Alright. I am woefully ignorant on the finer things in Russia. That said, I probably am representative of some of younger America and their thoughts so here it goes. Putin Putin fighting bears Cold Vodka The most amazing dashcam videos Snow / Ice Vodka Men who are so manly they redefine the definition of men Not a big fan of America Sick architecture though And epic, real serious literature Too expensive for us to leave the airport on our layover ($500/person for the day! :O) Lack of regard for smoking rules (no smoking in Sheremetyevo but people smoked anyways) Snowden Fucking massive country. 90% crazy empty "bad" land which is why they are still trying to take over other land that is better. May be related to "Men who are so manly they redefine the definition of men" Putin always gets what he wants The cold war was a thing......but I skipped that part of history apparently. "That 70s Show" filled me in on that gap. Gah. So ignorant. I'm going to go read a book or something.
Well, you aren't... that much off. The dashcam part made me chuckle: I still remember some of the featured videos, like a tank rolling onto the drive, or the Chelyabinsk meteorite shining across the sky. Putin didn't fight bears: if folklore is anything to go by, he rode them. In truth, he did help capturing and weighing a polar bear once; there were news about the thing. This much is... semi-disputable. You see, it's the government who have fangs aimed at the US: younger people, like myself, enjoy American culture and sometimes even strive to move there (like my friend who did Work & Travel USA two years ago and wanted to stay there so much he almost took up an offer to fake-marry a girl to get the green card). We see how much better the US' quality of living is and how more appealing people seem to be, and we desire that in a country where we stoically don't care if things suck and people smiling on the street is a rare sight. What's that about? Even back in the day $500 was around 15k RUB - many Russians' monthly pay! Now it's around 38k RUB. What can you possibly need this kind of money for? Presuming you were in one of the Moscow airports - only this can explain such terrible pricing. Even if you're eating out and being generally expensive at that, you can easily survive on 3k. I don't even... I recommend Vladimir Pozner's Parting with Illusions. He's basically a French-American stuck in the USSR for most of his life.Not a big fan of America
Too expensive for us to leave the airport on our layover ($500/person for the day! :O)
I'm going to go read a book or something.
The 500$ comment might've been in relation to the Russian Visa policy, which is nuts. Not US nuts, but almost.
Yeah. In order to leave the airport, the visa would have been $500/person. That was for super short amount of time too. There are other options that were more. The flight to Budapest via Russian was don't $349, to give that some perspective.