When I was 10, Mcdonalds and Carrols started to come to Russia (around 1995). Free napkins, additional sugar, cute plastic spoons in Mcflurry ice cream, two-colored coctail straws, paper bags - everything seemed so surreal. It's like photos of people migrated to US with many types of sausage in the supermarket: now it's reality in my country and 20 years ago you could never imagine it exists.
So people took all the free napkins and all the sugar bags home (sadly, my mom still has this habit). They re-used plastic spoons and straws. You needed first to take used straw home (don't hurt it! hold it carefully) and then wash it after every use so others could drink beverages at home with a straw. Yes there were straws in USSR, but first thing, they were rare, and second one, they were of boring colors. Like condoms.
Gosh, we even washed used plastic bags and hanged them with clothes-pegs to let them dry. And it was Moscow, not Havana.
We washed used yogurt cans, too. Because out grandmothers used them to grow seedlings in winter and take them later to the summer cottage (famous datchas).
When I was 8, we made ashtrays of beer cans at official school housekeeping lessons. Like this:
I tell you this and I understand how huge was the cultural gap we covered in last 20 years.
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