Stairway to Heaven

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post is public restrooms. When I visited the Russian Far East three years ago, my group was fascinated by the horrible state of public restrooms. Of course, restrooms in people's homes were immaculate, but whether in a cafe, museum, or anywhere, they were generally so bad sometimes one didn't want to use them, and in fact I rarely saw any of our Russian hosts using them, I guess they just held it all day. One of my teammates started documenting the variety of conveniences on film, and later gave each of us a calendar with a different horrible restroom pictured for every month. A clean restroom was a rare occurence to be celebrated. Perhaps it's different there now, I understand a lot has changed in the "Wild East" in the past three years.

However in Moscow, clean public restrooms are in abundance. The strange thing is that, often to get to these nice restrooms, you must negotiate a narrow, winding staircase. For some reason, they don't like having the restrooms on the same floor as everything else.And if you can't wait to get to a cafe or something, there are even porto-johns scattered throughout the city, the use of which will cost you 10 Rubles (about 25-30 cents), and are cleaned frequently by the attendants to whom you give your 10 Rubles. Think about that the next time you're feeling unhappy in your job.