--whatever it is, it's the rare hour that passes without a siren sounding in the background. 

Here in Russia, there just aren't sirens. I mean, every once in a while, I a feeble little siren sound for a second while a highway patrol officer (гаишник) pulls someone over, but that is rare. Also, sometimes an ambulance will go by with its siren on, but no on pulls over or even lets the ambulance through. And there most certainly isn't any kind of weekly emergency siren test; shoot, there aren't even fire alarms in most apartment buildings (that always scared me when I was living in a 12-story apartment building in Moscow that had just one door and no kind of fire alarm of sprinkler system. Fortunately, my building here in Vladimir is new and has alarms). 

It's strange how little things that you take for granted and relegate to the back of your consciousness take on a new importance when you suddenly are without them. Although I must say, for someone who has studied city planning and tries to keep abreast of local news and procedures, I've never understood why it is necessary to test tornado sirens every week, and I have no idea what the different signals mean and doubt anyone else does either. I mean, really, who sits around and times out an emergency siren and says to themselves, "Oh that was two 30-second sirens followed by a 15-second siren--that means we're doomed."?