slocad1
Frequent Guest
Joined: 10 Aug 2004
Posts: 12
Location: Caribbean Sea
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 Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2004 6:24 am Post subject: What is Russia really like? Some experiences beyond Moscow |
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First, let me say that this is one of the finest sites on Russia, and the information is tremendously useful as a resource for independent travellers. You've done a great job with this, and I wish you future success.
In reading your Russian People section, I was coming across many of the same reactions that I encounter often when going on about how I look forward to trips to Russia. I'm talking about the fears that people have of travelling there. I have always been more curious than fearful, though. The idea of a closed border tickled my imagination and when I first visited St. Petersburg in 2001 to study survival Russian. What a rich and rewarding country rested below as the plane descended past the suburbs near Pulkovo.
I work with Russian ice skaters, one of whom arranged my homestay with one of their mothers. This hardworking woman was up early every morning, seeing to it that her breakfasts were a colorful and tasty combination for her guest. She censured my meager eating in a tone of kind, motherly reproach, "Mala kushitye! Kushitye yesho! Cevodnya holodnaya pagoda!" (You eat so badly! Eat more! The weather's cold today!) Every day, she would scold, and sit by me with a chocolate and cup of coffee, watching and trying to make herself understood. Occasionally, she would draw on her memories of an English word or phrase and surprise us both.
It's understandable and expected that a friend's mother would be kind, but perfect strangers have also shown the gentler texture of Russia. I crunched through a snowy path one sunny morning, passed an older gentleman, and offered a "Dobray utrah." I walked on but I could tell he had stopped dead. I turned as he did, and we looked at each other. Pointing his thumb at himself, he asked, "Why me?" in Russian. I knew immediately that I couldn't have been more foreign to him in that one action than if I had been carrying a flag and munching a burger on the street. "We don't greet strangers, generally," my teacher had explained days before.
I mustered a simple response in Russian, "Why you? Because in my culture, we say hello to people. It's not important. Just, 'Good morning.'" He walked closer. "Where are you from?" "I'm American." "America? Why are you here", kindly. "I'm learning Russian." "Ahhhh. That's good." "Well, I will go now to the metro." It was simple, a gesture of goodwill, and one of many I have experienced in this huge land.
The chill of early snow in October hadn't thawed the heart of a submarine engineer I met in my train compartment, enroute Murmansk. We sat at first in silence, he a young man, and me, reading. As I got up for tea, I asked if they wanted tea or coffee. On my return, the engineer was quite friendly and wanted to tell me about Murmansk and his love of fishing and hunting, of picking berries and slaughtering a pig at his mother's dacha. He wanted more than this, though. He wanted me to stay with his wife and daughter in their flat so he could take me there - to his rivers and favored hunting grounds, into their lives for a few days and to that treasured Russian spot, the kitchen table. While I declined to impose so suddenly on their home, I did gratefully accept an invitation to join them for dinner. His mother's berry preserves, smooth butter and earthy bread, pickles, pickled onions, pickled tomatoes and smoked fish. And between little plates and bowls of the tangy and salty and sweet flowed an easy conversation that led me through their lives. We picked through the fish bones and pored over their photo albums. Black and white, brown and white, older styles on a young man and woman in Soviet days. As I considered my ever-tightening belt, they worried that I might leave before seeing Murmansk and the lovely forests and rivers nearby. All the more reason to return, then, and I was off.
Off the next winter to teach English in Zelenogorsk, a closed-city deep in Krasnoyarskii Krai. Just north of Mongolia, and out of this world. It had been arranged online, this volunteer teaching assignment. I felt obliged to share all I could in terms of teaching materials, methods and techniques. My charges were youngsters of all ages, some coming along quite well under the strict tutelage of at once gentle and stern women teachers. One young man, barely 13 or so, shuffled around in the frosty shadows of an early nightfall. We had bumped into one another outside a store, and there I was enjoying a lovely Russian pasttime - licking an ice cream cone in February. I had planned well the clothes I brought, including thermals, a long palto (black, long coat) and a bright fleece piece that wraps snugly around my neck. He, on the other hand, had a lazy zipper at the top of his thin light blue jacket. Between licks and our chat, down it would drop and up he'd pull it. After a while, I gave him my neck gaitor and slipped it over his head. His grandmother was all smiles with appreciation the next day; she was a colleague in the English department, as it turned out.
She joined me later, along with a dozen students, as we made Mexican breakfast burritos together in the school cafeteria. Excited eyes and awkward hands met together in that Siberian kitchen as kids and teachers rolled out soft and cool flour tortillas for the first time in the history of Linguistics School #164. Others close by were working out the rainbow of vegetables for the salsa. "It's spicy, so maybe you want only a little at first." Undaunted, they traveled to Mexico with each bite, and laughed at those who panted for relief-water. The cooks, in their delightfully-amusing cook hats, watched from the corner and once we approached with an offering, joined in this mess of languages, foods and cultures.
Before leaving Zelengorsk, "What is it you want to do or see?", the staff asked.
It took only a second, and it was arranged. I was to meet with a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, the former school principal, in fact. A teacher offered to translate, but as she walked into the schoolroom with him, it wasn't a greeting she translated. He had erupted into somwhat of a shout. There was no look of warmth there, in his face, no hint of welcome. So I listened as he spoke through her, listened as his first intense words came through. "He wants to say first that he admires America and Americans. Even after the war, he ignored the risks of praising America publicly because we were able to survive, Russia was, because of their help." He had been a handsome young man, sporting the green cap of a Red Army atop his blond hair. I know because he let me choose from two original photos he had brought. "Eleanore Rooselvelt had seen us, how bad the Red Army looked, and she took pity and told the President to ship fresh uniforms to us so we would look good when we crossed into the West. I'll never forget the radios, new uniforms, the trucks and equipment we got from America." It was a burning, urgent memory. I asked about Stalingrad. He told me. Apparently the staff was happy I wanted to hear him go on about his war because over the years, they'd stood their shifts of his recollections. Now he finally had an eager ear, and an American one at that.
I can go on and on about Russia, given enough coffee, pine nuts and smoked fish, and perhaps someday I will bore the bejesus out of my nieces and nephews or anyone within earshot. And maybe someday I will meet someone as eager as I was that day, someone hungry for news of Russia outside the Golden Ring, beyond the Neva's statued bridges, east of St. Basil's elegant domes. Until then, this may serve those troubled with the question, "What is Russia really like?"
Good night, now, from a ship running southbound through the restless Caribbean Sea for Aruba.
-Franklin |
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