The Beauty, the Beast, and the Bumbling Public Official

The Wheels on the Bus Go Nowhere

1. It isn’t so easy, after all: the mayor of Saratov attempted to persuade his city’s residents to use public transport by using it to get to work himself. The result? A two-hour commute and a tardy arrival at his briefing! Luckily, Mayor Mikhail Isayev understood this as a call to action, not an embarrassment. He reprimanded snow-clearers for not being efficient enough, and has decided to continue the experiment by riding the bus in from every corner of the city to test the most heavily clogged roads. Although we applaud Isayev, we wouldn’t blame the people of Saratov for waiting to bandwagon on the buses until after the situation improves.

2. In a heartwarming turn of events, the hunter became not the huntee, but the rescuer. A man was fishing on frozen Maloye Lake in the Krasnoyarsk region, when he saw a deer that had fallen and become stranded in the middle of the lake. So what was he to do, except push the deer 400 meters to shore? The video speaks for itself, as you get a cute deer, a very classic Russian man discussing how anyone would save the deer and then talking about his homeland (and having a one-sided conversation with the deer), and, finally, beautiful views of a vast Siberian lake.

3. What’s better than a mushroom? An ice mushroom (although our stomachs might beg to differ…)! Giant, natural ice sculptures have appeared on trees that grow in a reservoir in Siberia. When the water is high, ice freezes around the trees and is covered by a mound of snow. When the water is let out of the reservoir suddenly, the water level drops but the ice creation remains. The natural sculptures have become a local tourist attraction, alongside the nature reserve that the reservoir is a part of.

In Odder News

• Seems fake but okay: an official, forgetting a few historical events, stated that Russia never targeted dissidents
• But Mom, why can’t we have Christmas when all the other kids have Christmas? The Orthodox Church is refusing to budge on the date of Russian Christmas
• Russian film is changing: a new, controversial Russian movie was funded by crowdsourcing and published on Youtube

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