{"id":720,"date":"2006-10-30T15:44:55","date_gmt":"2006-10-30T15:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=720"},"modified":"2006-10-30T15:44:55","modified_gmt":"2006-10-30T15:44:55","slug":"english_russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/10\/30\/english_russia\/","title":{"rendered":"English Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Team-sleeping<\/a><\/p>\n

A couple months ago, I added a new stop to my daily tour of the InterWebs, a site called English Russia<\/a>. It’s a photoblog that documents the strange, beautiful, sad, and sometimes — like the image above of subway “team sleepers” — humorous aspects of life in the Russian-speaking countries. The photos and occasional videos are described in English so you’ll know what you’re looking at.<\/p>\n

I find this site fascinating — I grew up during Reagan’s tenure in the White House, when the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire and Russians were mysterious, faceless villains lurking in the dark corners of the world. After the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR imploded, it was if a whole other planet had been discovered, and I went through a phase of intense curiosity about the former Soviet nations. I wanted to know what the landscape looked like, what life was like over there, what the people really thought about things instead of what propaganda had always told us they thought. I even bought a Russian watch<\/a> and a set of defunct coins, thinking they might be worth something some day. The idea that something as huge and intractable as the US-Soviet rivalry, a paradigm that seemed to my teenaged mind as eternal as the stars themselves, could evaporate almost literally overnight was bewildering to me. If only I’d had access to this web site back in 1990!<\/p>\n

Here are some of the recent entries that have caught my interest:<\/p>\n

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