I grew up in a “home” the size of a studio apartment in SF except that we were like 5-10 people in that space. With our kitchen, and a little outside space for bathroom. No running water and sketchy power.
It’s crazy how different that life is from the comfort here which I love.
I recall my ex-wife's family flat in Krasnodar. No air conditioner, One single 220 volt 20 amp circuit breaker for the entire flat. Bathroom door always kept closed to bottle up the stench. Her father always warned me that too often the walls of these buildings were made of "gyp" or gypsum, plaster of paris type stuff I guess. Cockroaches running everywhere. I finally brought a bunch of roach baits on one trip over.
He also warned me that some of the babushka's sitting together on benches outside were reporting back directly to the KGB, so keep quiet.
All the window AC's were blowing hot air at our wedding reception held at a local restaurant.
My well educated physicist grandfather was downwind in Gomel. In the immediate aftermath of this, all the while all the May parades were going on to show "everything is normal", he called my parents in Moscow to tell us to not send us kids to Belarus that summer, has locked his family in the apartment and sealed all windows with paper tape for a couple of weeks. After that we were never allowed to pick chanterelles in forests near Grodno downwind from Chernobyl, or pick linden tree flowers for our dried tea. Plenty of people did and sold that stuff at the markets to unsuspecting people.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] threadThat's some Soviet shit.
I grew up in a “home” the size of a studio apartment in SF except that we were like 5-10 people in that space. With our kitchen, and a little outside space for bathroom. No running water and sketchy power.
It’s crazy how different that life is from the comfort here which I love.
He also warned me that some of the babushka's sitting together on benches outside were reporting back directly to the KGB, so keep quiet.
All the window AC's were blowing hot air at our wedding reception held at a local restaurant.