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Two days after safely arriving at my hotel, my best friend and I were walking through the evergreen parks of Sochi when he paused and turned his head towards me. “Everything they told us about this place was a lie,” he said.

Sixty years after the first ended, I thought I was living through another Red Scare

Stereotypes surrounding the Russian people have certainly evolved since the height of the Cold War, but this evolution hasn’t always been positive. The news we read of Russia typically surrounds Vladimir Putin and his government’s mass corruption: stuffing ballot boxes, illegally annexing a Ukrainian peninsula, using chemical weapons in an attempt to assassinate a former spy in the U.K. and influencing the U.S. election. And so, of course, in our minds, it contributes to a picture of what the country – and the people of the country – must look like as a whole. Sadly, the locals bear the brunt of our negative assumptions, leading to beliefs that they’re rude, unhelpful and prejudiced with a deep-seated resentment toward foreigners that is regularly expressed through violence.

Any Canadian would be hard-pressed to expect a warm welcome in Russia considering our government’s travel advisories, which warn that ”harassment and assaults are prevalent, particularly against foreigners of Asian and African descent.”

Yet, even if I hadn’t watched Cristiano Ronaldo score a stunning hat-trick against Spain, this trip would have still been my most enjoyable vacation to date. And it’s because of the locals. It was upon arriving in Moscow – after a few days in Sochi – where I got a real sense of what the country was like. My friend and I arrived in the capital just two hours before Russia secured a berth in the knockout stages of the World Cup. We wandered into Khachapuri, a restaurant named after the Georgian staple (bread stuffed with sulguni cheese and topped with a fried egg), but arrived only 30 minutes before it closed. The game was on when we walked in, and so the two of us headed for a table before being stopped by the owner. He politely informed us that service was winding down. With my hands clasped together, I begged for a seat, explaining that there was only airline food in my stomach and I had looked to his restaurant for a cure.