So you're probably thinking, “What's it like living in Siberia?” I live in small village called Tankhoi, which is situated in Buryat Republic, in the midway between Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude, the two biggest cities in this area. My current home is an old apartment close to my work, quite luxurious for this village standard.
View from our street of Lake Baikal
Our old wooden apartment building
Baikal Nature Reserve Headquarters with the nature reserve behind
I have running water (only cold in summer and hot in winter), and central heating. None of these things are that common in the houses here. However, the tap water is not potable. Instead, twice or once a week a big water truck with the sign “ВОДА” (which means water) comes to our apartment building. Everybody goes out with empty buckets to fill them up for the rest of the week. This water is from the Lake Baikal. Supposedly, it went through a filter, but apparently the filter is quite old, because you can see some algae and little fish swimming in it once in a while.
Water towers containing potable water from the lake
The water truck
I even have a "shower" (quite rare in this village), a black house coming directly from the radiator, which means sometimes it gets too hot. For washing, I instead use the Banya, a Russian traditional bathhouse. I love it! It is definitely my favourite thing in Russia. Pretty much it is a sauna, where you warm up and relax, get hit with the birch branches and right after it you jump outside in the snow. This is repeated a few times until you get tired. At the end, you mix cold and hot water in a bucket and somehow wash yourself. Before everyone can enjoy the Banya though, we first need to fill 2 big barrels with water and heat up the house with wood (this might take 4 hours or more).
Furthermore, our place can’t be locked, neither from inside, nor from outside. That’s why if I am leaving for few days, I either bring my valuables to my neighbours or hide them somewhere around our place.
Some things that surprised me about Russia were that every day the students are formally dressed in school. Males, from the age of 7, wear nice black pants, shirt and many of them even a tie, while girls wear high heels, which are generally very popular in Russia.
Traditional Russian wooden house with decorated windows. There are still plenty of them in our village.
Here in Siberia, the work between men and women is still quite divided in kind of old school manners. Women have to do all the housework, but then they expect man to pay for everything. Some of my friends still do hand washing of their clothes.
I have to admit that I had a bit of cultural shock at the beginning. It wasn't the rudeness of the ladies in the shops and trains. I was expecting this, but once you get to know a Russian person a bit better, they are very helpful, friendly and hospitable. What surprised me was the fact that Russians have difficulty to be on time. Moreover, if you ask them to do something, they will always say "Yes, yes, yes", whether they plan to do it or not. Here in Russia, the best answer for everything that doesn’t work is: “That’s Russia!” Then they continue with: “Don’t be bothered! You’re not in Moscow, but Siberia and the time passes slower here.
