Chernobyl's last wedding | Hacker News Reader

Chernobyl's last wedding

bbc.com

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I recall my ex-wife's family flat in Krasnodar. No air conditioner, One single 220 volt 20 amp circuit breaker for the entire flat. Bathroom door always kept closed to bottle up the stench. Her father always warned me that too often the walls of these buildings were made of "gyp" or gypsum, plaster of paris type stuff I guess. Cockroaches running everywhere. I finally brought a bunch of roach baits on one trip over.

He also warned me that some of the babushka's sitting together on benches outside were reporting back directly to the KGB, so keep quiet.

All the window AC's were blowing hot air at our wedding reception held at a local restaurant.

My well educated physicist grandfather was downwind in Gomel. In the immediate aftermath of this, all the while all the May parades were going on to show "everything is normal", he called my parents in Moscow to tell us to not send us kids to Belarus that summer, has locked his family in the apartment and sealed all windows with paper tape for a couple of weeks. After that we were never allowed to pick chanterelles in forests near Grodno downwind from Chernobyl, or pick linden tree flowers for our dried tea. Plenty of people did and sold that stuff at the markets to unsuspecting people.

"...her fiancé Serhiy Lobanov was asleep on a mattress in the kitchen."

That's some Soviet shit.

In the USSR, you usually don't have a spare guest room. An unmarried young man would be lucky to live in a separate apartment; otherwise, it is usually just a bed in a dormitory. At best, it is a one-room (12-20 m2) apartment with a kitchen (10 m2). A hotel is too expensive, so you put your guests into your bed, a folding chair, or a folding cot and go to the kitchen to sleep on a mattress. There were families of 4-5 people who lived in such apartments permanently.

Even in the US, I don't know many friends with enough living space to have an entire spare guest room. When friends visit, they sleep on the living room couch or an air mattress. Is this not typical?

I think the operating word here is not "mattress" but "kitchen". How cramped do things have to be to need to put the guest mattress in the kitchen?

They were 19 and 25.

It doesn't seem that crazy that there would be very little space. Visiting parents and/or grandparents probably got the bedroom, some friends the living room.

In most of the Eastern block the accommodation given to a family was sized for that family. Few had the luxury of a completely unused room.

The kitchen was routinely used as a room for two reasons, one that it was obviously a room, the second because it was easy to heat with the stove being right there. A lot of families were using the kitchen as permanent living space, usually relegating the grandparents to that worst room so the young ones could get a decent start in life.

It's less common than it used to be, but in India it's still kind of normal for newlyweds to live in the groom's parents' kitchen for a while until they get their own place

Flippant answer: in the U.S., in your twenties, you have no spare space, and visiting friends sleep on your couch. In your forties, you have a guest bedroom, and visiting friends stay at a hotel.

Possibly more accurate answer: it depends on what kind of housing people live in, if they have kids, and if they work at home. Most residential houses were built for couples with children, so if someone owns a house and is single and/or childless, they likely have spare bedrooms that serve as a home offices, hobby spaces, or guest bedrooms. People living in apartments usually don't pay for more space than required for their daily needs.

Somebody else was likely sleeping in the living room already. The reality of living conditions in the USSR was harsh.

You were typically allocated spacious 9 square meters (96 sq. ft.) of living space per person, with an additional 18 square meters for the head of the family. So a 4-person family would get about 45 square meters (485 sq. ft.)

And these were _typical_ numbers, not a guarantee. Plenty of families had less space.

To be fair it says "In a nearby apartment packed with guests" - if your house is oversubscribed, the host gets the worst accommodations is pretty common worldwide - "He had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he—as the host: he knew his duty and stuck to it however painful—he might have to go without."

My wife grew up in a one-room apartment with her parents and two older brothers.

I routinely tell her "I want our daughter to have everything you didn't get as a kid".

1 Bedroom apartments near me in the free west are asking for more than 50% of the average wage and there's only a sliding door between the 'bedroom' and the kitchen.

That is reality for billions of people.

I grew up in a “home” the size of a studio apartment in SF except that we were like 5-10 people in that space. With our kitchen, and a little outside space for bathroom. No running water and sketchy power.

It’s crazy how different that life is from the comfort here which I love.

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