Why Walking Russian Streets is a Dirty Business...

When watching movies and TV shows made in USA and Europe, i always wondered why people are ALWAYS shown wearing outdoor footwear when, in fact, they’re walking indoors in their homes. What bugged me, is why in the hell would they bring dirty shoes indoors… Because, in Russia, indoors we only wear slippers. Then, my husband’s friend moved to USA, and when he came back to take care of his wife’s papers last December, he showed us his shoes and told that he had no need to clean them for several weeks walking streets of Washington – but now they were dirty just because he walked from airport to a taxi and then up to his house. Later, last February, i went to Moscow. And now my personal mystery is solved – i simply live in a dirty shithole of a city. Check out, this post’s header picture are my very own boots, photo taken a week ago after i  came home.

I had to take them off before entering apartment, but still had to wash not only the boots themselves, but also half of bathroom rugs, the bathroom itself and everything i used to wash the boots, PLUS a cat got dirty, myself too and some stuff on the way to bathroom… Why was i so dirty? Because i had to park my car in a “lawn” next to my house’s normal parking zone, where all spots were already taken by someone else. Take a look at all the dirt inside of that poor car, it’s not even worth the time to clean it, because the next time I'll sit in, it’ll get even dirtier than before:

 
When i went to Moscow to take some classes, i bought pants used for snowboarding to keep my ass warm in that frozen hell of a city, but the pants were only sold in white color. I used them for 6 days straight, with no need to ever cleaning anything. Then, when i got back home, still reeling from being in a clean city, i made a mistake of wearing the very same pants going out to a next-door store (it was still cold back then). It took me 15 minutes straight to plunge into enough shit for my pants to require a complete wash… Of course, everything else is also covered in dirt – streets, cars, people’s clothes – and during both autumn and spring times dirty water is flowing all around.

Some shots of our streets i took in the last couple of week to showcase this fucking shame here:


Not all cities in Russia are as dirty as Rostov-on-Don where i live, but many of them are, and certainly every city in Rostov area are complete shitholes. During USSR time (at least, in its good part, before 80s) we didn’t had to live in dirt, streets were regularly cleaned, grass planted to keep earth from eroding and lawns - they were really lawns and not just bare dirt wuth no sign of life - were divided from roads so earth couldn’t spill all over with rainwater. Now, nothing like this is done. In my city, only a couple of central streets are cleaned during summer time – mine is not one of them, but the next one is, and i can hear cleaning machines working around 2-3 AM.

Why is it so dirty here? Rostov area is climatically a steppe, with land being more or less flat for hundreds of kilometers straight, and it’s between Caucasian mountains and Black and Azov seas (i bet you never heard of that one, it’s a small basin pouring into the Black sea). Winds are blowing strong and hard during both autumn and spring (flying buckets and plastic chairs are not an uncommon features here), and earth erosion is a big problem. All vegetation larger than a shrub were planted by humans after World War II, people kept winds down by planting lines of trees and bushes - woodland belts - many kilometers long, one after one after one, and erosion by planting grass and trees everywhere in cities.

Of course, no one is doing that anymore. Half of the forests were burned down in the last 10-15 years, along with many woodland belts, and they are barely replaced. The result: extreme earth erosion. We now even have sand and dust storms occasionally (they are rare now, but i feel it’s only a beginning…) when everything gets covered in grainy shit. And even without those, everyday winds are carrying dust everywhere… And as if that weren’t enough, humans weren’t humans if they didn’t threw their garbage all over the place too.
Can’t wait for the good weather to settle. At least, the dirt won’t be STICKY anymore…