Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Soviet Tourism. Cruise Diary, Part 7. London, England 1978 #ussr, #soviettourism" video.

I don't understand. If she only had $32, how did she have 40 pounds in Britain? That doesn't add up. I don't understand why these cruise videos would lose you subscribers. It's a chance to get kind of inside view of how Soviet elites thought about Western countries before the fall of the USSR. Being written by a disgruntled homesick wife gives a lot different insights than someone who was just a normal tourist.
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@UshankaShow well, something's weird about her story. A pound was worth about $2.00 in October, 1978. If she had 40 pounds to spend, that means she had to come up with more than $80, accounting for the foreign exchange fee. She writes about buying at least some meals without when she was in these foreign countries, and it's hard for me to believe she wouldn't have bought at least some cheap souvenirs of the countries on the tour. That outs her near $100 total. As you've talked about your other videos, people with the right jobs could have money the state didn't know about. Just the boombox she talks about buying would have been more than $32 in 1978. Unless they stri serached her before she got on the ship, I can't see how they would know exactly how much money she really had with her. Something is fishy about her story when it comes to money, but that probably wasn't unusual in the days of the USSR.
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