For someone who has spent half their childhood in Russia, the most glaring difference is everyday life. The …show more content…
My mom would wake me up at 6:00 on a typical morning, during the long winter we were used to in the so-called Far East. After a quick breakfast and cocooning myself in warm clothing, I would be walking along the still dark, freezing street outside the 9-story apartment building we lived in. The path led me to a bridge across a busy railroad, then along dozens of boxy garages, until I got to the bus stop. There are no school buses in Russia, so I would pay 13 rubles (about $0.35 at the time) to stand in a public bus for 20 minutes, pressed on all sides by fellow schoolchildren, adults rushing to work, or just some hobo. Next stop: city center. I walk under a highway underpass, which reeks of cigarette smoke, past a supermarket and a couple construction sites that seem to be untouched for years, and along the snowy streets of another residential area. As the sun came up, I would reach my destination: a large Church, where the private school I attended was hosted.
Overall, this journey would take over an hour, not to mention the way back – quite different to public school in the USA, where a school bus would literally drive up to my home in the morning (and now I complete my education from home!). That is one of the examples of how everyday life for me was different, another being the ordinary task of grocery shopping. Instead of going to the supermarket every week or so, I went to buy delicious, freshly …show more content…
For example, you ask “How are you?” when meeting someone. Even though most of the time you don’t actually want to know how the other person is doing, that’s the polite thing to do: an attitude that isn’t common in Russia. In fact, it’s completely normal to be straight up rude to strangers, a stark contrast to the American attitude. A lot of people who immigrate to the United States from Russia are taken by surprise by the politeness, and vice-versa, Americans visiting Russia are often appalled by offensively ill-mannered nature of Russians.
An obvious and normal difference between the two countries is the surrounding culture. However, in some ways it’s actually similar: the part of Russia where I lived was close to the border of China, so naturally, the population had a good percentage of Chinese people. I specifically remember the outdoor market, where the Chinese set up their tents and sold goods both exotic and common. America has a similar multi-ethnic effect, where people of many different nationalities can live in the same