Snow? In September? I must be in Russia. I woke up this morning to see a light snow falling from the slate-grey sky. I remember one of my cross country races in high school was canceled due to temperatures above 90F--in October. I guess I'm not in Ohio anymore.

They (you know, "they") say that it's going to be a record-cold winter this year in Russia. Like once-in-a-hundred-years cold. That sounds fine to me; it will make for an untoppable comeback anytime anyone in Ohio complains about winter weather ("when it was -40 and blizzarding in Vladimir, we still went to work...."). As you quickly learn, layers are the key to surviving extreme cold. That and vodka are how Russians do it. 

Here a picture I snapped on my way to the gym yesterday morning. It's about three quarters of a mile to the gym, and that walk is a nice way to get moving before my workout. My morning walk takes me through apartment-building land, past a school, and past (not through!) the netherworld of garage land.

What is garage land? Well apartment buildings weren't built with the idea that residents would have private cars, so they were not equipped with any facilities for car storage. That worked in the Soviet Union when no one could afford a car, but now more and more people have cars (although not on American levels: most families have just one car, and a lot people don't have a car at all). All these cars choke what little parking exists near apartment buildings, and open space near apartment buildings is usually taken up with makeshift garages: metal or concrete structures that people build--usually illegally--wherever they can. These garages are really ugly, occupy what little open space exists in many neighborhoods, and create a warren of unseen space--a perfect environment for all sorts of sketchy activity.

Garages have a few important functions, though. They, of course, are a place to store cars. We Americans are really spoiled: Think of having to walk ten minutes on a frigid, dark, snowy morning to your little metal garage to get your car, only to find out that some idiot parked his car right in front of it (most garages have a stern warning painted on them not to park in front of the door). Garages have other functions, too. They act as the Russian equivalent of man caves, giving guys a place to tinker with stuff, swear and spit with impunity, and to get a break from life in their two-room apartments. There are also plenty of informal businesses in garages--mostly tire stores and greasy car repair shops.

Garages are also a place for criminal activity, committed by everyone from drug addicts to wanna-be thugs to actual thugs. If you see a couple of guys in Adidas track suits hanging out in the garages near a black BMW, you should probably turn around and go back the way you came. The garages near my apartment have a bad reputation--people get beat up as they take a short cut to the bus stop, and a girl was recently raped kidnapped and raped as she walked through them. Needless to say, I don't cut through the garages anymore. Also you don't have to look very hard to see discarded heroin syringes lying around near garages. I was walking to work one morning last winter and a guy came up to me griping about all the drug addicts in the neighborhood. What set him off? Someone had jabbed a used syringe into his car tire. Welcome to post-Soviet, post-industrial garage land.  

I found a very interesting article last night about alcohol and alcoholism in Russia. If there is one thing that most Americans associate with Russia, it is vodka. That association is perhaps a bit unfair: There is a lot more to Russia and Russian culture that vodka, but it is impossible to consider Russia without thinking of alcohol. Spirits pervade every aspect of life--the drunks sitting on benches swilling beer at 9am, the workplace champagne toasts for every birthday and celebration, the vodka-drenched holiday celebrations. Most stores have a vodka isle.

I think the article gives a pretty fair look at the state of things in Russia right now. This article states that the cheapest bottles of vodka cost 30 rubles ($1), which is true but misleading. Those cheap ones are just 50ml tiny bottles, but you can buy a half liter of totally drinkable vodka for the whopping sum of five dollars. Also, a few laws have been passed under Putin and Medvedev that make an attempt at limiting the availability of alcohol. They reclassified beer as an alcoholic beverage (it used to be considered a soft drink--ya that's how intense Russia is), and now you can't buy any alcohol between 11pm and 8am (a least if you are following the law).

Alcoholism exists everywhere, but you definitely get a full-on view of it here in Russia.Vladimir has a reputation for being a bastion of alcoholism, although locals say it probably isn't any worse than in any other medium-sized city and that the alcoholism in the countryside is beyond belief. In a lot of villages, there simply aren't any real jobs, so people line up every day outside the alcohol store at 8am, spend the whole day getting stewed, and repeat the process the next day, working odd jobs to pay for their vodka. Or people run stills in their Soviet apartments and sell illegal booze to all the drunks of the town. Honestly, seeing the hellholes and human tragedies created by alcoholism everyday makes even drinking in moderation seem much less appealing. Leave it to Russia to make something fun difficult and depressing. Maybe that's why I know quite a few Russians who don't drink alcohol at all.

Here's a link to the article:  

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/how-alcohol-conquered-russia/279965/

Here is an interesting article from the English-language Moscow Times newspaper. I had wondered whether Putin wrote his op-ed himself (doubtful) and who translated it. Can you imagine the pressure of translating Putin--or Obama's or any other world leader's--work?

Tweaking Putin's Op-Ed to Stick It to the U.S.

Here's a popular in Russia song that has been stuck in my head for a while. It's called Небо поможет нам (the sky will help us). This song seems to always be playing in taxis here in Vladimir, so it is best listened to through a pair of old Lada speakers over the whine of an unhappy Russian engine. If you can't make that work out, a pair of headphones also will do. Give it a listen.

I saw this written on a dirty bus window the other morning. I guess somebody with a spelling problem was dreaming of a warm, sunny place. 

My apartment doesn't have much in the way of appliances, but what we have still gives us trouble. Actually there are only three pieces of life-enhancing technology in the apartment--a stove, a refrigerator, and a television. I don't watch TV, and even if I did, we only get about seven channels (some of them fade in and out).

The stove/oven was the first act up. When our landlady showed us the apartment, she mentioned that the stove has a small gas leak, so if it smells too badly of gas in the kitchen, just turn off the gas supply valve. Fortunately she had the gas supply line changed a few weeks ago, so that has diminished the gassy smell. The oven, though, has its own personality. It is a Soviet oven that you have to light manually; there's a little tube you drop a lit match into. You first select your temperature--on a dial that has numbers one through eight (I have no idea what temperatures those line up to)--then push a red button, allowing gas to flow to the burner. You hold down the button for a little bit until a thermocouple warms up and tells the oven that it's lit. That thermocouple, though, is a finicky beast. Sometimes it heats up almost instantly, but other times it takes a few minutes. The poor oven operator, who has far better things to do with his life, is stuck holding down the button until the oven decides it is ready. My record so far is four minutes.

The refrigerator also has an attitude. Yesterday morning I noticed that the fridge door had been open all night because the freezer cabinet wasn't shut and was blocking the main door from shutting. The freezer was completely iced up, so the door was stuck open. In the process of fighting with the door and trying to chip some ice out, I bumped a button labeled оттайка, a word I quickly guessed means "defrost." That turned the compressor off, but I managed to get the door shut, so I didn't give it any more thought and went off to work. I got back later that day to see that the floor was covered with water. All that ice had melted--the defrost cycle was doing its job. I did a quick Yandex (the Russian Google) search of our refrigerator and the problem we were having and figured out how to heat up the thermostat to trick the fridge into working again. Fortunately I need to go to the grocery store, so there wasn't much of anything in the fridge that would spoil. I just hope the water didn't rain down on the neighbors below--that's definitely not a good way to endear yourself around the old apartment building.