Where and Why I Traveled to Russia
I was in Russia for a two-week exchange program during which our group stayed with families in a city outside of Moscow. The city was representative of the best Soviet urban planning: each building the same, each block repeated ad infinitum. The cookie-cutter layout of the neighborhoods was confusing for visitors and amusing to the locals.
My Funny Story
A group of Russians, who were about our age, took my friend and I under their wing. During the evenings we would walk, talk, and compare notes about life as teenagers in our home towns, getting lost in conversation . . . and literally getting lost. When it grew late, and it was time to return to our families, the Russians challenged us by making us find our way home even though the pervasive sameness struck panic in us. The first evening, it took us an hour or more to find our way back home, and who knows how many times we circled the neighborhood trying to find some identifying marker that would tell us we were on the right path!
Lessons Learned
- Always know the address of where you're staying, even if you can't pronounce it. Write it down!
- Movies have been made around the fact that Soviet architecture can be eerily the same from one neighborhood to the next, and even from one city to the next. There is a good reason these are comedies, though their premises aren't so far fetched.
