There's no place to sit! The lack of benches and seating in public places is one big difference between Russian and America that my family noticed. There really are very few places to just relax and take a load off during a long day of touring around a Russian city. I don't know if this reflects an official indifference toward the population, a lack of finances, or something else, but it sure is annoying. Parks don't have many benches, although I think this is by design: City officials removed all the benches at one Vladimir park to discourage drunks from congregating there. Of course, if the park were designed better, maybe it wouldn't be such an attractive place for drunks to hang out away from the eyes of police patrols. The worst places, though, are museums, where there are no benches or chairs at all in the galleries. The Hermitage, for example, has no places to sit, and it's the same story for pretty much every other museum we visited. That can make for a very long, unhappy day of looking at paintings. At one museum, we got yelled at because my dad sat down briefly in the only chair in the whole gallery, which was, of course, reserved for the angry lady who watches over the paintings (we were also the only people in the place). I guess it's further proof that you have to be tough to live in Russia.