Local living

Skiing locally at Studgorodok.

We have in the past grappled with the idea of having a car. There are arguments for and against. For us there are some pretty strong arguments against a car. For starters, it's expensive to run a car. But in Russia there are many more pitfalls.

- The tyres need to be changed twice a year, between Summer and Winter.

- The roads are very bumpy with pot holes, which means the shock absorbers need to be replaced at least once a year.

- The drivers are pretty dangerous here. Lines are not marked on the roads, so there are not lanes as such and people squeeze their way through at speeds.

- There are too many cars for the amount of roads in Krasnoyarsk, or vice versa there are not enough roads, but which ever way there are constantly bad traffic jams here. People can get stuck in traffic for two hours sometimes. We didn't want to spend a bunch of money to be sitting in traffic.

- There is no where to park your car. People live in high rise buildings. Even when new buildings are built underground parking is not put in. Occasionally this happens, but you have to buy a parking space, which can cost $10,000. It can also cost $10,000 to buy a garage. So people park their car where ever they can on the street. This is a security issue. You can pay to park your car in a secure car park (which you may have to walk a distance to).

- In Winter (unless you have a heated garage or underground car park, it can be a pain starting your car when it gets below -25. You can buy an automatic starter which should turn the car on and off intermittently through the night to keep the engine warm. Sometime the auto starters fail and people get up in the middle of the night to start their car.

- There is of course lots of paper work with running a car.

We decided that we would not buy a car unless our work ministry demanded it. To date this has not happened. In fact many of the indigenous students live just a few bus stops away, in our same community.

We have been saying to one another that we need friends locally where we live in Akademgorodok. We have been working away at this and it has slowly been happening. We visited a family in our same building last night and another local couple that I work with are coming over on Saturday. We have also met other people locally recently that we would like to invite over.

God has also been speaking to us. What does God's kingdom look like in our local area? We don't know exactly although we have some ideas. But we know God wants us right where we are.

Our local involvement at the moment is:

- Melody takes Abigail to her local kindergarten. (School starts at age 7 in Russia, Abigail is 5 1/2 and does English home school as well as Russian kindergarten.) Melody meets other mum's there.

- I teach at the local English school.

- We meet people in the market that we can invite over.

- We are developing more local relationships, even with our neighbours.

Akademgorodok has a small town feel. We like it and hope we can get in deeper here. We have even begun to meet indigenous people's in families who live in our immediate local area.

A funny story yesterday proved to me that local living is the way to go. I arranged to meet a friend at the swimming pool. We were to meet at 11:30. We would have been done swimming by 12:45 and then had lunch together. We could probably have had a relaxed lunch and been done by 2. My friend was starting work at 3, I at 4. But my friend called me while I was at the bus stop and came and picked me up in his car. We ended up driving to a different swimming pool at the other end of the city (20 kms). We stopped off at a few places along the way, stopped for petrol, stopped in to pick something up from home, etc, etc. We eventually got to lunch at 2pm and rushed that in 20 minutes. We then got back in the car and made it to his language school by 2:55, just in time. The funny thing is that my friend's job is really close to the first swimming pool I suggested. If we had not got in the car and driven all over the city we would have saved and hour and a half. I am convinced that people drive extra distance and go places they think are worth while because they have a car and because they can.

Local life can be a lot more relaxed and a lot more meaningful in relationship building. I may be convincing myself, but I just found one more reason for not buying a car. This gives me less carbon foot print than many people I know, which should mean I am allowed to have an opinion on climate change.... :) (But I'm not!).