Привет из России

[RoHS]

Hello to all members of this forum. I am Russian. And already some time ago I created my lucid dream diary on this forum. But I would like to tell you about my country, Russia. And find out how you live in your countries. As I understand it, there are people from the United States?
They say that people from different countries have different mentality. But it seems to me that people are the same everywhere, no matter what country they were born in.
What would you like to know about Russia, but were afraid to ask?
PS: I apologize in advance for the incorrect translation into English. Since I use google translate. I myself do not know English well, although I learned it at school.

[RoHS]

For starters, it's worth saying that I live here:



Country Russia. Siberia. Irkutsk region.City of Bratsk.



And where do you live?

[Caradon]

Nice. I don't know about the mentality thing as I feel like an alien

But yeah I imagine the life basics are the same most everywhere. Go out to make money to pay the bills. When you don't have to be doing that try to enjoy a few hours of free time as best you can. Repeat.

[RoHS]

Since I live in Siberia, the weather is very cold here in winter.  Now it is -13 degrees Celsius.  In winter, temperatures can reach -35 -39 degrees Celsius.  In Russia, temperatures are measured in Celsius, not Faregates.

Despite the cold winters, our summers are also hot under +30 degrees Celsius.  In the summer, I swim in the Angara River, which flows near our city.

What's the weather like?

[Caradon]

Yeah I bet it does get cold. Any polar bears?

Swimming in the river on a hot summer day sounds like a good time. There is a place in Wisconsin not so far from me where they made a river tubing park (Apple River) Or Float Right Park where people rent big inner tubes and they take you on busses to a starting point and drop you off and you tube down the river for what seemed like half the day and they pick you up again and the ending point. I've not actually done that since I was a teenager but it was a lot of fun back then.

In the US there is basically every kind of weather imaginable depending on where and what time of year. I live near the northern border so like you it gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

[RoHS]

We do not have polar bears, but brown bears are found. There is a forest near the town. And sometimes bears wander over to us. Mainly in the area of country houses - vegetable gardens. Although I myself have never seen a bear. I only watch local news. But I personally saw the fox quite closely. She was in the area of the observation deck of the hydroelectric power station.

[RoHS]

[Caradon]

Cute. Yeah a lot of foxes around here too. For a while I had a family of them living under a big fallen tree on the edge of the yard. So always would see them running around the yard at night.

[RoHS]

I have heard that in America they mainly live in two-story wooden houses. Although there are large apartment buildings, skyscrapers, but mostly in America, small wooden houses. This is true?

In Russia, five-story and nine-story houses are mainly common. Skyscrapers are found only in large cities like Moscow. I myself live in a five-story brick apartment building. We also have our own wooden houses with a vegetable garden, where people plant potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers. In Russian it is called Dacha.

[Caradon]

Five and nine story houses are the normal? Wow. Is it really big families all living together? I don't think most rich people here even have houses with that many floors.

But yeah the average house has only two floors. Some have basements too. So I guess would make it three levels with the basement, two above underground. One underneath. When I was a kid we had a basement in two of the places I lived. I don't have a basement where I live now. I don't think most families have more than two to three kids. So no reason for five to nine floors.

[RoHS]

These are the houses in my city. On the right side of the road there are private houses with vegetable gardens. On the left side of the road there are five and nine-storey buildings. There are a lot of apartments in one house. Each apartment has its own family. They are not relatives and do not know each other. They are just neighbors. The apartments themselves are: one-room, two-room and three-room (in some houses there are 4 and 5-room apartments, but this is a rarity).
I live in a two-room apartment. Bedroom and hall - 2 rooms. Separate from these rooms there is also a kitchen, bathroom, toilet. That is, in fact, together with them, there are 5 rooms, but only 2 halls and a bedroom are considered. There is also a balcony.

[RoHS]

It is also very difficult for me to translate the word "Подъезд" into English. I doubt that the word "Entrance" is the correct translation .. The "Подъезд" is the entrance to the stairs, the staircase itself from the 1st to the last floor. There is a basement at the bottom of the stairs. It is closed by a door. The staircase goes down to the basement even lower. There is a heating pipe inside for the whole house.

Here is a typical "Подъезд"in an apartment building.



The blue piece of iron on the wall is an electric meter. There, the tenants of each apartment see how much electricity they have run over. Then, according to the meter readings, they pay taxes in ЖКХ-hcs - housing communal services.

We pay taxes for: electricity (electricity), heating (in Russia, every apartment has batteries for heating), water supply and sewerage (this is to take more money from the population, in fact, the same as water supply simply for draining water into the sewer, an additional fee) , garbage disposal (trash cans are on the street), house renovation (which no one has repaired and is not going to do for 20 years now) and they also came up with a major overhaul of the house (the authorities will allegedly repair the whole house when it gets into a bad state - pay for nothing in fact). Well, once a year comes just a tax for housing, an apartment that you live there.

What taxes are paid in America?

[Caradon]

Entrance is the right word.

Yeah looks basically the same. I think it's a language mix up. We call those on the left apartment buildings or apartment complexes. Very different from a house.