PLN at KIS

Since I wrote quite a lot of posts concerning film, I’ll write something different, and also something which I hope would be interesting. Since I lived in Moscow for three and half years, I have a pretty good idea of how that place is like.

When I first arrived in Moscow, I thought it was Korea in the 1960s, right after the war. Since Russia hadn’t yet recovered from Stalin and his pathetic idealism (communism, the KGB etc), it wasn’t exactly the best place to live. The school I went to, ‘Anglo American School of Moscow’ was good because it was one of the places where it wasn’t like Russia. The culture was very diverse, because there were students from over sixty different countries, from Albania to New Zealand. The majority of the population was Americans (of course), second was Canadians (I think), and the third was Koreans (yay!). For some unknown reasons non-Korean students loved Korean words, and for some known reasons most teachers hated Korean students (because we spoke a lot of Korean).

Our first house was in a street called Stari Arbat (Old Arbat), and I had to hear at least five beer bottle shatter (it’s a weird Russian tradition to shatter beer bottles to celebrate something), and at least three grotesque voices singing songs in Russian (I wouldn’t have wanted to know what they meant anyway) every single night. Apart from these annoying aspects, the house was fine. Our second house, which we moved to about three years later, was sort of scary. A pack of giant stray dogs lived outside of our apartment, and my mom got bitten by one of them, and I’m allergic to dogs. This was the major reason for why I hated our apartment. One of the only good thing was that the Korean Embassy (where my dad worked) was really close, so I could go on the computer when I wanted to because our apartment didn’t have connection to the internet. Another good thing was that it was also near to a huge shopping mall, so I used to hang out with my friends mostly at that mall.

Russians were interesting people to meet. They are racists, stupid, hostile, and ugly. In this post I would also like to clear the misconception of Russian people being beautiful. That is nonsense. Of course, there are some blond, tall, skinny people that come out in magazines, but that is rare. It is like trying to find gold in a pile of dirt. The rest are brunettes (I have nothing against them. I’m just saying they’re not blond), fat, ugly, and short. Some of them are desperate enough to ask Koreans out in random Metro (subway) stations.

Among the Russian population there are a group of people called ‘Skinheads’, and they are a disturbing bunch of air-headed, bold blokes. They are against any race that is not Caucasian, and they beat up and kill the person they pick on. During my stay in Moscow, the skinheads killed the Iraqi ambassador’s son, a couple of Armenians, some Kazakhstanis, and maybe some Japanese tourists.

This is a video about Skinheads. It’s scary.

All in all, Moscow is a nice place to live, if you are careful enough to not get bitten by stray dogs, try to stay away from skinheads, and if you can speak Russian.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 10:11 pm and is filed under crime and film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.