Russia: Day Two

After a good night’s sleep, my next day started when I was steadily jolted in and out of sleep by some homeless cat screeching outside our building. For breakfast, my host family asked if I had ever eaten kasha. Other than the hippy 6-dollar-a-box American cereal, I had no clue what they were talking about. Apparently it’s just some type of grain boiled with milk and sugar. You can use any of a number of grains I guess. Either way it wasn’t bad. I tried to explain what a bagel was, since they asked what I usually have for breakfast. Not knowing a whole lot of bagel-related vocabulary, I gave up completely. They seemed okay with it.

My host family and Christina’s host family went to a beach, which was oddly located just off the major highway going south from Biysk. It’s very nice that her family and my family do so much together, since we can make fun of Russian people and help each other out with language. Anyways, to get to this lake, you’re just driving along, and there’s a big billboard that says “BEACH – 800m.” Then there is a little red arrow sign that says “BEACH” on it, pointing onto a dirt road leading away from the highway. At the end of the dirt road is a lake. Someone decided “Hey, it’d be a good idea to dig a huge hole here, fill it with water, and charge people admission.”

The guy who drove us there was a friend of Christina’s family, and a mechanic by trade. We had a very spirited if not one-sided conversation about cars, highways, and the like. He asked if we have Ladas (Lada is a brand of Russian car) in America. I said no, we don’t. He said “Good, they’re horrendous.” That much I understood, even if he did only speak Russian. I also gather that all the potholes are the Soviet’s fault, and that all the good roads were built after the fall of the USSR. I guess that makes sense. I’m sure I will have occasion to talk about Russian cars and Russian roads again at some point.

Either way, this lake is a pretty nice place. Such a place in America would probably be well-supervised and whatnot. This place was pretty much laissez-faire relaxation. Parking was first-come-first-serve, wherever you could find a spot of ground. No lifeguards watched any of the swimmers. There was a tall diving board, and people were just jumping from it one after another, in some cases practically on top of each other. There was a big water slide, but it cost 10R (1R = around $0.04) per slide. You could also rent little pedal-boats, and also Jet-Skis – something I did not expect to see in a place located about as far as you can get from the ocean.

Here, the kids stayed in the water practically the whole day. Little did I know at the time that this was just a preview of what was to come in terms of the energy of Russian children. I did a lot of people watching, and noticed a few different things. For one, Russian men either wear their boxers to go swimming, or really funny-looking and tight-fitting swim shorts. Russian women look pretty much the same as American women at the beach. Another thing I noticed here is that practically everyone has some kind of scar or minor deformity. Either that or some kind of health problem. I don’t think I ever want to find out what Russian medicine is like. They’ll probably try to bleed me with leeches or some shit.

We threw the disc a little bit in the dirt parking lot and then went home. The highway to and from this beach is called the Chuiskii Trakt, a huge federal project to connect the major cities of this area to some major city in Mongolia I think. Either way it’s a pretty nice road, and it looks almost as good as some American highways.

After getting home, we went on a walk to the train station to look at how much it would cost to go back to Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway. Turns out it costs like 6000R, or around $240. So, we’re not saving that much money by going back on the train, but it is still about $100 cheaper and we get to do something noteworthy. It was interesting how nice the train station was on the inside, despite its overall crumminess on the outside. This is a trend I am noticing with buildings.

Afterwards, Ilya and I listened to some American music then went to bed. Apparently the Black-Eyed Peas are really popular here. Weird since black people are not so popular.