Heating system

In Russia we can afford to do many things in an ineffective way.

We don't worry too much about spending resources because we think we have plenty to spare.

Among such things though there is the one that is very special.
It's our heating system.

We have to heat up a lot of buildings, with huge square, and we have do it for a long period of time, like 6-10 months per year.

Another factor is that in many cases people lives crucially depend on that system.
If during the winter the building gets frozen, people wouldn't be able to live in it until next summer.

The system consist of a few parts.
The first one is a plant that produces hot liquid.

Usually it has several redundant sources for making energy, usually it is piped natural gas + reservoirs with oil or store for coal.

It can work and produce warm for a long time autonomously.
Also, for redundancy there are several such plants, so if one of them stops, others can do its work.

After warming in such a plant hot liquid pumps in to well-insulated pipes.

and goes to the buildings and homes.
Despite the insulation, those pipes are pretty warm, so many animals like them, and vuild their nests above them.

Inside the room we have radiators like this one:

We have them in each room under the window.

The radiator is a very simple devices with a tap to adjust it's temperature.
The system is good in general, redundant and cheap.

I pay about 50$ a month for that heating, which is much cheaper than producing  heat with a small gas radiator or wood stove (I do that at my country house and it 10 times more expensive).

Our people love to have hot temperature inside houses, usually it 26+C inside, and since I live in the block apartment it happens that I never open taps of radiators in my rooms, because I have enough heats from neighbors.

How do you keep warm in your home?
What is the temperature in your home?

LEWWWP and Holly

The LEWWWP will be closed in few days.

I trust Holly has some strong reasons for that, so nothing to do.

I have a lot of feelings about that, but I’m going to leave them in 2016, and start a new life in 2017. Traditionally it’s what those “New Years” are serving for.

I was a member of that awesome community for more than a year, and I want to share some my thoughts, not about LEWWWP as community though (I believe we will continue) but about Holly.

She was a soul of the LEWWWP for eternity, and for me personally she is the face of the LEWWWP.

I believe Holly taught me enormous amount of things and many of them without even my awareness.

I’m going to share only a few most remarkable of them.

First of all it’s confidence. When I came to LEWWWP I was confident enough to write a few sentences in English, but wasn’t ready to say them aloud, for the audience, for recording, for being published publicly.  But all of that comes to me fast and naturally because of way how she encouraged me.

I can’t but mention her persistence with fighting for  my pronunciation. My helpless tries with “courage” will be our private joke forever.  Her “transcription” classes were my the best hour of the week.

Almost every day I was astonished by her attentiveness to details, one has only to mention or show some challenges and in most cases Holly will help with that immediately or later.

She has given me so many positive feedbacks with many improvements to my writing that I must count her as co-author of my blog.

As an IT guy I used to expect from users simple questions about IT, but it doesn’t work with such a tech-savvy person as Holly is. If she asked you something about IT, you should be prepared that she’s already known about the subject all what you can google about it.

It’s a challenge to be on par with her.

I know for sure we meet her again and again on other sites and in different circumstances, and it will be our “new page”.

Intercultural communication

I used to attend a MOOC course from Shanghai International Studies University, which was called "Intercultural communication".

I haven't finished it yet; in fact after I finished week 3 out of 5, I had decided that I lost something.

Hard to describe what exactly I lost, but it began to seem for me that I was missing the point, and I decided to take a break and to start again later.
But something I already found interesting.

In those three weeks they showed many challenging cases of miscommunication and they described the reasons.

I also liked a few tricks which they show too.
For instance, a simple question, who are you, can lead to many different types of answers:
- I am Ivan, I am from Russia
- I am a christian
- I am a sculptor

And it shows us different approach, different balance between commonality and differentiation from people of different cultures and origins.

As far as I noticed, they didn't mention the language barrier too much, they set it out of the box.

In ideal circumstances when the language doesn't lead to misunderstanding anyway our different background is enough reason to make a problem.

Since we are intercultural community without any borders, it might happen with us too.

Do you have some fun or educational example of such cultural misunderstanding? Can you share it?

Halo

These days we can see a scenic effect in the sky.
It's Halo:
Halo  is the name for a family of optical phenomena produced by light interacting with ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. Halos can have many forms, ranging from colored or white rings to arcs and spots in the sky.  
Wikipedia: Halo_(optical_phenomenon)
 

These photos are not mine, I copied them from the local community website, because it's too hard to take such  a photo with my smartphone.

Please share your favorite sky effects, polar lights, ellipsis and so on.

Can the politeness be excessive?

I've been listening to my morning podcast this morning when I run into the question "Can the politeness be excessive?", mostly because of this dialogue in it:









The dialogue starts at 11:51 and finished at 17:57, so its length is about 6 min.

What happened in this 6 minutes? Well one girl asked one boy return her i-pod back.

If I were here, and was an author of that scene it would be:

- Hello, Luke, give me my i-pod back please.

- Sure, here you go.

Something for  2-5 seconds long.

Also I mentioned a lot of hypocrisy or/and direct lying in the original dialogue.

For instance, girl was telling him:

- Actually, I can't remember, did I lend my i-pod to you

But it's a lie, she can remember, she is here because of that, and she knows that exactly.

How it's possible that this lying is polite and fair directness is not?

If you are lazy enough to listen to the podcast I can give your another example.

The scene:

The teacher is trying to manage multi-user conference call for a class.

One of the student has really bad sound, deafening noise which prevents communications for everyone.

From my point of view, it's polite, to disconnect that student rapidly, giving him/her a chance to realize that he/she causing a problem for many others, and probably fix it and connect back quickly, and thus save time for everyone.

Simple arithmetic works here for me, causing problem to a group of people is inappropriate  (old communist habit?)

But I have seen another picture, when the teacher trying to explain the problem to that student, waiting for a long time when this student will leave the class by himself/herself.

Since, I don't feel it might be a pleasure to hear that noise, probably there is another explanation , I reckon it must be politeness.

My questions are:

1. Are there limits for politeness? When we should stop trying.

2. The thing definitely related to the culture, but is it related to language?

3. What do you think what is the current trend for such things now, are they changing, do we simplify rules or vice-versa ?

Jeremy Clarkson about politeness

I've read a good text here: https://bashny.net/t/en/103153 (Jeremy Clarkson on the Russian)
It's a short one, but in case if you don't want to read that all, I'll show you a few quotes:

...

Our obsession with good manners means that we feel a duty to discuss the weather with the postman and leave with a hairdresser. We are writing to laugh long thank-you letters to people who have already thanked verbally.

...

When the British Top Gear fan, wants to take a picture with me, he spent hours explaining how his son watches the show on the channel «Dave», and how he can parody me and everyone in the house "pray" for our transfer. In Russia, just say, "Photo".

...

For the British it all quite wildly. But some time later, I began to realize that incivility saves a lot of time and nothing you do not need. When someone is spending your evenings on every empty-headed nonsense, just say that they are wrong and walk away.

...

Already at home, at the airport "Heathrow", I came across a pretty sociable immigration officer. "For a long time went?" - He asked politely. I saved two seconds, not bothering to answer.

It looks like for one week we defect this guy.

It looks like he already knew that excessive politeness is a burden, but he just wasn't brave enough to make this conclusion.

Human a social animals, and it's a hard thing do something opposite to common behavior.
My favorite video in that regard:


My questions:
1. Do you think that you could survive in the society where the rules of politeness quite opposite to what you got used too?
2. How fast we can get new rules?
3. Which direction is easier to adapt? To the excessive politeness or to the brevity?
4. Are there "wrong" and "right" way about that topic?

Grandfather Frost

In this post I'm going to show you some info about Russian version of Santa - Grandfather Frost.
There are a few differences in appearance:
He wears :
- A fur hat,
- Long fur coat that usually red
- Long white felt boots
- Warm gloves
His beard is thicker and longer.
He doesn't have elves and wife, only his granddaughter Sniegurochka  (snow-little-girl) accompanies him.
He doesn't wear glasses, doesn't smoke, and he is really old.

There are a few differences in his behavior:
He never uses chimney or something like that.
People who waits him are awake and they keep door opened for him.
Usually granddaughter comes first, and all together loudly invite him to come in.
Children expected to report him how their acted this year, were they good boys/girls and so on.
Then they declare poems to him aloud (because he is old and doesn't hear well they should do that aloud), they sing to him.
Usually all the children and granddaughter dance together traditional way around fir-tree.
He never stay in one house for a long time, there are many houses in the country, and he supposed to visit all of them in one night : New Year eve.

His transport
There are a lot of ways for him, it could be a fancy sleigh or a normal sleigh.

Sometimes we says that she went by skies.
I think there is nothing special about where he lives / how he moves, that's why we don't have only one version for that.
The gifts
He has a big red sack with him. He never allows someone to touch it.
When children finish their show he gives gifts to them.
Usually it's something what child asked in their letter, but it is not mandatory: it can be anything.

Do you have your local version of Santa?
What are the differences?

The early bird catches the worm

The early bird catches the worm - they told.

I waked up early, and since it's still my Ski-December I went to the ski path.

And there was almost no path!

The new snow covered it.

Perhaps skiing through is a good exercise, but it's too much for me.

Three kilometers later I gave up and went back.

Because of outside cold and intensive working/breathing my face got some frost:

And when I came home, my younger son was impressed but this my new look, and laughed a lot.

Sledding

Skiing is not the only winter entertainment. Sledding is not bad either.

I like the variant of sledding when the sled is pulled by dogs.
Dog sledding is sometimes called "mushing", and a person who travels by dog sled is called a "musher".

Because my dog is small, I made my own sled.
I made it from titanium, it's a very lightweight metal.
And because of titanium, the whole construction weighs about 3 kg.

I polished the runners, and I coated them with varnish, so now they can slide easily.
I have a few sets of runners also: for hard snow with ice crust, for fluffy snow, and for something in between. They differ in the width and in construction.

All members of my family like this sled, excluding maybe the dog only.

When we need spring water, we take a canister in the baggage rack and we are ready for a small trip.
The well is close enough, something like 1 km from our house.
A good reason to walk, a good exercise for the dog.

Chess in my life

Family

I got acquainted with chess at a young age. I was 5 or 6 years old when I saw my father playing chess with my grandfather. I asked them to teach me, and my grandfather did so.

He liked to play with me, we played huge amount of games.

He almost never let me win on purpose, he thought that there is no place for fake wins. 

I used to cry a lot because of that, but now I agree that facing real troubles is the best way to learn.

When I grew up a little bit, he stopped to play with me, and only many years later I understood that he was just not a good player, and he strongly dislike losing a game. So when I was mastering the game better than him, he lost interest playing me.

However, he was my the best teacher me, I wouldn't say he was "unbeatable" but it was hard to beat him. And it was exactly what I needed.

I am very grateful to him for all those games. He was patient, he explained me the things again and again, and he bought and read me some books about chess.

My father was a better player, and so I rarely played against him at that time. Only when my grandfather started to have excuses not to play with me we started to play. 

We don't do that regularly, perhaps 3-4 times per month, and for long period I have almost no ability to develop my chess skills.

School

At the age of 12 I changed schools, and I was lucky enough to become a member of a school class which had about 8 good chess players. 

We played a lot after our classes. We managed tournaments, and were passionate about chess.

It lasted for approximately two years before we opened a "bughouse" game for ourselves.

Bughouse is a variation of chess, a team game. After we ran into the "bughouse", we fell in love with it, and never played ordinary chess anymore

Bughouse chess ended up playing a huge role in my future life, I made friends, I acquired skills, I even got my job because of it.  I'm going to write a blog about it sometime. 

Children

Now I'm not developing my chess skill anymore. I play rarely on freechess.org, I have rating around 1700 for long time. (2700+ champion of the world, 800 beginner).

Now my opponents are my sons. 

I started to play with the older one when he was only 2 years old. 

I play with him regularly, and I let him win from time to time.

I've tried to replicate the methods I used to learn chess.

I can't see any progress, but what's even worse is that I don't see very much interest.

I am ready to give up as a chess teacher.

That's why on the last week we both went to the local chess school. 

I read in the news about a local event - a chess tournament - held at the chess school, and I wanted to show it to my son.

It was a good solution, first of all I could talk with the best teachers of our city, because many of them were judges during this event.

The second good thing that the boy was impressed by number of people who play.
He was curious about rules, table of results, and so on.

The thing which surprised him a lot when a slender little five-years-old girl defeated big adult man.

He can't believe that, he asked me how it's possible, and I could see how new this thought for him.

Luckily, in my city we have plenty of good coaches, and some of them works only with young children. 

We made an arrangement with coach for my boy. We will see soon what he gets from it.

Our chess school is very good, for instance their student Volodar Murzin who is only nine years old already plays for Russia and he is in top 10 chess players of his age.

That's why it's better for my son be trained by them instead of me.

Dec 1: The Beginning Of The Winter And Ski-Sember

Despite the fact that we were already having temperature down to -30, and 2 meters of snow for last month, officially, the winter starts only today.

Because our country is huge and have many different climates, we don't use any special days as begin/end of season, just the calendar.

So today the winter is started for me, who hardly survive under snowstorm last week, and for Sochi people who have +10 and rain.

I try making any December to Ski-sember, by doing my best in trying skiing each day.

There is the last year picture from my sport tracker:

As you can see only a few days missed.

That's why I greeted December on the ski road today.

After a long pause it was not an easy thing for me, but looks like I still can!

Hope I will be ably to beat my record and I'll make this December the one without days-off.

Help me with that! Please do remember me that I have to ski every day 

Igloo or choom

When it's getting cold, it is not comfortable to sleep in the tent anymore.

But people who like camping can't stop their traveling, that's why there is another solution for overnight stays.

It's "chum" or "choom" or "igloo" sometimes when you use snow for insulating.

The big tent with fireplace and valve for avoiding smoke.

Originally they are made from reindeer skins and sticks.

Now they are made from modern materials (aluminium prop and polyester tents)  that makes it easy to use, and to transport.

We used to have some stove inside it, like that:

This stove can be easily disassembled to a few little details, and it's easy to transport it.

Because the choom is good for team up to 15 men, it's easy to distribute small parts of stove and choom to your team, and it will not be too hard to carry on.

When you have a choom and a stove, you can stop think about temperature at all, you can camping whenever you like, but anyway there is a nuisance for good sleeping.

From my personal experience in a team of 10-15 people, you will for sure have one or more musicians.

Usually it implies a concert for a whole night.

The simple rope bridge

During our hiking we (my son and I) had to cross the river.

The river is not big, it's possible to swim it over, but it almost winter, and it's uncomfortable to swim now because of temperature.

That's why we had to use some kind of bridges.

Map told us, that we have only one reasonable option: using a rope bridge. All other alternatives, were too far from our route.

That rope bridge is too simple. It's not even a bridge. It's just two ropes, one about 1.5 meter above another, that's all.

I decided, it's a good entertaining moment for our hiking.
We bring special equipment with us for safety. We used belts with small leashes with carabiners.

Two leashes for my son,the first one to buckle him to the rope, the second one to attach him to me.

And two for me, I had to change ropes during the way, but I didn't want a moment when I wasn't attached to something. 

That safety leashes were extremely useful for us.
Because the distance between ropes is long, my son couldn't hold on the upper one, and he had to act like an acrobat in a circus.
That's why he fell sometimes.
But he liked the process, after he assured that falling is safe, and he can sit and swing while I pull him forward, he played with that a lot.

Now, after we finished our hiking, he asks me to build such rope bridge somewhere for playing.

Worms farm

I love fishing, I love to grow plants, and I have a fish tank, based on that info, can you guess who is my the best assistants?

Yeah, it's worms .

I have a worms population and I grow them.

They are hybrid of two breeds:
- red Californian worm
- local worms.

Red Californian is good, they multiply rapidly, they live long, but they have a crucial flaw in my case, they love warm, and they can die if temperature is above 10C.

The average annual temperature in my place is +3C. Not enough.

That's why they were bred with local worms, and now they can bear almost zero C temperature, in detriment of other advantages of course. They grow a little slower, etc.

I bought a small box with this worms several years ago, and I have a huge population of them now.

I use them to produce vermicompost as well.
That population produces something about 4-5 garden handcarts each year. It's more than I can use.

That is  a perfect fertilizer, it's proved many times.

From time to time, when I have time for that, I'm asking for damaged and dried plants in plants shop.
I put them in the bucket with vermicompost, and usually, the magic is happened.
I gave a lot of grown palm trees in kindergarten because there is no place for them anymore.

I feed worms by fallen leaves:

And I have a good assistant for that. The one who collect all the leaves.
Leaves used for two goals, first it's the fodder, the next it's a house.
We made big pile of leaves

to keep warm inside during the winter. The layer of pressed leaves is about 2 meters in height, it's enough.

Worms live in the middle of the pile, converting leaves to the vermicompost.

When there is no more leaves to eat, they migrate to another corner of the pile. That's the time to get the compost.

Worms are very conservative, they hardly can change the food which they are adapted too.

I did a lot of experiments, before I stayed with leaves. 

Some of others foods works better, but it was either hard to sustain the constant quality or it can be  more time-consuming.

This farm is very easy to maintain, I spend only a few hours an year to manage it : only a few time an year I add the leaves, and two times an year I pull the compost. Comparing to the effort, it's very profitable thing.

The worms itself are the fodder for my fish in the home aquarium, and when I had a chickens farm, the chickens loves them too. Worms are the good source of protein for birds and fish, I use it as a supplements even when I use another fodder.

It's also priceless for fishing. 

My boy likes to use fishing rod with a float and worms as a bait for fishing. It's a simple fishing, but it can be very gambling pastime.

Have I convinced you to start your own worms farm?

Learning English by conversation-exchange

In my previous post I wrote that I got a lot of my English from podcasts.

Where did I get the rest ?

The second big part comes from conversation exchange.

It's a way to practice your English speaking with native speakers.

In the beginning it was a really hard job for me to get acquainted with native speakers. Especially because Russian is not very popular for learning, only several people in the world would like spend their time talking to you.

But as time went by I found a way to solve that and I want to share a few my tricks with you.

1. The place

First of all you need a site where people looking for partners, there are a lot, google knows about  2,030,000 results.

I tried only few of them, and found that this one : www.conversationexchange.com suits my needs.

2. The attitude

Be ready to be refused. For any ridiculous reason. People have different habits and culture  all over the world. I promise you will be surprised. Some people don't speak with person of opposite gender, some people don't like bearded men.

Don't overthink it. Don't get disappointed. Don't let you be stopped by that. 

If you got refuse from someone who you didn't know a few moments before, who cares, go on.

I've written a tons of letters at first (bad letters actually) before I got first contact, I thought a lot "what is the reason?" and rewrite and send my e-mails again.

3. The text 

The only thing what you partner know about you, it's your letter, only if this letter is good he or she may decided to look on your profile and contact you back.

When I mean the letter should be good, I don't tell it should be without mistakes in perfect English, my experience told me it's not important (moreover some people would like to correct you as soon as possible to show their expertise), but it definitely have to be understandable.

Brevity! Very important to deliver your thought concise. It's a crazy world today, you can't expect that someone will spend more than two minutes for that.

What to write about?

We have a funny proverb in Russian, I'll try to translate.

I like strawberry, but hate worms. In opposite, fish like worms, so when I go fishing better to have worms than strawberry with me.

I used this wisdom a lot. If your contact wrote something in their profile -> use it.

She likes art? show her your drawing; he likes cars? show him funny Russian car, ask about his car.

In a few words, try to imagine what do you have/know what interested to this human, and use it in your letter.

Add only a few word about you and a link where they can get more info about you (blog/profile/social network).

The only fact which I left undecided is should I write that I married when I send e-mail to woman or not. It's not a easy thing, I should admit. I tried both option, but nevertheless women refuse me because "they don't speak with married men" equally with "they don't speak with single men".

I tried a lot to predict that, I was looking for clue in their profile, but got failed.
Mostly I do it in random way now, the percent of success is the same.

4. The topic

You got contact, what's now? How to start conversation?
Well the first talk is the easiest one, you have to say your name, where you from, ask the same, pretty easy.
The problems will come later. Sometimes it's really hard to find a topic especially when you (or your partner) have difficulty with the language.

I solved it in this way: Photos! ;)
I share a lot of them, about me, my place, my town, something funny in general. And we can discuss them.

Sometimes we can't predict how the usual (for you) thing can surprise other human from another continent. 

I also write in my blog for the same reason, but it works a little worse.

5. The time

Don't wait too much. If you didn't resume contact in a few day after the first conversation, most likely it lost. I can't explain it well, but I have a lot of statistics about that.

If you interested in this particular contact, try to resume it in a next few days.

I don't mean be clingy, but don't expect you can resume conversation after the long time.

6. Does it help?

I don't know the answer, it definitely something different than having a teacher.

People will not fix your mistakes endlessly (British people never do it even once)

So if your goal is grammar, better to find another way.

What it actually do, it helps you start to speak what was a huge problem for me.

Even when I could understand 90% of my podcasts, I couldn't speak at all.

And it has changed in a few months.

7. The feeling

I've found that it's normal to feel like an idiot most of the time when you are on the beginning of your way.

It's not a quite comfortable, but think if you can get used to how useful it can be for you ;)

8. The bottom line

Let me show your some my  statistics. 

Unfortunately the site which I use, store letters only for last six month, and it's for sure not my "active" period.

My active period was 2 years ago or so, and at that time I considered a few coherent sentences in English as a big achievement.

The last six month.

I send e-mail to over 480 contacts, got answers from 90 of them ( a huge rate,  huh?) 

I got about 15 friends whom I call from time to time, often than once a month.

And I got 5 close friends whom I talk to almost each day (not about English already though).

Is it good? Well it's approximately 2.5 times more than I got in my off-line life for the same period.

Podcasts and a riddle about statistics

I've got the significant part of my English from podcasts.

What is a podcast? Wikipedia tell us:

The word arose as a portmanteau of "iPod" (a brand of media player) and "broadcast."

A podcast is an episodic series of digital media files which a user can set up so that new episodes are automatically downloaded via web syndication to the user's own local computer or portable media player.

For a long time I'm addicted to those podcasts, and I'm waiting for new episodes passionately.

Each morning my smartphone checks all my subscription and shows me the list of new episodes for today. 

Honestly I can't listen to all of them for a long time, because I bit off more than I can chew, so for now I have a huge list of episodes to catch up.

I like some podcasts more than other and they always have the high priority for listening.

The absolute leader, the  top priority one is Teacher Luke podcast.

He is a English teacher from London, who also is a stand-up comedian.

I adore his humor and his pronunciation. 

I like his explanation for serious topics, I think he can explain everything.

If you have a time during a day when you can listen to something, I strongly recommend consider to listen to his podcasts.

I do it during my walking and cycling.

Recently I listened to this episode about British comedian Tim Vine (which is the perfect topic itself) and Luke read to his listeners the statistics about where his listeners are from:

I was surprised. Russia? Really? On the top of the list?

It can't be explained  by interest to English language, because I just can't believe in that.

During all my life I met two persons who learn English seriously here.

And I have only a few Russian acquaintances over the Internet  who do so.

There must be another explanation. 

 - Am I living in an area which don't represent "average Russia" well? What if everyone outside the are speaks perfect English as well as Russian? Unlikely!

- Do those listeners just like his humor? How they understand it then? 

- Are we hiding our ability to speak English? Why?

Could you please help me to reveal this riddle?

The New Year

The summer season is ending here. As always it's abruptly.

Two day ago it was +30, yesterday it was +12, and today it's +5.

Probably we will have snow in the September.

We have The New Year celebration at Jan 1 as many people in the world, but to have some fun we closing our summer with a fake new year celebration too.

It means, the fun season is ended, let's wait for another one.

Despite the fact it's a fake new year, it has all what a real new year has.

The contest of costumes for children, they were declaring poem during it, and they got their sweets.

The fire show, with fireworks, fakirs, and magicians.

The Russian Santa. Russian Santa is kind of different, from western one.

We call him grandfather Cold, and he is usually accompanied by his granddaughter Snowgirl.

For sure we had our fir-tree:

and traditional new year's food, like champagne and caviar, and a lot of else.

And, of course, rock stars and the concert, for the whole night:

Because this fake new year is about the summer, we celebrate it not in home, but at our favorite camping on the river Chusovaya with our friends. 

More than 400 people were there with us. A lot of fun.

My boys still dance and sing songs which they heard there.

My older boy was the one who opened the concert by declaring poem, he is still proud of himself (and I proud of him too). I am not sure if I can declare something for such large audience.

Did you ever celebrate fake holidays?

Would you like participate this one?

Bards' festival

Recently we visited a special even - bards' festival.

It's almost like a live concert but with some quirks.

1. It located on the big meadow in the forest, and almost all people who visit it live in the tents.

It's like a combination of camping and live concert.

2. It longs for a few days, first of them it's a contest between bards.

And the last one is the gala concert, where only best of the best are allowed to performance.

3. There is no electronic or synthesized music, it's all prohibited.

All what can you use is your voice, music instruments, amplifier and speakers (last two are provided by organizers)

4. It's a kind of special genre. The restriction is not about music melody, or way of singing, the restriction is about who wrote the text.

For contest it can be only your own song.

There is secondary scene (smaller one) where bards allowed to sing songs of other authors, but it's out of contest.

 Why I like this event? It's pretty special. 

For instance: in additional to main scene and secondary scenes there are a lot of other places where bards are singing, after their participation in the contest.

Almost each campfire have its own star. It's good organised.

I call it small scenes. It's a campfire, place for bard(s) and the audience, and several tents on the perimeter.

The music differ significantly from one small scene to another.
It give you almost 100% chance to find something which you like.

In addition those concerts longs for a few days, and people make friends, combining into duets and making new music just in front of you.

I like to see and listen to talented people. I like this community.

Many of them don't see each other for the whole year, and meet here once a year, and produce their hits just on the spur of the moment.

It was the first time for my boy when I took him with me on this event, and he was very interested in it.

The idea, that the musician can be not on the scene but sit near to you and making his music just here and now, was new for him.

- Have you visited such events?
- Would you like to visit it (again) ?
- Are you a famous bard ?

The first Russian train.

As I mentioned before my town is an industrial town.

There is the metallurgy industry here since 1600 or so.

At that time it was a very hard job. Almost no machines, all works were made by humans.

Because the metallurgy need an iron, and coal, water, and other things and all of them located far away the logistic was a hard task.

Several centuries the task was solved by horses, not the most efficient way.

In the early 1830s Russian inventors father and son  Cherepanovs built the first Russian steam locomotive.

I took a photo of it, and attached it to the post. It's not an original one (original is in the museum) but it is a very exact copy of it.

Cherepanovs were serfs of the Demidov, owner of local factories, and they got freedom after that invention, and became a chief mechanics at his factories.

Now they are the part of Russian history and we are proud of them, that's why   we have a monument about them in our town.

The funny thing is that local citizens call them "brothers" without a reason. Just because they looks similar on the monument.

It makes a funny folksy name for that monument, local call it "The monument for brother Cherepanovs, father and son". Kind of controversial but people don't see that.

Internationally the steam locomotive was invented before their work, in France (if I am right), but because of lack of the Internet and science magazines they had to reinvent it again.

I mention them, because I'm planing to describe a funny phenomenon, what we idiomatically call "The Russia is the motherland for the Elephants", and those guys could be a good illustration for it.