Russia and biking

Yesterday was a crazy day at work. The kids ran around, switched off the lights, and in general created chaos. Therefore, I was not able to spend time sitting at the computer and update my blog with trivial details about my life for your reading.

Nothing interesting happened in my life. I continued reading the End of Poverty. I find his explanation of what happened in Russia and Poland interesting. He believes that Poland did so well because the international community helped. No western country really wanted to help Russia transition to a market economy because they still believed Russia was the enemy.

I spent one day in Russia. I can't say that I really enjoyed it, so I am really biased. First of all we had been traveling for about 24 hours when we arrived in Moscow. We only had 24 hours there and I was really tired and wanted to sleep. My teammates wanted to do everything touristy they could in 24 hours. If you remember I always hate touristy things. I dislike it even more when I'm seriously sleep deprived, jet lagged and traveling with a huge group of people. Then after all this I had people pinching me on the subway, seemingly unfriendly people on the street and so on. But that brief experience has made me interested in Russia. This book can't explain the culture and the reasons it is such a hostile place to foreigners. But it's nice to think about different aspect of how Russia got to the point it as now.

I've been biking for 3 weeks now. I'm not really sure why I didn't start biking seriously before now. I don't know why it took high gas prices and a broken car to make me start doing what I wanted to do for years. I think a huge part of it is my friends. I'd talk about wanting to bike and they would give me all the reasons why it was a bad idea. I kept listening to them because I thought they were being practical. Now I realize many of them are too scared to really be objective. I'm trying to do research on how to bike with the cars on the road, proper care of the bike and so on.