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For me, the most shocking thing was going to the market, the 'rinok'.  Seeing pigs' heads, freshly skinned rabbits and whole, uncleaned fish was more than a little unnerving for me.  The smells would stick to you like perfume and wouldn't dissipate until hours later.  However, once you left the horror movie called the meat market you would be amazed at what you could find: colorful carts of Indian and Uzbek spices, fresh vegetables, eggs so fresh they still had feathers on them and gold.  Not metaphoric gold, but real pieces of gold sold either as chunks or in jewelry such as bracelets and earrings.  How all this was organized in one small space was beyond me, but it worked. 

I remember that first week just wandering around the city, at the time I was living in Toliati, an industrial metropolis, similar to Detroit but lacking the attempt to make it pretty with museums or questionable architecture.  No, the engineers of this city saw the rectangle and decided that it was good and therefore all buildings would be grey and shaped like an ice cube.  I'm originally from Colorado so I had always taken landscape and daring building shapes for granted, I never knew that such stark, bleak places existed, it may sound like an odd thing to be shocked about, but I was. 

However, despite being surrounded by grayness I was able to make a few friends and understand a different side of hospitality.  One of my colleagues would bring in a chocolate bar and she would always break it up into several pieces and offer it everyone in the room.  Again, not to say that Americans don't share or anything, but I had never seen anything like this before.  When was the last time you saw someone snap a Hershey's bar into all the pieces and only take one piece and let everyone else have some?  When this happened someone else would put on a kettle of tea, complete clockwork.  It was an unspoken agreement that whenever someone brought in something sweet, you had to share it and tea would always be provided.  These small moments of sipping tea and discussing the brand of chocolate and comparing it to childhood chocolate will always stick with me.  In the end, you really realize that no matter how different humans think they are from each other, in the end, we really aren't.  At the end of the day, everyone does enjoy a hot beverage when it's chilly out, everyone worries about their families and most importantly, everyone is united by food.

Nice memories

Thanks

Not shocking, but not so pleasant as well. In the USA people would generally pay know attention to the way you look, I mean clothes or haircut, even if it's extremely eccentric. Yet in Russia it's common to see shocked faces and murmurs about you behind your back.