Well, you aren't... that much off. The dashcam part made me chuckle: I still remember some of the featured videos, like a tank rolling onto the drive, or the Chelyabinsk meteorite shining across the sky. Putin didn't fight bears: if folklore is anything to go by, he rode them. In truth, he did help capturing and weighing a polar bear once; there were news about the thing. This much is... semi-disputable. You see, it's the government who have fangs aimed at the US: younger people, like myself, enjoy American culture and sometimes even strive to move there (like my friend who did Work & Travel USA two years ago and wanted to stay there so much he almost took up an offer to fake-marry a girl to get the green card). We see how much better the US' quality of living is and how more appealing people seem to be, and we desire that in a country where we stoically don't care if things suck and people smiling on the street is a rare sight. What's that about? Even back in the day $500 was around 15k RUB - many Russians' monthly pay! Now it's around 38k RUB. What can you possibly need this kind of money for? Presuming you were in one of the Moscow airports - only this can explain such terrible pricing. Even if you're eating out and being generally expensive at that, you can easily survive on 3k. I don't even... I recommend Vladimir Pozner's Parting with Illusions. He's basically a French-American stuck in the USSR for most of his life.Not a big fan of America
Too expensive for us to leave the airport on our layover ($500/person for the day! :O)
I'm going to go read a book or something.