Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold and With Some Assembly Required

Let us take a walk through history. Imagine yourself in a simpler time. A time when men were men, women were women, and children were cheap farm labor. A time when Russia’s strategic war planning included at least three words that weren’t “big and cold” and, using this deep reserve of military cunning, they managed to fight a war and win it without actually, you know, losing at the same time (as based on any reasonable calculus that refuses to recognize as “winning” any victory gained at the price of the death of over 10% percent of your citizenry, the razing of your entire economic infrastructure, the total desolation of your territory, and the thorough and long-lasting suck of your relationship with all other countries not ruled by mad Latin American dictators).

Yes, Russia won the Great Northern War of 1721, according what is quite probably the worst written and least informative Wikipedia article ever, save the interesting observation that “Peter the Great tried to enhance his army’s morale to Swedish levels.” I’m not sure what this means, but it sure sounds like a lot more fun than the Russian army has ever had, before or since. Anyway, “I beat up Sweden and took its lunch money” was apparently the sort of thing that got you bragging rights on the international playground of 1721, as opposed to today, when you would probably not want to spread that around too freely unless you had managed to couple it with an invasion of Belgium or something else equally difficult. But this was impressive enough in 1721 that Peter the Great felt compelled to construct an entire palatial estate centered on a monument to his victory. It was as classy and restrained as all the other monuments the tsars had built to themselves had been. The representation of Sweden as a lion with its jaws being pried open by a very muscly Pete was, in the end, really very tasteful.

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As you can see from the gushing fountain coming out of the lion's mouth, Peter the Great’s morale levels were very Swedish indeed.

So the Swedes have had a good long time to seethe about this indignity and, due to the happy convergence of remote geography, bizarre weather, and total international irrelevance, no one has paid the slightest attention to them for the last 250 years while they have plotted revenge. And revenge they have plotted. Here is the Swedish response, a monument planted on Russian soil, on the outskirts of the very city founded to protect the territory that Russia wrested away from them:

Touche, Pussycat. Touche.

Inspired by Obama’s message of freedom to the oppressed corners of the world, this last weekend I made my pilgrimage out to Ikea, all in the name of supporting the still fledging capitalist economy of the former Second World, of course, and also to get some pillows and a duvet. I joined with undisguised glee in the universal human experience of pondering questions like “Do I want the Melbu or the Mongstad?” and “What the hell do these words mean?” And I don’t care that I had to walk to the metro through a snowstorm, take a 30 minute ride to the end of the line and stand up in a packed shuttle for 20 minutes, and then do the same on the way back but with two enormous shopping bags. It was entirely worth it.

I’ve never actually been to an Ikea in America, but there’s probably nothing particularly Russian about the Ikea in St. Petersburg, except perhaps that the suggested route through the store eerily mirrors the USSR’s roadmap to communism:

I believe if you look more closely at Lenin’s writings, you will see that he indeed laid out a path to the socialist utopia that began with dishes (посуда) and culminated in houseplants (растения).

But really, what makes going to the Ikea in Russia so worthwhile isn’t that it’s Russian, but quite the opposite. It’s just so unexpected. Russia obviously isn’t the Soviet Union anymore, so there are plenty of stores, and plenty of them are international chains, and plenty of those chains don’t exactly blend in with the landscape. (The KFC on Nevsky Prospekt throws me for a loop every time. Quick, name one place on the planet that is less like Kentucky. The bottom of the ocean doesn’t count.) But almost all home goods in Russia are sold in kassa stores that are cramped, sort of flea-market feeling affairs, with everything jumbled together and slightly dented at the edges. You just never expect to walk into a huge open space in which are sold thousands of polished home products, all of them with umlauts on their labels, and none of them behind a counter manned by an evolved Neanderthal.

Everyone who lives abroad, I’m sure, feels at least some (much?) of the time like they’re existing in a weird planet outside of space time, and in certain cases, populated exclusively by people who hate them. What I am trying to say is that there are times when living in Russia can feel isolating. Which is why I am happy to write to you now cozily wrapped in my very own Mysa Strå and reclining against two puffy Löktravs, just like thousands of other 22-year-olds on a budget around the world. Tomorrow I will probably try and fail once more to find salad dressing; I will astound my Russian professor with my inability to form imperatives; and I will incur the wrath of the cashier at my grocery store when I can’t make change. But now I know that when it becomes too much, there is a place where I can return and wander lost among the aisles of bedspreads and cabinets, secure in the knowledge that no one else knows around me knows what Löktrav means, either. And that’s enough for me.

J.J. Abrams is my master now

One of the glorious things about living abroad is that the stated goal of improving your language skills is the get-out-of-sloth-free card that allows you to sit around all day watching television and not feel bad about it. Factor in three additional notes—1) most of Russia takes off work from December 31 through January 12, my workplace included, so there’s nowhere I have to be all day; 2) the temperature has been steadily and rapidly dropping, to the point that it’s sometimes colder the next day than it was the night before, which I didn’t think was allowed; and 3) every time I step outside, I seem to discover a new weapons shop—and you’ll see that forces beyond my control have conspired to effectively to keep me indoors. I’ve used the free time well, though, by putting in a truly phenomenal amount of, um, intensive listening practice over the past week. In fact, I just immersed myself in my target linguistic environment for three hours! I’m so proud of myself. Four gold stars.

When it comes to television, I’m none too discriminating to begin with. To know if I will watch a show, a good rule of thumb is to ask, 1) Is it on? 2) Am I awake? If yes, pass the remote. However, when I was in Russia two years ago, I was seriously put off from the tube by my host father, who followed a different set of criteria when selecting shows, something to the effect of, Does this show feature a) impalement, b) dismemberment, оr c) any-other-kind-of-violence-ment? Since that was my impression of Russian TV going in, I was worried that I would be limited to the news, which issues from the mouths of the anchors at speeds that have been known to upend trees and capsize sailing vessels. So, imagine my joy when I turned on the TV last Saturday morning and caught this classic snippet of dialogue:

У меня есть одна идея—ты хочешь? (I have an idea—do you want to hear it?)
Да! (Yes!)
Отлично! Вот мой план. (Excellent! Here is my plan.)

Yes. I had found the Russian dub of “Scooby Doo.”

So, as it turns out, my criteria for watching television in Russian is even lower than my criteria in the U.S., namely 1) Can I understand what’s going on? and 2) Is anyone being impaled? If yes and no, pass the remote, which doesn’t work, sigh, get up and manually flick through the channels, tire of the amount of effort this requires, and just keep it on MTV. This is the only explanation I have for the amount of “Next” that I have watched. I make no apologies for my unabashed adulation of “Pimp My Ride,” which is made even more, um, pimpin’ by the surreality of watching it in Russia, in Russian. (And no, I can’t understand the dub, but no, that has not limited my understanding of the essential themes of the show.)

My parents will be happy to note that there are a number of things to enjoy on Russian television when they’ve run out of rides to pimp. Chief among these is the Russian sitcom, which eerily resembles the American sitcom, specifically the American sitcom circa 1984-1992. My new favorite standby is “Кто в доме хозяин?”—“Who in the house is the boss?” (Sidenote: I’m a huge fan of the way the addition of the extra words turns the title from a declarative statement—“Who’s the Boss”—into something of a philosophical query. I wonder, good sir, if you could tell me, who is in charge of this domicile? I don’t know, Socrates, I guess I’ll have to keep watching the show.) Out of everything I’ve seen, this show best fulfills criteria 1 and 2 above: the ratio of comprehensible-dialogue-to-impalement is astoundingly high. It is far and away superior in that respect to “Счастливы вместе”—“Happy Together,” which is the Russian knockoff of “Married with Children.” “Happy Together” has a similar impalement rating, but I can’t understand a word of it, despite the fact that a full nine-tenths of the content of the show is communicated entirely through mugging for the camera. In fact, the dubious honor of “Show That Sounds The Least Like Gibberish To Me” belongs to, of all things, the Russian dub of “Lost.” Yes. That’s right. “Lost” is the most comprehensible thing on television. Think about that, the next time you think culture shock is nothing. I understand about 80% of “Lost” in Russian, which is, I'm pretty sure, about 50% more of the show than most people understand in English. (In Capitalist America, “Lost” understands you!) The honor is dubious because for this to be the case, the writing must be astounding monosyllabic. Should I ever need to tell someone to Run! Run!, I’m totally set. “Lost”’s comprehensible-dialogue-to-impalement rating takes a hit on the latter end, though; while no one except a polar bear (yeah, I know, and yet I understand this) has yet been impaled in the episodes I’ve seen, the threat of it remains much higher than on, say, “Can you point me to the leader of this residential building,” or whatever they’re calling it.

Pretension alert: I’m about to take a detour into “Modern Jackass” territory and make some statements that I don’t have the actual knowledge to back up. The Russian penchant for ‘80s sitcoms makes some sense, I think, if you make the gross generalization that Russia is, in many ways, 20-30 years behind the U.S., particularly when it comes to attitudes towards women and families. While I can, with not a small amount of pride, state that I have never actually watched the original “Who’s the Boss” and “Married with Children,” my understanding is that part of the popularity these shows enjoyed was due to their new portrayals of women, specifically, working women who were the heads of their households and who had no time for housework and women who were vocally and crassly unhappy with their families. That was new in the U.S. in the ‘80s. While women in the USSR had a very different experience than American women, obviously, women who make more money than men and who head their households are only now starting to become a more visible part of society in Russia, and the strain is starting to show. Maybe if more Russian judges watched “Кто в доме хозяин?” they wouldn’t be quite so quick to declare sexual harassment the cornerstone of the country’s population growth. Who knew that Tony Danza was the international women’s rights movement’s greatest weapon? No wonder we lost the ERA.

It is also possible that the Russians' attachment to Eurovision has permanently retarded their cultural growth. This can only bode good things for my blog when Russia hosts Eurovision later this year.

Now excuse me, I have to go watch “Pinky and the Brain.” Don’t worry, I’m going back to work on Monday. Narf!

Things that I wish...

I would like to present the inaugural entry in what will become an ongoing series on this blog entitled “Things That I Wish…” This series will largely feature my small-minded and imperialist critiques of other cultures, specifically the things people of these cultures do that I wish they wouldn’t, or don’t do that I wish they would, or are secretly planning to do to me in my sleep but haven’t yet (Russia, I am on to you). Rest assured that the Russians will not be alone in bearing the brunt of my wrath. Given the manifold challenges and daily annoyances of living in a foreign country, there is plenty of brunt to go around. Such folks who see fit to wantonly act in a way that detracts from my comfort and convenience can expect to find themselves held up as an example of their people and their behavior generalized to every member of their culture or nationality. It’s on the Internet. You have been warned.

I’ve decided to kick off this venture with what will probably become the biggest bone of contention between me and the motherland in the coming months. I can 100% guarantee, or your money back, that this is not the last time you will hear from me about this topic.

Things that I wish Russians would do that they don’t: Customer Service

I wrote about this the last time I came to Russia, but clearly not enough Russians read my blog (shaaaame), so I’m going to write about it again right now, and I will continue to write about it every time I can’t think of anything else to say and an embarrassingly long period has gone by without my blog being updated. Americans tend to think that anyone who works in a business directly tied to helping us is a complete and utter incompetent, and not only an incompetent, but one whose grasp of English is so tenuous or heavily accented as to render it another tongue entirely. Well, I write you now to tell you to pick up the phone and call the first customer service hotline that comes to mind (yes, even if it’s Comcast), and thank them. Thank them for trying. Thank them for following a script, however begrudgingly, which demands that they pretend that you are always right. Thank them for the insincere smile in their voice. If you can, try to thank them in their native tongue. Do this. Think of it like going to your estranged relative on their deathbed to make things right. Do this, because Uncle Morty may die at any moment and you may find yourself in Russia, filled with a thousand regrets and no where near anyone who speaks enough English, or Spanglish, or Hindi-but-it-sort-of-sounds-like-English to help you buy your computer adaptors and kitchen utensils and wouldn’t bother helping even if you could make yourself understood.

Assuming you got through that tangle of mixed metaphors and are still hanging with me, allow me to elaborate. There is an unwritten law in Russia that states that no one may be hired in the service industries unless they indiscriminately hate people. It’s that simple. Here is what I imagine the application looks like for a job at, say, my local grocery store:

First Name:
Patronymic:
Last Name:
Do you hate people?
Discriminately or indiscriminately?

The follow-up interview, I imagine, goes something like this:

Which of the following adjectives would you say best describes you:

a) bitter
b) angry
c) disdainful
d) all of the above, and some other ones as well that you couldn’t print in a family newspaper

You can guess which applicants get the job.

The problems with the Russian service industry are magnified by a special, Russian form of torture known as the kassa. The kassa is kind of a mix between a store and one of the outer layers of hell. Instead of picking out the things you want and bringing them up to the checkout counter to pay for them—brilliant! who thought of that?—all of the goods in the store are behind a counter and you have to ask for each item you require specifically. If it’s an especially vicious kassa, you will not even then receive your item. You will receive a receipt for it, go to another counter, pay for it, get another receipt, go back to your original counter, and only then retrieve your purchase. This means that, at a minimum, you have to interact in a meaningful way with at least two of the most misanthropic specimens humanity has to offer. More likely, you’ll need to frequent at least three counters because, oh yes, did we mention that different kinds of goods are kept at different parts of the store, behind counters manned by different people, the only similarity between whom will be their inability to understand anything you say and their unwillingness to try? Well, let us mention it now. It blows the big one.

If you’re imagining this along with me, make sure you fill in the part where every time you approach a salesperson anew, they act as though they have never seen you before and have never fulfilled such an idiotic, time-wasting, incomprehensible request as you have made. What, fetch the Tupperware you purchased? Why would I do that? Oh, you say you were here five minutes ago? Wasn’t it enough that I went all out of my way to write you that receipt for the Tupperware? What more do you want from me? Don’t you know that I have important things to be doing? Can’t you understand that I just applied a coat of nail polish? You’re going to make me chip my nails. Fine, Jesus, don’t get all irate; I’ll bring you your damn Tupperware. God. Your Russian sucks.

That’s sort of what I imagine to be the inner-monologue of the woman behind the counter at my local home-appliance store.

An illustrative example: I recently had to purchase a water filter. I had high expectations for this water filter. I was depending on it to take the not-chemically-uncomplicated mixture that pours from the Russia faucet, which may or may not contain any or all of the following—dirt, rust, lead, giardia, chlorine, fluoride, cholera, multi-antibiotic resistant strains of tuberculosis—and render it close enough to H₂O boil pasta in. So you can see, the purchase of the water filter was a matter of some importance.

I go to a home goods store near my apartment, which turns out to operate kassa-style, vicious type. Skipping the part where I have to first find out where the water filters are, for brevity’s sake (too late), I stand in front of the glass case displaying the models the store offers, stare at them for an unnecessarily long period of time, and decide that the smallest, cheapest one will do just fine. I go to the counter and ask for it. No, no, the salesman says to me, you don’t want that one. You want this other one, it is larger and comes with two, yes two, filters! No, I say, that one is more expensive, and I don’t need two filters. I want the small and cheap one. But no! he says. This one is blahdy blah your sink blahdy blahdy blah two filters! I’m sorry, I say, I don’t speak Russian very well, and I don’t understand most of what you’re saying. I just want this water filter. This one, right here. At this point, he starts yelling at me. Let me repeat that. He yelled at me. Someone whose job it is to ensure my happy patronage of their establishment yelled at me, because I failed to recognize the logical superiority of their preferred brand of water filter. Finally, through a cunning combination of looks of incomprehension and poorly articulated pleas, I get him to give me a receipt for the thing, I pay the woman at the cash register, who has been watching this whole exchange with the scornful surliness that women at cash registers in Russia are so good at projecting, and return to the sales guy. He goes and gets my water filter, opens it up, and takes out the pieces to show me, banging each one furiously on the table and emphasizing his displeasure with remarks like, “Look, here is your small container,” and “ONE water filter.” Finally, he packs it all up, shoves it at me, and waves me away, muttering to himself. Did you catch the part where HE YELLED AT ME? Could I complain to the manager? Where do you think I am, Germany? And could I take my business elsewhere? No, because I’d been to two other stores already looking for a water filter and they hadn’t had any. This is part of the reason Russians don’t feel the need to be polite. Ultimately, any given store is likely to contain a fairly unique mixture of goods, the ones of which you need will prove impossible to track down at another store. They know they’ve got you trapped. Capitalism, fail. The kicker to this whole thing is, I get home and discover that if my filter was any bigger, it wouldn’t have fit into my fridge anyway. Me, win.