Name of the town is Irkutsk. It is, basically, a center of East Siberia, but don’t let the word “center” trick you. Actually, the farther you move from Moscow to the east, the less-developed infrastructure you have, excluding some port cities at the very far east, like Vladivostok. The western part of our country is way more advanced than eastern. Here we have higher prices on everything, except immovable property (cause obviously nobody wants move to live here, lol). At one point of my life I worked at hostel for some time (cause I can speak english a little bit), and one of guests from "the western side” gave a perfect and polite description of our town:
“It is very beautiful, a lot of historical and cultural places here and there, many old wooden houses at the center of the town, but I’d prefer not to live here for a lot a reasons”.
In other words – we're too far from “civilized russia”. Generally speaking, people are slightly different here: a little bit less-educated, more rude and aggressive. Not all of them, of course.
Irkutsk are not far from Mongolian border, thats true, but majority of the foreigners here are chinese. For some reason chinese people really like our region, they do a lot of business here and you can buy chinese goods basically on every corner. Two of the biggest malls in the town calls “Shanghai City” and “Chinatown”, no joke. One of the chinese businessman even hold a souvenir store, where he sells chinese fake goods presented as “Made in Moscow” to chinese tourists. That’s funny.
I am 25 y.o., and almost all of my friends are moved out to St. Petersburg or even abroad long ago. Like they say, if you have an university education and a financial opportunity to leave this place – then there’s absolutely no reasons to stay here. But I ain’t have both things, so i get used to enjoy my life “as is” 😊.
I'm not a patriot, but I am don't hate my country eather. Every place has it's good and bad sides.
Since my main interest in life is music, I wish more "big bands" could play in our town. But it's simply unprofitable. Only one hundred people came to see Kreator gig in 2013, and this was before the Crimea incident, which staggered our living standard a little bit. That's... sad.
Ah, and about how big is Siberia is - well, your guessing is right - every federal subject of Russia to the east of Ural Mountains can be called "Siberian". So it's more like a common name for a pack of federal subjects, than one whole gigantic district 
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Many of local people are proud to live here and they proudly called themself "Siberians", which makes them think that they are way more hardcore russians, because of all the difficulties like cold climate and impassable roads.
posted November 23, 2019 15:31
posted November 26, 2019 17:54
