Some insight on Russian society

Through my friend and through the volunteering, I've met several Russians who are patient enough to either let me speak in English or are patient enough to speak slowly to me in Russian. Last week, in addition to our English Discussion Club meeting on Monday, we went out to bar with a beautiful view of the Neva. I want to share a couple interesting little tidbits that I learned from them:

• It's apparently common in Russian Internet parlance to use Albanian words to make yourself sound funny. For example if you want to call someone a Krasovchek (a handsome guy), but you replace the "k" with a "g", thereby sounding Albanian, it's supposed to be funny. I tried repeating it a couple times, to broad laughter. Replacing almost any "k" sound with a "g" is just funny sounding to them. I don't really know what an equivalent might be in English.
• There's an entire site called www.vkontakte.ru (lit. in contact) that is a basic copy of www.facebook.com. I now have a profile, sort of in Russian. It's hard for me to type the cyrillic letters without these little decals you can buy for your keyboard.
  
• People in this country are forced to go into the draft, unless they are enrolled in a University or have children. What's quite common here I'm told is that families will pay off doctors in order to get them out of having to serve. I realize this happens in a lot of places though, not just Russia.
• I've been asked repeatedly here about why Bush was elected president a second time. It's amazing (and unfortunate) how some Russian people's image of America is based solely on our leader. When we turn the table to Russian politics and ask who will follow Putin, the unanimous opinion is that they are pretty sure they will only get to know him for a very short time before he's "elected".
  
• As I have mentioned before a lot of this city is under reconstruction. I don't think I can describe to you the extent to which almost every 5 buildings has some sort of scaffolding and every other block's sidewalk will have at least one ditch in various stages of filling. Apparently, there is a lot of money to be made in this business, but the money is being used to only renovate the facades of the buildings, not the courtyards (like this one which Dostoevsky wrote about), pictured below. There is more money to be made in renovating the buildings since that costs more, than in just knocking them down and rebuilding.

Inside

Outside

Well, I am off to go eat some more Bliny's and try my hand at buying a train ticket to Moscow. I have lots more to write about now that my econ tests are over.