JC 1010E

August 6, 2011

This was our last day in Japan and as such we didn't have our hotel room to go back to. That didn't seem to slow us down though. We went to Shibuya, Shinjuku, and ended at Akihibara. We spent quite a bit of time in the Akihibara area and enjoyed it a lot more the second time around.

The past month and a half or so I have been riding the bus to work every day. I used to ride TRAX all the time when I was still going to school, but hadn't taken public transportation much since then. So what do I think so far? I love it.

The computer is basically done. I am finishing up getting all of our documents and pictures over to the new hard drive but that is just clean up work. I had a few people ask me why I was building a new computer and the main reason was because our old computer was almost dead. It took about 10 minutes to startup, and then if it sat for more than 10 minutes then you had to reboot the machine because it froze up. With all of the Photoshop and Sai Paint Tools stuff that my wife does, she couldn't handle it.

Like any foreign country, Russia has its own unique cuisine. Russian food seems to be a secret to a lot of people. The Russian diet is nothing special with lots of vegetables being consumed. Most people eat a lot of potatoes and macaroni. Most meals will contain one of the two. The one food that is at practically every meal, if not every meal, is bread. If you don't eat any bread then people think you're sick because bread is a must. I am not sure why but people ask me every time "Why aren't you eating any bread?" (Что хлеб не едите?).

Doing a quick search for Copyright laws in Russia bring back several sites that talk about bringing Copyright laws up to standard with other countries. I am not quite sure what they are talking about though. Here is what I've found in Russia.

There isn't really any enforcement of copyright laws at all. Well, I guess that isn't completely true. It looks like Microsoft got in with someone and so most Microsoft products are legal copies. However, most everything else is pirated over and over.

Today's post will be quite short. Also, the next couple will probably be shorter and I'll be missing a few days as we are getting ready for the long trip back to the United States. Stay tuned however.

So obviously the rionik isn't the only place to buy things. There are stores all over the place where you can buy stuff. However, the stores in Russia have some distinct differences from those in the United States.

Shopping in Russia is a different experience than going to the local supermarket in America. Shopping is done in a few different ways and I will cover those over the next few days. To start off, I wanted to cover one of the funnest ways to shop in Russia as an American – the rionik.

People who live in their apartments and homes either own or rent them. During the Soviet Union, the government owned everything including the homes and the land. While there were apartments before the Soviet Union, they were quite rare compared to the landscape now. Before the Soviet Union, most people lived in homes like the one pictured in my previous post. People built these homes and lived in them. However, the socialistic years brought about many changes. The government built the apartment buildings and replaced a lot of the regular homes.

First impressions of a country and of new experiences often stay with a person for most of that person's life. I remember my first day in Russia like it was yesterday. There were so many new and different experiences and I could practically retell the whole day down to several small details. One of the experiences that I don't think I'll ever forget occurred on my first day in Russia. As we were driving from the airport to the city, we began coming into the city and I remember very clearly two huge buildings standing on the outskirts of the city.