There are no pics this time.
We are home, safe and sound. Our travels back were thankfully boring. Here are a few observations I haven’t made elsewhere.
Going over the Atlantic, we flew the double-decker A380, which I believe is the largest passenger plane in common service. It’s a nice plane, but the new Boeings are better. Between Paris and Russia, we flew the A319, which was incredibly cramped and totally lacking in amenities such as music, USB chargers, video, etc. Air France served decent meals with complementary wine.
The Russians are spectacularly unwilling to let go of the past. They talk about the Polish invasion like it happened 50 years ago. They absolutely fixate on the German Invasion (which we call WW II). Overall, the Russians seem much more prone to despair and depression than in the US. That’s understandable, given how they hang on to bad events of the past and their tendency to drink. “Times of troubles” are fresh in the memory of all but the youngest Russians. The 1990s, when the USSR and the Russian economy collapsed, were much harder than I had realized. The retirement pension has been slashed. Even with a free house, Russians cannot live on the standard retirement pension without help from their children. (Citizens receive their apartments for free when property was privatized.) In addition, many people lost all their savings during the 90s, as banks and financial institutions went belly-up. Then and now, there is no equivalent to FDIC insurance for bank savings accounts. BTW, I saw less alcohol than I thought I would. The idea of the Russian male who is drunk all the time is much more a joke than a reality. However, on vacation as at home, we are early to bed / early to rise. We did not participate in any night life. We were generally in bed before the good folks in St. Pete had finished their dinners. Russians are certainly less well of than Americans, but the extreme poverty we have in the US either doesn’t exist or is well hidden. I didn’t know what to look for, since anybody who is homeless would certainly die if they tried to live on the street in the winter. But the people I asked said there is no homeless people. According to the people I asked, nobody tries to spend their winters in the Metro, even though it would be ridiculously easy to do so.
The Russians I met like Putin. They like having a strong central government. Putin’s overall rating is somewhere between 80% – 90%. They freely joke about Putin being the Tsar. He was inaugurated right next the the Church were all Tsars were coronated. (Even when the capital was in St. Pete, Tsars were coronated in Moscow.) The Russians have spent large fortunes restoring their ancient Churches and buildings.
The standard of living in metro areas appears to be good. Smart phones and cars are pervasive. I saw more high quality fashionable dress in Russia than I see in the US. Bicycles are used but they are not common. All the bikes I saw were heavy steel models with fat tires. I didn’t see a single road bike (carbon-fiber body, skinny tires, and drop handle bars). Russia is cleaner than Disney World. There is no trash anywhere. I often saw people cleaning. Most citizens keep their cars very clean.
Russians enjoy much more personal freedom than they have had in the past. They know their news is censored, but minimize that. They compare their news to the “slant” that US news organizations put in their content. It is still difficult for a Russian citizen to get a visa to visit the US. When visas are denied, no reason is given.
Russians love to have the biggest, even if it s not the best. They believe their country is well behind the US in every respect. Most of them did not believe me when I told them they were only country that can send people to the space station, or that we need a Russian rocket engine to send heavy satellites into space.
The metro stations built in the 40s are very deep, The escalators are long and very fast. Danita used to find it very difficult to get on US escalators. Now she does escalators as well as anybody.
Using a tablet as my only computing device brought some limitations. Spell check works only sometimes (I don’t know why). Everything takes longer than on a computer. One needs almost twice as many clicks to do something on a tablet, and each screen rendering is much slower. I usually rename picture files to indicate what I took a picture of. Using the tablet was so slow that I quickly gave that up. Now, faced with hundreds of pictures and a poor memory, I will have a nice collection of pictures on my computer, with little idea of what they represent. I did almost no proofing, as you have certainly noticed. Somebody left a message on our phone. One of the security cameras saw the blinking light as a motion detection at night. I adjusted the sensitivity to “minimum”, but we still got 60 or more alarms every night. (I left the alarm on so that if somebody had broken in, I would at least have a picture of the perp.)