This is just a cool picture of the house across the street from us.

The word cfet on the gate of our next door neighbors means 'light' in Russian. I was talking to one of my friends on skype and she asked, "what do you have to do today?" I told her I needed to put out the trash on the curb and write our electricity number on our gate. She said that was different so I thought I would let every one see it.

This is our light numbers on our newly painted gate. We have to write it down by the 15th of every month so that we can get our electricity bill.

As far as the trash is concerned every Monday you have to put all your trash out in plastic bags and pray that the many stray dogs and cats don't get into them. You can not put out trash cans because they get taken.

When we first got here we were unable to find large trash bags in the stores like you have for trash in the states. Everyone uses the little grocery bags for trash but imagine the number of small bags we have as a foreign family of five. I must say we have cut down on trash a lot but we also found these nice black bags at one of the bazaars and the blue ones come around our bottles of water.Then when you here the trash truck blowing his horn on your street you better be out there to throw your trash in. Or have some good neighbor relationships so they help throw it in for you if you are gone that day. They do recycle plastic bottles so you have those separated out and they go in that big bag over on the right side of the big truck.