One of the biggest differences between Russia and America is how purchases are made. In the US, I buy almost everything on my debit card either online or in a store, depending on the item. Here, I don’t know of anyone who shops online and many stores won’t accept cards.

That means a whole lot of cash goes through my hands. Pictured above is money I’ve been withdrawing preparing to pay some of my housing costs. Our floor is recently renovated, so they put everyone who pays monthly here and on the older floors are the people who pay through their sending organizations. They’ve been threatening to raise our rent even though people have agreements that it will a certain amount.

Well, today I finally went and paid for my first month and fortunately was not charged the higher amount (more than 4/3rds of the original price). We’ll see if that holds for next month. Personally, I’d rather live on one of the other floors. The rooms have more character. Here, sure, our furniture matches, but we don’t have any storage in the desks (my roommate and I share what is basically a table instead of the separate desks with storage that other floors are privileged to) and we don’t have fridges in our rooms like on the other floors. We may have light switches by our beds, but on the other floors people have desk lamps, which are more versatile, especially for photography. Our walls are bland and theirs are patterned. We have a gauzy window treatment and they have actual curtains in addition to the sheer drapes.