There won't be anything about the US, I'm kinda sick of it. I'm reading all sorts of nonsense on Wikipedia and retelling it to you in Russian. Of course, this activity is more dignified than reading idiotic blogs on LJ, which are essentially no less dumb than fishki.net, but still. What's really cool to do on a summer evening is to be out in nature, which is exactly what I was doing today - riding my bike.
By the way, I replaced the rear sprockets (cassette) and chain on it - they were worn to trash from winter and lack of maintenance. The new stuff works pretty well, plus the manufacturer's name sounds funny to a Russian ear - SRAM. The cassette is simple, a PG-830, the chain is a slightly higher class - PG-880 or something like that. I don't know much about all this - the mechanic at Trek said it's easier to get the simple ones and change them more often than buying expensive ones. The latter only make sense if you ride a lot and in harsh conditions - through mud and puddles. The prices, by the way, are normal - not much higher than the famous store ChainReactionCycles, where all the bike fetishists, I mean bike upgrade enthusiasts, shop. While I was at it, I also bought a universal bike tool, lube that's better than oil, patches with glue, and a chain cleaning machine. It lets you clean the chain without taking it off the bike. Very relevant for a lazybones like me. Although my laziness is so monstrous that up until now I haven't cleaned anything at all, except for relatively rarely washing the bike.
I was riding around Lake Bolshiye Stropy, didn't ride that much, about 25 kilometers, but it took me a whole two hours - the terrain is way too rough, in some places I was almost walking, in others pushing through the forest. I'm SCARED of ticks, was too lazy to get vaccinated, as usual for me. But while I was pretending to do cross-country, that is, off-road riding, on the shore of the lake opposite the hospital
I saw something interesting.
Someone bought a piece of land right near the shore, built wooden cabins there. Since the lake is overgrown on that side, they cleared the vegetation from the shore and made a giant 100-meter-long pier. All this is wonderful, but one detail ruins everything. You can barely get to this place from one side - I was walking on squelching ground through cattails (which you probably think are reeds).
Cattail
If you walk through the forest, you'll hit a fence, or get completely stuck in the thicket. You can get through from the other side, there's a path, but it's blocked by a nailed-on board. In case anyone doesn't know - 5 meters from the coastal strip in Latvia cannot be made private property. That is, by blocking the road, these scumbags are simply preventing me from using the lake and land that by no means belong to them. It's clear that they want to hog the landscaped territory for themselves, motivating it with the labor they put into it. But the state and laws are needed precisely so that this doesn't happen. I wonder what all those extreme proponents of private property and minimal state intervention have to say in such cases?
If you want to know where these anti-people greedy guts settled, here are the coordinates in Wikimapia. Or even a photo from Google Earth's symbiont - the Panoramio service.
In winter you can get there across the ice, but there's no point.