Life in the Burg

It's now Monday afternoon here in St. Petersburg, and most of our friends and family back in the States are either waking up or about to in the next few hours. What I can say is this, that God has been very gracious and merciful to us thus far. He continues to sustain us, and he has made our landing here in St. Petersburg to be a very "soft" one.

There is no way we could tell you everything that has been going on and everything that we've learned. So from time to time we will simply try to answer some of the big questions that come up.

Living in General

It takes a fair amount of time to just live over here. What takes an hour or two in the States generally takes three to four times that amount of time here. For example, there were four things that we needed to get the other day, a rain jacket for Cristy, a boiling kettle for boiling water, cups, and house slippers. There's a "mall" of sorts just down from us that sells these products. The raincoat goes for about $100, the boiling kettle for over $50, the cups for about $35 and the house slippers for about $10 each. These are extremely nice shops where the few Russians who make extremely nice incomes go. But most Russians do not make extremely nice incomes, so what do they do? They go the Renok.

Renoks (pronounced "ree-knock") are kind of like open-air markets where people set up little booths and sell their products. In one section of a renok you might find clothes, in another shoes, in another hardware type products. At renoks you can bargain, talk the vendor down, and if you don't like the price walk down about ten feet to the next place. The renoks seem to almost always be much much cheaper.

So here were our two options.

1. Walk down to the "mall" and buy all of our stuff for about $205, be done in about an hour and a half and come home.

2. Walk to the metro (10 minutes), take the metro ride down town (30 minutes), walk from the metro to the renok (30 minutes), spend two and a half hours looking around the renok for the items we needed.

We chose option two. "Inefficient" you say? Of course it is. But here's hour our journey turned out.

We paid about $32 for Cristy's rain coat. We found a boiling kettle for about $13, a set of glasses for about $16, and two pairs of house slippers for about $8. All total we spent about $69, and the whole ordeal took about 5 hours.

But you say "what about all of that time?"

Granted we could have saved a lot of time and energy just paying more down the road, but there are a number of things we would have missed. First of all, most Russians do not make a lot of money. By going to the renok we were going to the place where most Russians go. We got to practice a lot of Russian. I got the opportunity to bargain with a woman about Cristy's coat. In short we got to see and experience more of what real Russian life is like, and learn about these people with whom we hope to communicate.

When you email us and ask us "What did you do today" and we say "We went grocery shopping and washed clothes (that's a whole other story by the way), don't be shocked. We are learning fast that life runs at a different pace here. If we move at that pace we will move with the people who live here. If we, because we can "afford to" choose to move at our own pace we will pass them by.