JC 1010E

This past week I attended my first ever Drupal conference in San Francisco. The conference was the official Drupal conference, Drupalcon, that is held bianually. The conferences are typically held once in the US and once in Europe each year. The conference was the biggest conference to date for the Drupal community with over 3000 attendees. The conference itself kept us pretty busy basically all day. We were in sessions from 8:30 to 6:30 with a lunch break in there.

I know it's been over a month since we've been home and I have meant to post this video for some time now. Anya took this video on the way home from Russia on the train from Penza to Moscow. We had the two top beds in the train and it was hot in the train. You can't really hear what I am saying (unless you turn your sound way way up and listen carefully) so I have transcribed it below.

The people in Russia are very interesting and very diverse. It makes sense with all of the things that they have been through from Communism under the USSR to the fall of communism to the beginning of a democratic society that this people has a very unique attitude and one this is tough to capture in a blog post or any pictures. Words can't really describe human nature, but I have tried to describe other parts of Russia, so I will do the same here.

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.