Showers of Blessing

Technologically, Russia is so behind America on so many things, and then there are some things that blow me away, they’re so ahead, efficient, and stellar.

For example, our shower is unbelievably great; it’s a cubicle you enter (think teeny-tiny spa) with sliding doors, and you can set the spray to come from the hand-held bar, or a regular shower head, or a complete rain from the entire top of the unit (various strengths and droplet size), or jets that shoot out from the walls. (There’s even the incredibly random golf ball cleaner that you open and close them in that I can’t figure out how to turn on, which is fine since I didn’t bring any golf balls with me anyway.) But you have to turn the water on up to 15 minutes ahead (I know; it bugs me to waste this kind of water as well, but Joel assures me that there’s lots of water here!) in order for it to get hot.

There’s a great front-loading washing machine in the kitchen that is so cool that it can dry the clothes as well after it spins them. What a great idea! This is so advanced for America that I’ve only seen one before, and that was in Bobbie and Bernice Wolfe’s RV. However, almost nobody has a washing machine, and nobody, but nobody, has a dishwasher.

I’ve mentioned the improvements since last year in, for instance, the internet--many more people and places have excellent high-speed service--but the internet didn’t work at all yesterday at the Institute because inexplicably there was no electricity or phone service that day!

Many, many people have cell phones now, and their service is reliable and cheap; my guide Lina, for example, has what she calls the second-to-the-cheapest plan, and she pays about 1¢ to 2¢ per minute—no minimums or maximums, no 2-year plan—using a great, inexpensive phone that is smaller and cooler than mine anyway. So, for those of you with a, say, 750-minute plan in America, you would pay only about $7.50 to $15.00 that month for, and you wouldn’t have any overage charges, and you know how expensive those can be, because you still pay the same rate, and you don’t have to know ahead of time how many minutes you’ll talk in a given month. Way better.

The Metro, too, is cheap, efficient, and fast, and, if you know me at all, my preferred way of getting around, since I dislike driving. You can have a “smart card” that is so clever that Lina doesn’t even take hers out of her pocket; she just goes through the turnstile and it reads that she has her card with her. If, for example, she had given her card to me to use last year when she was in the United States, it wouldn’t have worked because it “knows” that she’s outside the country on a visitors’ visa. This is the kind of “Big Brother” that I find good and helpful. Even my temporary, works-for-one-week-only card doesn’t even have a bar code; I simply place it on the scanner, a green light comes on, and I’m cleared for the metro. However, when I arrived at my metro stop yesterday, the doors were all locked up inexplicably, with no sign or anything, messing up the many native Russians’ schedules who had to be somewhere. They--and I--walked to the next station, which was working just great, and all was fine—but again, it simply didn’t work that hour (it had earlier that day), again with no explanation (the posted hours said it would be open, and apparently it is, most of the time, working at that time, as best as I could figure from the Russian speakers around me).

OK, here’s another example: Russia, like France, has a fantastic mosquito killing system that I would love to have in the States. It’s a palm-sized ball into which you insert a tablet (think Glade Plug-in Scents) and plug the whole thing into an outlet. It’s so good that you can sleep with the windows open, and you won’t get a
single mosquito bite, and that’s saying something since Ken is so sweet he attracts bugs from Siberia and beyond. And yet you can’t find many, many useful products,such things as spot remover or carpet cleaner--and peanut butter is so expensive you have to sell your children to get any.

So, it just goes to show you that--well, I don’t know what it shows, but they’re interesting differences anyway.