Hey Din,

I was curious as to why you chose to go to Russia for your vacation. Do you have family there?

Russia is high on my list of places I'd like to visit but I doubt it will happen. Hungary and the Czech Republic would also be interesting.

oh yeah, gotta see the Czech Republic before it die. i just bought some czech surplus gear.

It almost makes me want to revisit Djibuti, or my ever favorite Somalia again.


I grew up the son of a State Department employee so we moved around a lot. In my travels I got the chance to visit Moscow and Leningrad when they were inside the borders of the Union of Soviet Socalist Republics. I was a great trip and I learned quite a bit about our cold war enemy.

My best friend is the son of Soviet escapees, during the Cold War. His Mom and Dad, both Doctors over there, managed to escape to the US.
His Mom has since returned to visit her parents, but his Dad is unable to return.
His knowledge of Russian certainly comes in handy. It is amazing how many Russian speaking girls we meet on almost a weekly basis.

I am fascinated with the cold war. I think it was growing up with the threat of nukes etc. I remember it became trendy for the lefty teachers to obsess about how much the threat of nucular war was making the kids anxious and when they asked me about it I rattled off how far we were from any strike points and how we would be ok even in a big attack unless we got a really strange change in the weather.
Yes I ended up in some counsling but I was fine it was the adults who wanted the kids to be hurt so they could have another sign at the next protest that said "nukes hurt kids".


We are finding out some interesting things now that some of that stuff is declassified. It was Nato that was way more likely to start using nukes because they thought the soviets had such a superior conventional forces. Nato strategy was to use tactical nukes against soviet armoured divisions and hope they did not retaliate in kind. The soviets had special spetznaz units who were supposed to kill the nukes 48 hours before hand. A lot of those units were made up of Olympic athletes who had been in those western cities for games and could find their way around.

That would be awfully motivating ,trying to take out a nuke before it hit your entire army wiping out everyone you know.

Been to Budapest, Hungary. Liked it alot.