Pop Goes My Heart

So, I have now moved apartments 3.5 times since coming to Russia and have washed up in a gen-yoo-ine communal apartment in the center. You may think this update, coming after yet another mysteriously long hiatus, is going to be about wacky fun with my seven—count ‘em, seven!—neighbors coupled with some historical musings, but it is actually just more rambling about TV.

You see, my landlord finally purchased a television for the kitchen, which we broke in in spectacular fashion the only way I think you can break in a television in the kitchen of a communal apartment in a republic of the former Soviet Union: Eurovision!

Eurovision is a competition that pits mostly youthful performers from across Europe wearing spray tans and often not much else against one another in a battle of…um, well, what exactly does it take to make a run at Eurovision? Past answers to this question have included, but are not limited to interpretive dance (possibly interpreted by Howard the Duck), shiny pants, some really excellent hats, a pop ballad with lyrics ambiguously insulting Vladimir Putin, and as of this year, a fiddle. (For an illustrative look at four of these five criterion, see picture below.)



Since every point I just rattled off here can also be found in the dictionary under the heading “Russian Culture,” it should come as no surprise that Russia won last year. Winning Eurovision is a big deal. If you are very lucky, you might become an ironic internet sensation among east coast college students. If you are even luckier, you will become ABBA.

But most importantly, your country wins the right to host the show next year. The first thing you need to know is that many residents of St. Petersburg are angry that the government decided to hold the contest in Moscow. It really belongs in St. Petersburg, because this is the country’s cultural capital. That isn’t the first thing you need to know about Eurovision, it’s just the first thing you need to know about Russian culture.

There are several life experiences that only a viewing of Eurovision can offer. For example, you have never experienced country music until you have experienced it sung by a Dane doing grand pliés in pants trained experts identified as “very tight.” Eighties swing revival pop is not truly appreciated until performed by a German shimmying in pants our panel of experts identified as “tighter and shinier than the Dane’s pants.”

As the German example illustrates, performers frequently appear in some form of ethnic dress, often re-created entirely from sequins. The fine milk-maid tradition remains strong in Europe, as do the venerable institutions of the Madame and her male counterpart, the Bachelorette Party Stripper.

Particularly exciting moments of this year’s contest included the winning Norwegian performance, featuring fiddling and the human juggling of the backup dancers (not at the same time); the Bosnian performer walking forward in a particularly slow and purposeful manner, sparking wild applause from the audience; and the disqualification of Malta for fielding a contestant who could actually sing.

Low-lights included Great Britain’s choice to feature a song written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which represented a new achievement for the songwriter by actually being too bad for Eurovision. Seriously, the only thing that made watching it bearable was when the singer strayed too close to one of the four animatedly bowing violinists on stage with her, who enthusiastically bowed her in the boob.

Almost as bad was the violent suppression by the Moscow police of gay-rights protesters outside the concert for promoting, according to the Mayor, “moral degradation.” This while the entrant from Moldovia pranced about the stage in her abbreviated milk-maid’s costume, while a troupe of besequined yodelers skipped and flicked behind her. Albania meanwhile presented a young girl in a tutu who spent most of her number being groped by a mime clad head-to-toe in sequined green latex. (This is, I assume, traditional Albanian dress.) But oh yeah, it’s the gay pride parade that’s responsible for the problems with the Youth of Today.

So to end this on a not-about-television note, the modern Russian exhibits an obliviousness to irony that would make Gogol role in his grave. (Undead zombie Gogol, by the way, reverts back to Gogol’s pre-crazy-religious-awakening days.) This is probably worth a whole blog entry of its own (or an entry on a blog not committed to total inanity), but the Russian relationship with the gay community would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. Because basically, your average Russian man is a tight-pants-wearing, hair-gel-using, leather-enthusing, Eurovision-loving, raging homophobe. You plunk Vlad, smarmy Russian ladies man, down in New York City, and I guarantee you that he will not be attracting the attention of the gender that he’s used to. Obviously this isn’t to say that all gay men are tight-pants-wearing, hair-gel-using, leather-enthusing, Eurovision-loving, raging Vlads. But it is to say that there sure aren’t a lot of American straight men who would fit that description. Think about that, Vlad, next time you “woo!” at a Norwegian with a fiddle.

Alive and Well (Fed). Sort of.

Some embarrassingly large number of weeks ago, I posed the tantalizing cliff-hangers, “If not mayo, what exactly do I eat?” and “Is my grandmother offended by the level of profanity in this blog entry?” My grandmother, once again demonstrating why she gets “grand” appended to her name while I am universally known in Russia as “Eh-bby,” actually answered that last question, whereas I tried to distract you by talking about salt. I wish I could say that this entry comes to you now from a newfound determination to update my blog in a timely fashion. But actually I’ve been sitting on it for about three months, waiting until this, the fatal moment when my illegally streamed “Dancing with the Stars” broadcast cut out unexpectedly, to finally polish it up and shove it out the door to make it’s way in the cold, hard world. Be gentle.

My decision to categorically close my refrigerator to mayo stems in large part from my experience in Russia over the summer of 2006, when the mayo flowed, free and plentiful, from the grocery store aisles through my host mother’s cooking, finally lodging in my arteries, where I am convinced it remains to this day. So naturally, I was relieved at the thought that this time around, I would be doing my own cooking. My sanguinity lasted until my arrival, at which time the obvious corollary to this point presented myself, which is that I would be doing my own cooking.

Disclaimer for those proceeding further: I’m serious about the “sitting on this entry for three months” thing. The situation, while not a gourmand’s paradise, is not quite so dire as I present it below. I do, however, live on in the hopes that I’ll be able to get “Dancing with the Stars” back at any moment, so I can’t be bothered to make serious changes. Suffice to say, I’ve figured out at least two more dishes, but not how to stop burning the garlic. Anyway.

Despite my extreme lack of experience in the kitchen, there are a number of modern cooking utensils that I am enough aware of to miss acutely. Chief among these is the garlic press. The garlic press is a fantastic invention that allows you to pulverize clove after clove of garlic into your food with an ease and alacrity that spectators may find positively dangerous. This is assuming, of course, that you aren’t trying to overload the garlic press, in which case you will require the hand strength of a thousand very burly men to get it to operate, or at the very least, you will require the use of both hands. And yet, an overloaded garlic press is bliss itself compared to the complete absence of garlic presses in one’s life. I cannot even begin to describe to you the annoyance of having to chop into tiny fragments each and every tiny clove of garlic that I want to put into my food. And you can never do it in just one round of chopping. Oh no. To achieve perfect garlic pulverization, you need to slice all your cloves, put them in a pile, run the knife through them again, wipe the knife off, scoop the garlic back into a pile from the far corners of the cutting board to which it has fled, knife through it again, wipe the knife off, and then go back and individually slice away at all the huge chunks you’ve somehow missed during your earlier ministrations. Now assume that your knife is dull, there is no knife-sharpener in the kitchen, and you can’t even begin to imagine how you might say “knife-sharpener” in Russian, even if you wanted to pay for one, which, by the way, you don’t. It’s at the point where I have drastically cut down on the amount of garlic I use, purely because I seriously can’t be bothered. This may not sound like such a problem, but allow me to show you few more glimpses into my life in the kitchen, and you’ll start to see this for the tremendous gastronomic catastrophe it is.

Without further ado, I present the recipes for three totally edible meals in heavy rotation at Chez Moi. Astute readers will notice some themes and motifs. There will be a test.

House Specialty (i.e., Pelmene, which are sort of large ravioli/dumpling things that are more delicious than they deserve to be, having been invented by Russians)
(Note: This recipe was the first one I developed, which is why it’s the house specialty, well, that and it takes the least amount of time and effort you could expend and still be said to be “cooking.” The point being, it predates the epic purchase of the water filter.)

Ingredients
Pelmene
Tomatoes
Garlic
Onions
Olive Oil
Salt
Prayer

Steps:
1. Fill pot with water from sink. Promise self to find water filter soon. In the meantime, pray.
2. Place pot on stove.
3. Remove pot from stove. Light stove. Replace pot on stove. Stupid gas stove.
4. Peel and chop as many cloves of garlic as you can bring yourself to do (no more than 3).
5. Peel and chop onion into as tiny chunks as you can bring yourself to do (not very tiny).
6. Place sauce pan on stove. Cover bottom of saucepan with olive oil.
7. Repeat step 3.
8. Throw garlic and onion into saucepan. Poke tentatively at mixture with spatula.
9. Throw pelmene in boiling water.
10. Wonder briefly just how bad for you pelmene are. Throw more into water.
11. Burn garlic. Curse loudly.
12. Chop tomato into medium-sized chunks. Throw into saucepan. Be dubious about quality of final product.
13. Optional step (to do only if remembered): Throw in salt.
14. Turn off stove, fish pelmene onto plate with stupidly tiny little strainer. Pour sauce over pelmene.
15. Eat! Be proud of yourself, you cooked something!

Advantages
This one has a special place in my heart because, like I said, it’s the first thing I did in the kitchen that in any way involved the chemical transformation of one or more ingredients. (So, for example, my previous experimentation with putting granola into yogurt didn’t count.) Okay, so I won’t be breaking it out at my next dinner party, but hey! It was completely, thoroughly edible!

Disadvantages
And there’s not a whole lot more than that that can be said for it, at least until I figure out how not to burn the garlic.

Stir Fry a la Soy Sauce

Ingredients
Garlic
Onion
Rice
Broccoli
Mushrooms
Pepper
Soy Sauce
0 eggplants

Steps:
1. Go to store. Note shockingly high price of eggplant. Do not buy any eggplant.
2. Go home. Retrieve other ingredients from fridge and lay out on counter. Survey small number and sorry appearance of your vegetables with dismay.
3. Eight dollars for an eggplant! Who do they think they are kidding? Whom, even?
4. Fill filter with water. Wait for water to trickle down. Pour water into pot.
5. Repeat step 5.
6. Notice that you have put too much water in the pot. Make face.
7. Decide not to pour water out and risk going through arduous filtration process again. Place pot on stove.
8. Remove pot from stove. Light stove. Replace pot on stove. Stupid gas stove.
9. Peel and chop as many cloves of garlic as you can bring yourself to do (no more than 3).
10. Peel and chop onion into medium-sized slices.
11. Place sauce pan on stove. Cover bottom of saucepan with olive oil.
12. Repeat step 9.
13. Wonder if you should really get out the bigger saucepan.
14. Nah.
15. Throw garlic and onion into saucepan. Poke tentatively at mixture with spatula.
16. Realize that you have no idea how to cook rice. Instantly regret foolhardy and overconfident purchase of rice in a bag instead of instant rice.
17. Oh well. Open rice bag. Be sure to fling as much rice all over the counter and floor as possible. Throw some rice in pot.
18. That doesn’t look like very much rice. Throw some more in pot. Throw some more on the floor.
19. Where were we with the vegetables again? Go check.
20. Burn garlic. Curse loudly.
21. Chop mushrooms.
22. Chop stem off broccoli. Be aghast at significantly reduced quantity of broccoli for consumption. Will inclusion of chopped up broccoli stem ruin stir-fry or provide budget-saving extra broccoli density? Ponder.
23. Chop up the stem.
24. Hmmm. Which goes in first, broccoli or mushrooms?
25. Dump both broccoli and mushrooms into stir-fry. Be sure to overflow saucepan. Curse. Poke vigorously at mixture with spatula. Make mental note to use bigger saucepan next time.
26. Add copious amounts of soy sauce to mixture. Wonder if it will just burn off, leaving nothing but salty residue behind. Oh dear. Too late.
27. Be dubious about stir-fry with only one spice. Sprinkle in pepper, just to be on the safe side.
28. Develop concern about the high proportion of water to rice. Maybe rice is like cous cous and has to absorb extra water? Should rice be completely cooked before commencement of water absorption process? Or does rice finish cooking during absorption? Is rice supposed to be al dente? What, exactly, does al dente taste like, when applied to rice? Perhaps final result of water absorption test will answer all questions. Turn rice off.
29. Attempt to stir vegetables with mounting sense of futility. Underline, bold, and italicize mental note about saucepan. Turn off veggies.
30. Check rice. Discover limits of rice absorption capacity. Strain excess water through stupidly tiny little strainer. Holy shit that’s a lot of rice.
31. Put rice and stir-fry on plate. Serve with extra soy sauce on side if necessary. Success, you made something mostly healthy!

Advantages
No salad necessary! In a country whose culinary motto is If It Isn’t Mayo, It Isn’t Food, I consider this dish a total coup. Also, I’ve never made a stir fry by myself in my life, so I feel an extra-tingly sense of accomplishment when I make it, which helps me eat it.

Disadvantages
Despite being cooked through, some bits of broccoli mysteriously ended up tasting about 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the meal, which was odd. I still don’t know from al dente with rice (slightly less grainy than undercooked rice, slightly more grainy than overcooked rice? What does can this term possibly mean when applied to something that tastes grainy no matter what you do to it?), though I choose to believe that I have achieved it. Also, there’s only so much soy sauce I can consume in one meal and still pretend to be eating more healthily than the average Russian.

Spaghetti with Sauce with Stuff

Ingredients
Spaghetti
1 can of canned tomatoes (Is there any other kind of tomato that comes in a can? Discuss.)
Garlic
Onions
Mushrooms
Salt
Pepper
Some stuff that I’m pretty sure is sugar, but I’m not sure that I should be cooking with
Olive Oil

Steps:
1. Fill filter with water. Wait for water to trickle down. Pour water into pot.
2. Repeat step 1.
3. Notice that you have put too much water in the pot. Make face.
4. Decide not to pour water out and risk going through arduous filtration process again. Place pot on stove.
5. Remove pot from stove. Light stove. Replace pot on stove.
6. Peel and chop as many cloves of garlic as you can bring yourself to do (no more than 3).
7. Peel and chop onion into medium-sized slices.
8. Place sauce pan on stove. Cover bottom of saucepan with olive oil.
9. Repeat step 5. @*&#! gas stove.
10. Throw garlic and onion into saucepan. Poke tentatively at mixture with spatula.
11. Notice that water has been boiling for probably 5 or 10 minutes. Note with satisfaction that water now appears to be at appropriate level. Put some pasta in.
12. Survey pasta. Put some more in.
13. Burn garlic. Curse loudly.
14. Open can of tomatoes. Pour into saucepan.
15. Chop some mushrooms into sauce.
16. Recall just how much mushrooms shrink while cooking. Chop some more into sauce.
17. Poke at mixture with spatula with increasing confidence and enthusiasm.
18. Accidentally fling tomato sauce all over counter. Curse loudly.
19. Add salt and pepper. Taste mixture. Make face.
20. Go looking for sugar. Don’t find any. Find brown grainy things. Taste. Decide that they are sugar. Toss some in sauce. Pray.
21. Strain spaghetti in stupidly tiny little strainer and try not to pour entire contents of meal into sink. Mostly, but not entirely succeed.
22. Put sauce on spaghetti on plate (not in that order). Serve with discouragingly wilted salad. Revel in deliciousness of your home cooking.

For a variant on this recipe, replace steps 6 through 11 and 14 through 19 with the following:

1. Go to store. Purchase low-quality pasta sauce for vastly exorbitant sum.
2. Heat on stove.
3. Note that we are not kidding about the low-quality of this pasta sauce. It is made by Heinz.

Advantages
It’s spaghetti! What else is there to say? What drawbacks could there be?

Disadvantages
Well, I am the one cooking it. The sauce ends up being sort of bland because I don’t understand spices in English and haven’t yet worked myself up to purchasing any spicing I don’t immediately recognize on sight, which pretty much limits me to pepper.* Note that this rule does not extend to salt, as I cannot, on sight, tell it apart from sugar. Fortunately, there was some salt (and no white sugar) in the apartment when I arrived, but the supply is dwindling fast. Will desperation drive me to finally work up the energy to look up the Russian words for “basil” and “oregano”? Or will my pasta sauce increasingly become indistinguishable from tomato paste with things floating in it? And most importantly, when will some combination of the receipt of my next paycheck, a reduction in price, and the onset of scurvy drive me to finally purchase the eggplant I so desire? Stay tuned!

*Now you understand the magnitude of the garlic problem.

Things that I wish Russians would do that they don’t: Salt the damn sidewalk outside of my apartment

This dereliction of duty confuses me. I come from a land where the slightest hint of a snowflake begets the marshalling of a hundred snowplows to battle. I know the Russian government is in general non-responsive to specific citizen demands, but I’m not asking for more state television time for opposition parties, a serious investigation into the execution of journalists critical of the administration, or a permit to hold a protest. I can’t hold a protest because I can’t remain standing long enough to register my complaint. Perhaps that is why the city has chosen to leave the ten blocks between my apartment and my workplace frozen solid and slicked smooth. They are either trying to clamp down on actions threatening to the dignity state or attempting to break the record for world’s largest Slip ‘N Slide.

You know, there are spicing shortages in Russia, but salt is not among them. It’s not as if the Russian government needs to cumin the sidewalk. I would understand the difficulty of laying hands on a vast store of, say, tumeric in Russia, a country which tends to sell spice by the food to which you are to apply it (“vegetable seasoning,” “chicken seasoning,” “mayonnaise seasoning,” etc.). But salt is considered an all-times, all-foods, all-purpose flavoring option. Saltiness is not a concept with which Russians have difficulty. Maybe the government is flummoxed by the array of salty things available at the grocery store. Do they purchase just plain salt? Or do they go with “chicken seasoning” (salt that smells like chicken)? Would “fish seasoning” (salt that smells like fish) effectively mask the citywide smell of rancid diesel, or just replace it with something new and altogether more terrifying? If they’re so paralyzed by indecision, they should just put out a neighborhood alert, calling on dwellers to fling their leftovers out the window, the salt from which would no doubt liquefy the ice in an instant and, in addition, satiate the stray cat population. If the government doesn’t act soon, I will shortly be forced to barge into the nearest apartment I can find, grab a leftover chicken breast from the stovetop (you know what, I’m sure it will have been there for three days, they won’t miss it), and fling it before me every time I take a step.

Failing that, my other option is to buy a pair of fabulously impractical black, knee-high stiletto boots, since these evidently have the best traction of any footwear in the entire country. I’m wobbling in my snow boots and these Russian Amazons just stride past me on three-inch-heels as though Tyra Banks were sitting ten feet away, judging their comparative levels of “fierce.” Meanwhile, I have learned to anticipate which dips in the sidewalk are particularly treacherous, which does not actually relieve the difficulty of navigating them, since stepping into the street results in no change in iciness and only adds oncoming motorists to my increasingly lengthy list of things likely to result in an imminent loss of verticality.

Perhaps what I am saying is that my butt hurts from when I slipped and fell on it yesterday. At least now you’ll know what happened if this blog doesn’t update again until spring: it’s safe to assume that I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

That's Highly Illogical, Captain

So we’re coming up on the end of month two of my sojourn in the Big Freeze, and much to the shock of myself and all my nearest friends and relations, I yet live. (Some of you, noting the recent frequency of my blog updates, may find this news surprising, to which I can only say something childish and indecent about your mother.) Anyway, this can mean only one thing: I have, indeed, been feeding myself. The first month I could pass off my survival on my ability to purchase and consume water faster than a camel with dried-up spit reserves, but the three-week, humans-can-survive-on-water-alone-or-so-I-learned-from-Nickelodeon-Magazine window has officially slammed shut on the fingers of my frozen existence, so some other form of nourishment must be at play.

In any other, non-bizarro universe, the fact of me buying things and eating them would not be interesting enough to make it to the Internet – I have been doing this successfully since the happy day that I discovered that chocolate bars were not solely available by way of magic portal to another dimension guarded vigilantly by my stingy parents, but could be mine whenever I wanted through the much better magic of simple monetary exchange. However, in non-bizarro universes I hear that sales reps actually want you to patronize their businesses, so grab a seat, grow your beard, and let me explain why the Internet should care about my food.

Leaving language and customer service issues by the wayside, where I hope they are picked up by an ill-shaven, odiferous trucker who does unspeakable things to their person before abandoning them five miles from civilization somewhere in the backwoods of Kentucky, there are two big problems with shopping for food in Russia. The first is the utter lack of correlation between price, quality, and quantity. Paying more for something is no guarantee that you will real receive a bigger or better something than a similar, cheaper something, it is only a guarantee that you will subsequently have less money. The best example is bottled water. I could go to the store and purchase a 0.6 liter bottle of water for 15 rubles. Or I could purchase 1.75 liters of the same brand. For 13 rubles. If I wanted to have my wallet gauged with a bulldozer I could even go to a restaurant, where, in exchange for a mere 60 rubles, I could be the proud consumer of 0.25 liters. Or I could save some trees and burn some calories lugging a 9-liter, 72-ruble jug of water home from the supermarket. No matter what, I am hydrated and confused. Don’t even get me started on the amount of food I could purchase for the price of one eggplant. There are starving children in Africa who could be fed for a year for the price of one eggplant.

Now, I am a person who likes to know the worth of what I am purchasing so that I know how much I’m willing to shell out for it. In Russia, this instinct is flummoxed for normal reasons—I just don’t know what goods/brands are more difficult to come by or considered more luxurious in this part of the world—further diddled with by abnormal reasons—we’ve a bit of an economic crisis on our hands and the ruble is in free fall against the dollar—and then clubbed over the head and left unconscious by Abby Normal reasons—
WHYCANYOUBUYMOREWATERFORFEWERRUBLESWHYGOD
AHHHHTHECAPITALISTSUPERSTRUCTUREISALIEANDINEED
ANAP!!! The result is I end up setting arbitrary price floors and ceilings for myself to help me decide what to buy. This has brought me mixed success. On the one hand, I have delicious yogurt for 8 rubles a pop. On the other, an American friend of mine and I tried to buy a bottle of white wine a few weeks ago using the strategy of “pick the first one you see over 150 rubles.” Thankfully, the blindness has receded, and my wine price floor has been reset at 200 rubles.

The second problem with food shopping is variety. As is to be expected, you can’t find certain staples of the American diet in Russia. (And to be fair, you couldn’t find certain staples of the Russian diet in America; when I’m especially craving granola bars, I am consoled by the thought of ex-pat Russians cruising up and down the aisles of their local Safeways, muttering, “Where the fuck are the Lays Red Caviar Flavored Potato Chips?”) I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, but I do have a problem with the illogic of what you can and cannot locate. I cannot find any salad dressing to save my life, but every grocery store I’ve frequented—and there have been many—has had kiwis. I cannot find any hot dog buns, but I can purchase Ahava Dead Sea Skin Care Products, which are supposedly only sold in Israel. I know that hot dog buns exist, because you can buy a hotdog from a sort of WaWa-like store called V-Mart, and trust me, they’re not baking ‘em fresh, but they must be getting their buns from some sort of top-secret hot-dog-bun holding facility that doesn’t supply the rest of the public.

The only known food product to which none of the above rules of shopping in Russia apply is mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, no matter where you go, is always cheap and available in wide varieties. You think I just mean, perhaps, Full Fat, Reduced Fat, and Fat Free? Oh ye of little imayogination. Here is a picture I want you to look at:



Do you know what this is? This is an entire aisle in the enormous grocery store out by the Ikea filled with nothing but mayonnaise. What you cannot see is that this aisle actually wraps around to the left and continues displaying mayonnaise wares for another ten feet of shelving. Almost every food item in Russia has a different, enumerated flavor of mayo that’s supposed to go with it—mayo for your chicken, mayo for your steak, mayo flavored with chicken and steak, but you put it on your meatballs, etc. I’m pretty sure there are food-specific mayo products designed and sold in Russia for food that you cannot actually purchase in Russia—mayo for your Cheerios, mayo for your Pho…I could do this all day. In contrast, this ginormous food warehouse (think Costco) had six bottles of one brand of salad dressing available. And it was Thousand Island.

So, naturally, mayonnaise has been strictly banned from my kitchen. If not mayo, what exactly do I eat? Will I spend all of my money trying to find a white wine that doesn’t taste like pee? Is my grandmother offended by the level of profanity in this blog entry? All that and more ahead. Stay tuned!

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.

*

*

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.