May 03, 2021

A Refreshing Dip


A Refreshing Dip
That's not the Loch Ness Monster in this grainy video frame; just a Russian. VK account 63NEWS

Sometimes, you just have to force spring's hand. In a town still choked with sea ice and temperatures barely above freezing, one city employee is ready for warmer weather.

An Archangelsk worker was caught on camera swimming in a massive puddle last week, as his colleagues and onlookers watch. Among tarpaulins, construction equipment, and plenty of mud, a clip of the guy taking a dip, posted on Russian social media site VKontakte, has caused quite a stir.

The massive, urban lake is the product of the breaking of a massive municipal water pipe in the city, which is preventing a large portion of Archangelsk's population from using their sinks. While some go for a dip, other residents must visit water distribution stations to fill buckets. This Russian Michael Phelps is one of a number of workers sent to solve the problem.

We're sure swimming isn't helping improve the situation. We just hope he didn't pee in the pool.

Russians love to swim in holes, apparently: for a while, Moscow housed the world's largest outdoor swimming pool, also a massive construction site hole.

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Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
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A Taste of Russia

The definitive modern cookbook on Russian cuisine has been totally updated and redesigned in a 30th Anniversary Edition. Layering superbly researched recipes with informative essays on the dishes' rich historical and cultural context, A Taste of Russia includes over 200 recipes on everything from borshch to blini, from Salmon Coulibiac to Beef Stew with Rum, from Marinated Mushrooms to Walnut-honey Filled Pies. A Taste of Russia shows off the best that Russian cooking has to offer. Full of great quotes from Russian literature about Russian food and designed in a convenient wide format that stays open during use.
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This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
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