Grocery shopping

There are two types of places where you can get food here: продукты and супермаркет.

Продукты is pretty much your neighbourhood convenience store but with more dairy and meat products (продукты means products by the way)

Супермаркет is your standard supermarket. There's also the гипермаркет (hypermarket) which is your supermarket plus department goods. Think something along the lines of Wal-Mart Supercenter or Real Canadian Superstore but the size of a Costco. Some supermarket chains (like О'кей and Лента) will offer discount cards. These usually come in handy as there are sales and specials for card holders (besides the regular discounts just for having a card).

One of the features I find interesting here is that you have to weigh your bulk food before you go to the cash. I don't see it a lot in Canada (maybe certain stores or provinces do this) but here it's quite common. You weight your bulk items like oranges or candy and it prints you a barcode sticker. The machines, however can break or run out of sticker and this is a pain for the cashier to input the code and weigh it themselves.

As for the largest chains here I believe they are О'кей, Магнит, and Ашан (AuChan for all you French people). The latter one is mostly attached to the shopping mall chain МЕГА but they can be stand alone. Then there are some chains not available in all cities of Russia either because they're local to the city (for example in Krasnodar there's Tabris) or they haven't expanded out south or east. Anyhow just a little entry for now.

The giant cheesestring

Each time I pass by the cheese section in the supermarkets I come across two types of braided cheese. One is called чечил (Chechil) and the other is called коса (kosa meaning braid). A bit of a note before I continue and before you Google: Chechil is a bit of an umbrella word for the cheese as there are many variants. The first ones you'll see are the brown braids but it's more than just that. I'm just covering two here.

Back home in Canada there's something called cheestrings which is a sub-brand name of string cheese usually marketed for what to put in your kids' lunch packs. The cheese is usually mozzarella but there are cheddar and marble variants of it. The fun part about cheese strings is you can string them to make fun characters like a person or an octopus then eat it. Or you can be just plain old boring and string the cheese and eat it (even worse if you just eat the stick without stringing it).

Chechil is sort of like that, the first one I'm mentioning here. It's white and it has a mozzarella-like taste and consistency but it's one giant string that's coiled into a tube-like shape.

Chechil

You can slice it and when you do you can push out the middle or you can uncoil the thing. You can also pull apart the cheese and it's almost like pulling apart a cheestring.

you can unwind it and string it apart

The other type of chechil I've tried is labelled as kosa in the stores in Krasnodar. basically its strings of cheese that are smoked, soaked in a brine of some sort, and of course braided.

This cheese is quite salty and it's good to have at parties. Personally the best way to eat it is to cut it into bits along where the bindings are. It's quite salty so pair it up with your favourite live beer (разливное пиво) and maybe some croutons (гренки) or some hunter's sausage

And an honorable mention goes out to Adygean cheese. Not a stringable cheese but someone in a chat group mentioned I should try some by frying it. It's good in my opinion.

Where the streets have names

Okay, it's not a post on experiences but more a commentary on streets and how there named.

The word for street in Russian is улица (compare with ulica in many other Slavic languages). Yes there are other street types here like проспект (avenue), шоссе (highway) and проезд (lane) but I'll be using улица in my examples.

Now улица is a feminine noun and names of streets are adjectives and  Russian is one of those languages where adjectives have to agree in grammatical gender and number. So if you want to name something "Apple Street" in Russian it would be "улица яблочная" or "яблочная улица". (Note Russian word for apple is яблоко, яблочн- is used for adjective uses).

There are, however, some exceptions to the rule and that is if the street is named after a person or a date. Let's say you want to name your street after good old Vladimir Lenin. There are a couple of ways to go about it but the only difference is whether to include Vladimir in the street name or not. The full name of the street would be "улица имени Ленина" or "улица имени Владимира Ленина" which basically translates to "the street of the name of [Vladimir] Lenin". Russian names do decline and we have the use of the genitive here. What escapes this declension is Ukranian surnames ending in -enko for example (and those indeclinable foreign names). There is a street in Krasnodar named after pilot Polina Osipenko which is rendered as "улица Полины Осипенко". The first name is put into the genitive while the family name remains untouched.

And yes, there are street named after certain dates or achievements. Using ones found here in Krasnodar as examples there's 40 лет победы (named after the 40 years since WWII ended), 70 лет Октября (70 years since the October revolution I believe) 1-го Мая and 9-го Мая. The last two I've mentioned are named after the May holidays in Russia (May 1 is Labour Day and May 9 is Victory Day).

A bit of a story to go along with the two streets named after the May holidays. It was my first time getting a taxi on my own. I decided to download a taxi app (which I believe a friend of mine uses) since it was easier than making an order on the phone. It was close to midnight when I was leaving and the people I was hanging out with advised me to get a taxi since public transport was most likely on their last trip. The app was easy to use (and it came with an English interface even though it wouldn't translate поиск такси (searching for taxi) or however it was spelled). So I input where to be picked up and where to be dropped off and 15-20 minutes later I got a taxi.
Now the way taxi seem to work is that the driver knows where you are going because you either told dispatch or they received it from the app. My destination was 9-го Мая but I ended up going to 1-го Мая at first. I guess my driver got confused (and I at first thought he was taking a short cut). I think the driver realized the error after I showed him my phone and he looked at his. It was an interesting experience though (and there were no additional charges since it was a fixed rate and not a metred rate for the trip).

And as for the street names I think I'm just fascinated with the way Russian works. English doesn't have a lot of adjectives that agree with the gender of a noun since not all nouns in English carry gender. (blond man, blonde woman, red house)