Red light, green light

As I walked out of school tonight, I looked up and saw the light change from red to green at the large intersection near my apartment. Now, this would be unremarkable in America, but this particular intersection has lacked traffic lights since we arrived at the beginning of September. For the three months we've been here, cars have treated this intersection as a giant four way almost-stop-unless-you-are-in-a-hurry. I didn't mention it before because I cross this intersection on a more than daily basis and I didn't want to provoke any undue, or even very due, concern. But now it is all better and I can cross when the little man is green. Before my method had often been to wait until a Russian also needed to cross and cross with him or her, with myself on the side away from the traffic.
That's just one little oddity of Russian life I had started to feel was normal. Another was the proclivity of Russians to put meat in pastries. This isn't unheard of in America, of course, but here it is the expected norm. Mike, the short-term missionary here, learned of this the hard way, biting into what he thought was going to be a huge roll but which turned out to be full of greasy and no longer heated meat. My lesson came a little differently when I expected normal meat and was surprised to find tongue. At the Thanksgiving dinner at our flat, the Russians kept expecting to see meat in all our bread. They were suspicious when I told them that the dinner rolls were just bread, and they even asked if the pumpkin pie had meat in it!
By the time June comes, I think I will have a lot of surprises waiting for me when I get home and have to re-define normal. The other day we were reminiscing about having clothes driers when I suddenly realized I had been picturing them in bathrooms and I had to remind myself that that is a Russian assumption, that it is different in America. Don't worry, though, I'm very much looking forward to getting to re-define my normality back to American standards.