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In 1995 I had the pleasure to be part of a State Department sponsored "cultural exchange" with our then new friends in the Russian Federation. Basically it amo
by bane 4y ago
In 1995 I had the pleasure to be part of a State Department sponsored "cultural exchange" with our then new friends in the Russian Federation.
Basically it amounted to myself and about a dozen others, organized into a small chamber orchestra going to Russia for a summer, and in exchange a group of Russians formed into folk/pop entertainment group visiting and staying with us for a while during the school year.
I can't say that 1995 in post-USSR Ekaterinburg was incredibly different than 1991's pre-Russia Sverdlovsk. There were a few bits of free market showing up, but the general economic situation there was pretty dire. Even for me, who grew up in a very rural area and quite poor, felt like I came from nearly unimaginable wealth.
A couple years later the State Department and Russia repeated the exchange and I had a chance to show my host mother around the local shopping malls and such. The "change" from communism had already happened, the Russians by then were by and large waiting for America to arrive.
It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and it has given me lots of both wanderlust and perspective that I've carried with me for the rest of my life. I was very happy to see the improvement in standard of living in many parts of Russia over the years, but I'm very sad to see what they're wasting it on at the moment in Ukraine.
- tomcam 4y agoThat sounds like a once in a lifetime experience. What kind of music did you play, exactly? What instrument did you play?
- bane 4y agoI played violin. We played a mix of classical music and pop film scores. A local composer in one of the areas we visited composed a song for our group that we also played a few times. The Russians played half late 80s early 90s synth pop and half Russian folk music complete with wardrobe changes. They were really cool.
- ihatepython 4y agoWhat did they think when they went to Best Buy? (or maybe it was CompUSA, Radio Shack, or Circuit City back then)
- aaronbrethorst 4y agoBest Buy has been around since the early 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Buy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Buy
- bane 4y agoI don't recall making it to an electronics store at the time. But I do remember talking a lot about the state of consumer tech. Most of what we talked about or showed them in our homes was familiar even if they didn't have this or that device at home. My host family for example had a color TV, a Dendy NES clone, and a boom box that my host brother endlessly played Metallica mix tapes on. I saw a few desktop computers in passing, but have no idea what they were. They shared a single phone with the entire apartment building. It sat outside and was red. I think it looks almost exactly like the phones in Half Life Alyx. The Internet was very nascent at the time and they all seemed nonplussed by the BBS scene.