Culture Shock

Russia is different. Here are a few examples:
This was the first page of the menu at the sandwich bar I went to today for lunch. It was not at all a particularly rowdy type place, but rather a quick business lunch type place in the center of the city.
These little fishies, called Kuryushka, are unique to this area (I assume the Baltic Sea) and are only available for a few weeks in the spring. The coolest thing about them is they smell like fresh cucumbers...until you cook them. Walking down the secondary streets of the city you come across these stands everywhere with fishermen selling their daily catch. This weekend, Ira and Genya invited me over for a kuryushka feast. Ira cuts their heads off, then prepares them in two different ways: fried in flour, then sprinkled in parsley, and fried in flour, then marinated in an onion, salt, pepper, and vinegar marinade. Both versions were very tasty. You eat them with your hands, and you can either take down the whole fish with the crunchy-but-edible bones or remove the spine first. I must have devoured 50 fishies.
Some of the stations in the very center of the city which were created in the 70s have built-in platform doors that line up with those of the train when it pulls up to the station. I have no idea how these are more efficient or less expensive to produce (Ira said that was the original motivation) but I can see that people might have thought they were safer (Genya mentioned that drunkards often fall onto the tracks and die). Either way, they are very strange.
These are my first Russian friends (other than Genya and Ira, of course) - two brothers who live near me on Vasilovsky island. I met the younger one, who calls himself Kuzya (on the right), a few nights ago when I was waiting for one of the bridges across the Neva river to open again in the early hours of the morning after a night out. He and his friend walked me home. At first I was a little weary of the teenagers, but they proved to be nice guys. Last night I went out for a night walk and multiple coffee stops with him and his brother, Sasha. I was surprised to learn that they have never been to Moscow. They both live with their parents in a small Soviet apartment near me and it seems their family actually has it pretty tough. I felt bad that they insisted on buying my drinks since it was obvious they didn't have the money. Chivalry here is pretty ridiculous.