Dear CCI friends,
Kudos to Mike Metz for his terrific foto-journal pages of our September group while traveling throughout Russia. This is a very different place than what we read about in mainstream media. In the capital cities and in the regions, Russian people are friendly and their students are quite interested in talking with us. Russian cities are clean, trimmed and well-lighted. It’s clear local people feel safe at night on their streets, parks and metros. There are few policemen/women around and they don’t carry guns. To me it reminds me of my youth in Kentucky in the 40s and 50s. Our downtown areas were safe, as were our river banks. Kids rode their bicycles until dark set in and there were few street lights around.
Russia’s youth today wear the same styles as ours, but it’s clear there is a more conservative trend in clothing than a decade ago. Gone are the scant show-all cleavage of the 1990s, hemlines are somewhat lower than earlier. One sees young women in skirts and classic jeans … with lots of long straight hair like our youth. They don’t seem to have a “grunge culture.” Everyone has a smart phone and all seem to be connected to another reality. Russian parents and youth are admitting this and questioning whether or not this is a healthy trend.
Enjoy the latest foto-journal from Mike Metz.
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
I’ve never been to a Rotary Club meeting in the U.S., as I’ve always worked for large companies, not the small businesses that typically make up the clubs. But we were invited to a meeting in St. Petersburg tonight. The clubs started there back in the wild 90’s, after communism died and the Russians were trying to figure out capitalism. Here is tonight’s group:
Spent two hours with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR today, he’s 88 and showing it, but still very sharp. That’s Sharon Tennison, our trip leader on the right, his interpreter on the left.
Coming out of a shiny new airport into the Moscow air one is hit with a Times Square-size digital billboard for Hyundai. The city is wealthy and clean, with wide boulevards, new shiny cars, and the same McDonalds, KFC, and Louis Vuitton shops as London, Beijing, or New York.