Troubled times of USSR collapse and liberalisation in 90s paired with financial mess. Real mess. If to be precise, such a rip-off time; devaluation of national currency just bulldozer all the under-the-blanket savings, magically turned it to a toilet paper, in one night. Just like a Cinderella’s story, the golden carriage turned to pumpkin right at the stroke of midnight.

The foreign exchange turnover raised, and currency factor now played a massive role in a country socially segregating people in each city, and not only in Moscow or St. Petersburg. If to compare, in USSR, comrades were severely punished for using foreign money when bypassing the state; usually send to jail or labor camp. At that peculiar time Ruble was like for the unfortunate ones…non-elite, those who are not in business or in politics, and out of any kind of prestige circle. Dollar, as a leprechaun’s golden coin,– often called as bucks, greens, cabbage — weighted way more in value than any bill of national currency, banknotes for peasants. 

So there was a big gap between who had dollars and who didn’t; this kicked off a black market businesses that foam a new crime statistics, group-on-group violence, and outlaw pursuit. So far cities like Moscow, St Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Omsk(city where I was born), and more Eastern regions were known for their street fights, if you could call this bareknuckle slaughter a “fight”.  In those fights it was easy to notice this three-stripes fashion — gangs were fancy to wear adidas brand and so many jokes were made about it in Russia and abroad — comfy and stylish as they thought, well, for some it was a wedding costume.

Despite the criminal gangs there was a movement of punks, rockers, bikers, religious cults (that are strictly banned now), and more or less, for all of them an American dream was something long-waited-for but both controversial and dazzling promising; they sang American songs, watched American movies, wear American clothes, use American English words (ok, cool, good, bad, man, dude, coke, rock…) Musics, movies, fashion, language — all were keep coming from the US and we[Russians] loved it. It got to me also, I spent most of my teenage years in Russia living up to American dream, for which I now often ridiculed by my friends…

I was overthinking on the life standards abroad before leaving Russia. So after a few month being in the US I started to think maybe this place wasn’t quite the dream land I thought, actually just a bit same daft, witty, casually dealing with social disagreements, streets fights, street crimes, desperate poverty, drug&alcohol abuse,… So basically, I change the location but the setting, more or less, stayed the same. There are many good things that surprised me, like hospitality of people in the South States, spring break Hollidays, college parties, highly entertaining sport tournaments, comforting tools for shopping for studying for driving, large portions of food and drinks (soda and free water in caffe/restaurants).

But there was also noted feature that stood out quite often and carried out as a cliché, or say “classics” — being pretentious to carry on random talks and promises, like not giving much weight on words. Yeah, sounds like I was hoodwinked there a few times,…ahem, many times especially with customer services, silly me. 😛