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RE: What's for dinner?
Yes, it is just a way to preserve food for those long terrible Siberian winters. :-p I actually know someone who defected from Czechoslovakia. They spent 8 years in an Italian refugee camp before they were finally accepted to Canada. When they got off the plane in Saskatchewan, they thought they had been sent to Siberia. :-D
:DD What a story!)
But as a person, who lives in Russia, I prefer a darker mirror story. Let's say .... A Russian couple wants to leave Russia, they hate the regime, and are disappointed with life and perspectives, they are active and optimistic, skilful modern people, let's say a programmer and an artist. they spend two hard years to raise money, they work with papers, they get visas and all proper appointments - a Kafkaesque adventure - and, at last, they take a plane and having a long trip to Canada. They feel happy, almost dizzy with happiness, full of dreams about new free life in Saskatchewan... No, they don't want to have good salaries from the beginning, they are ready to wash dishes at restaurants and sweep floors, and they want to slowly create a new life on the stable grounds of Canada... After several hours of flight, they landed at the airport and noticed coming prisoner transport cars - Russian ones... They are in Siberia ...They are taken to a 3-kilometre deep mine to dig coal for growing Russian industry... Then, in the hut, on the very bottom of that coal mine, they are having a humble dinner (canned fish, rye bread, fake butter, fake tea) and watching a black-and-white analogue TV with the president's speech on coal as a key ingredient for success in the XXI century... The end ... :)
Is there such a thing as fake tea? What do they make it from?
Yes, that is a terrible story. It may even be the story that flashed through the minds of my friends.
Ultimately, they moved back to Czechoslovakia. Not from Saskatchewan, however, but from British Columbia. That Province is like a tropical paradise compared to the rest of Canada. The city of Vancouver has two seasons--Spring and Summer.
On the bottom of a 3-km coal mine, all food is fake. Luckily, all this food is premium patriotic so most people find it just fantastic.
I heard about British Columbia. Vancouver City. Sea climate, rainy, but no frosts (maybe very rarely .. in winter...), summers are mild. A very developed city. Expensive.
Czechia and Slovakia are not bad today.
Do these terrible coal mines still exist? "employing" enemies of a certain President perhaps?
In one respect, at least they get premium patriotic food. In the coal mines of Great Britain, it was the same situation, but without food or any kind of shelter. Children were sent down the mine as soon as they were old enough to throw pieces of coal into a bucket. Their only crime was being born poor. The trick was earning enough to buy some food for the day---something that rarely happened.
I pick on Great Britain, but it wasn't just them. It happened everywhere, and still happens today in countries that do not control how the rich treat their employees.
Do these terrible coal mines still exist? -
It was a metaphor, "a darker mirror story" I mentioned above.
They exist in various other nations around the world, sadly. Sometimes coal, sometimes another industry.