Some Observations:
1) Nuclear reactors are located right next to living areas! It's a normal part of the landscape.
2) On the highway, I see cars pulled over selling stuff. People will stop on the highway or fight traffic crossing it to reach the cars to buy stuff. Reminds me of China.
3) And like China, the idea of waiting in lines is foreign to them. You essentially need to squeeze your way to the counter. If you wait in line and leave just the slightest gap, someone will cut in front of you.
4) Okay, without getting myself a lot of hate mail, the women, they, um, dress sexy. Usually braless and sometime braless with a see-through blouse. I was, of course, thoroughly offended.
Pickpockets: The Red Square is to die for. Beware of pickpockets though. A gypsy woman holding a baby got her hands into my hidden pocket. It's a zippered pocket within my front pants pocket. She actually got a hold of my passport. I felt it and knocked her hand away. I instinctively shouted, "Hey!" She didn't let me off so easy though, because she then proceeded to follow me around Red Square shouting "Hey!" mocking me. Man, I never wanted to smack a woman so badly in my life. The fact that she was carrying a baby didn't help either.
On Tour: We took a tour to see some sights just to avoid some of the logistics of planning the routes. This is the first tour I've ever been on where we actually left 2 guys behind. We left them at the war memorial monument. To the tour guide's credit, we did wait for at least 10 minutes.
The Bureaucracy: Doing anything takes a long time. Checking into the hotel took over an hour because we had to register each person individually (20 minutes a pop). They are typing pretty extensively on their computer, I just don't know what they're typing. We also had to register with the local governmental agency in every city we were in (OVIR registration). Usually the hotel will do it for you. The only problem was that the hotel was misplacing passports! We saw more than a few irrate tourists. Even buying a SIM card for my cellphone required them to make copies of my passport and Visa...
The Food: According to CNN, this year Moscow was voted the most expensive city to live in. It is, but not the food. The food prices were pretty decent (at least compared to the likes of Tokyo and New York) and yummy. The borsch was good, the pork leg we had in Drova was fantastic, the bliny was tasty, and we had real stroganoff in Propaganda.
The Metro: It handles a million people a day. It is beautiful as well as efficient. But, there is a learning curve. I learned how to read Cyrillic just to be able to decipher the station stops.
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