Summer in Russia is a beautiful time. Temperatures are fairly mild, and the sun stays up until 10 or 11pm. Everyone wants to be outside. And, unfortunately, everyone includes some nasty bugs. Being in a high-latitude country, Russia has the same kind of huge mosquito and black fly populations as Canada and the northern US. Mosquitoes here are just as annoying as in the US, and there are a lot of them, but the worst are the black flies (in Russian мошки).

Black fly season started about a week ago. I noticed these little black insects on my walk to the bus stop one morning, and at first I didn't recognize them. They don't fly like mosquitoes, and they kind of swarm and crawl on your exposed skin. And then one bit me, and I understood what I was dealing with. They are pretty much everywhere right now, and they really like buses. Bus windows are covered with slowly moving flies that occasionally take interest in the passengers and bite them. It really adds a whole new dimension to my morning commute. People tell me that the black flies are around for about a month and that a good hot spell will kill them off sooner. Here's to hoping for some hot weather.

Also, here's what might be the most revolting picture of a black fly on the internet.

It's a Russian clothes dryer--aka a low-tech drying rack. American-style dryers don't exist in Russia (well, maybe someone somewhere has one, but I've never seen a dryer in a Russian household). So, people hang their clothes on a rack to dry. In the warmer months, this rack goes out on the balcony, but in the winter, all your wet clothes will just freeze if you put them on the balcony, so that whole drying rack has to fit somewhere in your tiny Soviet apartment. Fortunately, my apartment is huge by Russian standards, so the drying rack fits nicely in the hallway during the winter. Also, in the winter, the air was good and dry, so clothes dried overnight.

Well, now that it's warm and humid, clothes don't dry so well. I hung my shirts and shorts out to dry after washing them a few days ago, and they were still dampish even today. I'm a patient guy, so I can wait a little bit for my clothes to dry, but there is another problem with that long dry time. What happens when a bunch of damp clothes hang on a shady balcony for a few days? Let's just say that I used a wide selection from my vocabulary of English and Russian curse words when I realized that the shirt I wanted to wear today smelled like a musty basement. If the USPS makes a flat-rate box big enough for a Maytag dryer, I would gladly pay the shipping....

Sometimes you don't realize how good you have it until you don't have it anymore. I've come to realize lately how good Americans in general and Clevelanders in specific have it in terms of parks and recreational amenities. I love running and riding my bike, and I'm really spoiled to have the amazing Cleveland Metroparks and Geauga Park District  systems at my disposal. There are several gorgeous parks complete with excellent trails and all sorts of other recreational amenities within a ten-minute drive of my home, and the number of acres of parkland--all free, well-maintained, developed for recreation, and protected with a reverence for conservation--in Northeast Ohio is mind boggling. I can go mountain biking on professionally designed trails, running on trails made of finely crushed gravel through blossoming meadows, hiking to waterfalls in hemlock-filled glens, or swimming at beaches along one of the Great Lakes--all within an hour of my house.

So that's a bit of a shameless plug for the Cleveland area, but Northeast Ohio isn't too unique for the United States in its richness of recreational amenities. Our national park system conserves some of the world's most beautiful natural sites and has made them accessible for generations of Americans. Our parks and public spaces--and that's everything from the grandest national parks to humble local ball fields--are protected, maintained, and facilitated with infrastructure that enables people to learn about the natural world and engage with it in a responsible way.

Just how well we do conservation is starkly evident in comparison to Russia. There are few parks here in Vladimir, and most of them are small and have no emphasis on anything natural. They are places for drunks to gather, and those drunks leave all their trash in the parks. Once you get out the city, you don't find big parks or places for recreation like you would in America. A lot of Russia is forest, and this forest is theoretically protected and is open for anyone to access, but there is no kind of trail system and definitely no visitors' centers or lodges.

Also, in true tragedy-of-the-commons style, because "everyone" owns the forest, no one takes responsibility for it. So many places are just trashed with the remains of parties and campsites--bottles, bags, and home refuse litter the woods.I really noticed this on my trip to Baikal. We were in a national park, but there was trash and junk everywhere. We happened to hike (along a "trail" that was really tire tracks made by garbage trucks) through an acres-large dumpsite in the forest just outside of Huzhir on Olkhon Island, and it was attention getting. There, on the shores of one of the world's natural treasures, stands a monument to mankind's slovenly sloth. And this is everywhere: People toss bottles and bags of trash out of car windows without a second though, meaning that all roads are lined with garbage.

Last weekend, I tried to ride my bike in Vladimir's major park, and found that there isn't a single decent, marked trail in the place. After an hour of dodging broken glass (it's everywhere) and slogging though mud mires, I realized how good we Americans have it.      

The Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath--one of  thousands of recreational trails in the US 

 A waterfall in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park

 A bride that carries the Towpath trail over a busy road

 Garbage littering the forest on Olkhon Island 

More garbage 

Russian drivers are crazy. There's just no way to ignore that fact. Speed limits are a mere suggestion; it's not unusual to pass a car that's doing 40mph on a 25mph residential street while barreling into head-on traffic; and if you haven't hit the car in front of you, you're not tailgating. In spite of all this dangerous driving, few people take one of the simplest safety precautions--wearing a seat belt. Russian law dictates that front-seat passengers must wear seat belts, so people buckle when they drive in areas where police are likely to be. And only front-seat passengers wear seat belts; I've been laughed at for trying to put on a seat belt while riding in the back seat (people remind me that I'm not in America and that it's legal not to wear a seat belt in the back seat). 

There's a joke that Americans buckle up because they're afraid of getting into an accident, whereas Russians buckle up because they're afraid of getting a fine from the police. For me, putting on a seat belt is automatic: I sit down and immediately reach for the seat belt. I don't wear a seat belt because I'm afraid of getting a ticket; that doesn't even cross my mind. Actually, I'm even against mandatory seat belt laws; if you need a law to make you wear a seat belt, maybe you deserve to get into an accident. My self-preservation instinct won't let me ride in a car--much less one driven on Russian roads by a Russian driver--without a seat belt, and I don't need a law to make me think that way. Maybe that's my American upbringing at work. 

  

There are still several parts of my Baikal trip I haven't written about, and, partly because it's interesting and partly because I will forget about certain elements of the trip if I don't write them down, here is another installment my Baikal travel notes.

Irkutsk is a really cool city and might actually be the second nicest city I've visited in Russia (St. Petersburg is definitely in first place). Irkutsk isn't really a big city; the population is somewhere around 600,000, which is like two Vladimirs, but it feels much bigger. It is and has long been an important political center and hub of commerce; the city's emblem pays homage to the sable, the animal whose pelts were Siberia's first great natural resource to be exploited on a massive scale. The city center is nice and well taken care of--the sidewalks are paved with bricks, there is decorative lighting, there are benches and decent looking trash cans (being in Russia makes one starve for the most mundane of amenities). The roads are also in excellent condition for Russia, and actually are on par with roads in the US; this is in contrast to Vladimir where your daily commute involves doing slalom to avoid the chasms that seemingly could swallow a Lada--or at least mangle a tire. There was even a new and fairly well designed town-center-style commercial area blended into the historic city center. My inner urban planner was feeling indulged.

Here are some pictures of Irkutsk:

Irkutsk's airport

 Lenin Street

 A big bank 

The headquarters of a coal company 

A fountain on a big square in the center of town 

 A statue of some dead guy--I can't remember who 

The Angara River, which flows out of Lake Baikal

Where local kids gather  

OK so not all of Irkutsk is shiny and new 

It wouldn't be Russia without some military equipment sitting around  

The main commercial street. It's closed to cars. 

Some Russian ingenuity--using a radiator as a counterweight to hold a gate open 

Lenin Street again 

The city emblem in statue form. Note the sable in the lion's mouth 

Ohh pedestrian-friendly commercial area ingrained into the fabric of the city--cool

Looks like a suburban American town-center-style mall thing. Well, sort of  

"New City--a city in which expectations come to reality" 

 A statue to Kolchak, the one-time ruler of Siberia during the Russian civil war

A nice fountain 

Tsar Alexander III

 This embankment needs a little sprucing up, but it gets the job done  

Yesterday a group of American college students arrived in Vladimir. They'll be studying Russian at the American Home for a few weeks. It was really fun and interesting to meet these students because they are basically the only other Americans (besides my colleagues) who I have met in in almost a year. We went to a cafe after work and had a few drinks, and it was so refreshing to speak English freely and without having to monitor the complexity of my speech. Of course, it's not that I'm starved for conversations in English--my colleagues and I always speak regular, fast-paced English--but that's only seven other people. These new Americans have their own slang (including some phrases I had never heard before), and they are in touch with popular culture back in the US of A.

It's amazing what happens to your language after a long period abroad. While my Russian has gotten stronger, I feel like my English has gotten rusty. A lot of words have fallen out of my active vocabulary, and I even catch myself making stupid mistakes in my speech. Our TEFL course noted that you may find yourself making your students' errors after a while, and I sometimes screw up subject-verb agreement just like my students do. I make it a point to listen to NPR and read news articles, and now I get a thrill out of listening to native speakers of English. When listening to them, I don't have to subconsciously wince at butchered articles   and strange vocabulary choices or try to decipher what they are attempting to say. I often find myself translating my students' or friends' speech back into Russian to make sense of it; now, I totally understand word-salad sentences like "In how much time should we to meet tomorrow?" or "My friend very like to tell with you about you travel in Baikal." On a side note, that brings up one my favorite ESL mistakes: "My friend very beautiful girl--she have a long, black hair." The poor girl...

Anyway, here is a great song by the legendary rock musician Viktor Tsoi:

An interesting thing I noticed in Siberia is that many, if not most, cars are right-hand drive. These cars are imported directly from Japan. This is strange because Russian drivers drive on right (like Americans do). I can't imagine driving a car with the steering wheel on the right side in right-side traffic--it would be like driving from the passenger's seat. It would be especially difficult to pass another car on right because you would have to nudge pretty much all of your car into the opposing lane before you could see if it's safe to pass. This is really dangerous considering that Russian drivers constantly pass other vehicles in all sorts of unsafe places (blind corners, through intersections, directly in the face of oncoming traffic). Basically, it's best not to watch when you're riding with a Russian driver. Russia tried to ban right-hand-drive cars a few years ago, but there was too much protest from drivers in Siberia and the Far East, so those cars are still legal. Actually, almost all the cars in Irkutsk were made in either Japan or Korea, which was noticeably different that in Vladimir, where there is a mix of German, French, Japanese, Korean, American, and Russian cars.