Everything you ever wanted to know about Russia, but were afraid to ask (part 2)

Aug 09, 2005 22:25

I HAVE BEEN TO RUSSIA. THERE ARE NO BEARS.

I saw this on a T-shirt at the Hermitage after Vasya told me, “And how do Americans imagine Russia? They think bears roam the streets here, am I right?” Well, guess what? I saw a bear cub outside the Hermitage. Twice.

I’d like to get back to the point I began making in an earlier post: the Russianness of (my) St. Petersburg (experience). By Russian I mean “not American/’Western’” or “not striving to be like America,” but also, to an extent “not privileged.” I don’t mean to pass such blatant judgment, and my brother would probably tell me I completely missed the point of everything he tried to show me, but I would like to clarify that by “Russian” I do not by any means mean “not happy” or, God forbid, “wrong.” For my own sake, I am taking what I know of Russia simply from SP, and Ukraine from my time in Kiev, and though I will generalize I am not claiming to be an expert on either.

In fact, I found it to be a relief to be less inundated with Western ads for cell phones and cigarettes and Coca-cola. Even the subway wagons weren’t as plastered with ads as they are in Kiev - as for video-screen advertising, I saw none. They did have an unfortunate bombardment of personal selling on their commuter trains - like, people with ice cream and band-aids and gin & tonics and such, who'd walk the wagons and were really annoying to listen to (people tell me at least they're making a living, but to me it seems like some of the saddest living you could make. I dunno.) Speaking of cigarettes, from a marketing perspective, I find it interesting that in Kiev I have noticed more ads for “slim lights” featuring women or with female-specific messages. In Russia the cigarette ads were either gender-neutral or marketed primarily toward men. Also speaking of cigarettes, smoking is a giant problem in Russia. Sure, smoking knows no nationality, but there’s just a different attitude toward it - the kids I hung with all started at *cough* ten or eleven. I take it as a stress reliever and a devil-may-care outlook of “life sucks, we’re all gonna die, might as well enjoy it.” Ukraine isn’t very different in this respect, and it could be that I mostly hang out with women here, but I just don’t see so much of it here. Or just maybe people have become more optimistic here.

Along with ads, I found less catering for the foreigner in Russia. Tourist sights excluded, I noticed fewer signs in English, even in the metro. By far, fewer points of currency exchange. And again, among the people I spent time with, very few knew English beyond the “Hay! Haw do you do?” It makes me wonder if in that respect Ukraine is simply more Western-leaning or if Ukrainians have an easier time learning (or accepting?) another language, since they are bilingual to begin with. Many of my friends here possess enough knowledge of English to write to foreign pen-pals, while my Russian comrades (save for one) have no fervent interest in becoming fluent.

A related observation regarding the Americanization of these Slavic lands is that in Kiev I notice a helluva lot more American words. Though they are immediately recognizable, they kinda annoy me because they feel lazy. But I realize that with the onslaught of American commerce and technology, it becomes easier to adopt American terms rather than coming up with cumbersome local alternatives (I am familiar with some of these, too, and I can’t say they don’t annoy me, as well.) Nevertheless, I appreciate that my Russian buds haven’t entirely diluted their language with English.

Considering all of this, it comes as no surprise that Russians (in my experience) are deeply patriotic. I dunno about Muscovites (eh?), but all St. Petersburgites that I knew felt great pride and loyalty toward their hometown, and something between indifference and hostility toward their capital (somewhat like the Melbourne/Sydney feud). Not to say Kiev doesn’t have its share of nationalists (*scoff*), but I have heard many more people dog their city or at least not particularly laud it. St Petersburgites are much more like “Why would you live anywhere else?” Kinda infectious. :)

Another word on loyalty. The instant and unyielding loyalty my brother showed me from our acquaintance brought tears to my eyes. It came as no surprise, then, to observe the loyalty among Kostya and his friends. Perhaps only my Kiev acquaintances Tanya & Lesya are as inseparable. Guess that’s how it is when you know someone since kindergarten and live a stone’s throw from ‘em. No trip to the drug store, park, or the city was complete without at least one of my bro’s pals. But then again, after Kostya got in a real bad fight back in the day and got his jaw broken in two places from being shoved against a car, Vasya (his best bud) demanded he be shoved just the same. So they broke his nose.

Everyone I spoke to spoke of how much poorer the Ukraine is than Russia. I didn’t notice this so much as a wider gap between the rich and the poor in Ukraine. I could obviously be wrong, but I get the impression that here you’re either comfortable and got your Benetton sweaters and holidays in Egypt, or you’re barely scraping by. In Russia it seems more like everyone’s surviving, but don’t have much extra dough. In that respect it was kinda nice (like sugar & spice?) not to see beggars at every other metro entrance, like you see in Kiev.

One other noticeable difference between SP and Kiev. OK, so Slavic women traditionally dress well, but from what I saw St Petersburg ladies’ fashion sense slightly lags behind that of their Kievan sistas’. So it’s possible I spend more time in Kiev’s center where the fashionistas accumulate, but I still got the sense that Ukrainians have a finer appreciation for fashion. So I guess that means I fit in more in SP. :-P

Oh, and don't you worry. Them Russians are just as obsessed with "The Nanny" as are we, Ukrainians. Очуметь!

Before I go on I’d like to say that I realize matters of globalization and cultural difference cannot be summed up in a cutesy post such as mine, but I wanted to share my observations of two countries that I always considered to be just-about identical.

CLIMATE
I recently looked on a map and it was like “Holy cow, St Petersburg’s on the same latitude as Alaska.” So. Yeah. That. Explains the 25-hour train ride. Anyway, Peter the Great built the city on a wetland and so all the pretty buildings have to be continuously renovated ‘cuz the humidity is detrimental to them. So at any given time half the building fronts got those screens on ‘em so that gargoyles and crap don’t fall and hurt the pedestrians. Also, many of the cathedrals are decorated with mosaics rather than murals and frescos, since they don’t get worn down by the humidity. I have totally gained an appreciation for mosaics, by the way - never seen such beauty come from ‘em. Damn. But most importantly (to me) was the fact that this giant swamp produces some killer mosquitos. Guerrilla mosquitos, you could say. Would. Not. Let me sleep. I always complain(/brag) about Minnesota mosquitos. Um, I don’t think I’m gonna anymore.

Moreover, the whole northern locale does create a pretty sweet phenomenon in regard to daylight. Everything felt two hours off - at 7 pm the sun was still high and the kids were nowhere near thinking about bed-time. My brother would normally come home from work around 10 pm and we’d have supper and it wouldn’t feel all that late ‘cuz it would still be like out. A couple times we even went for a walk in the park and only by the end (roundabout 11:30) would it feel all yucky and dark-like. This is what I understood to mean ‘White Nights.’ We pulled an all-nighter at the bar the first night and I observed as the sun safely hid ‘round midnight, only to reappear ‘round 4.

TOURIST FLUFF
Let it be known that the ground-floor restroom at the Hermitage (the Winter Palace) is the poorest restroom in all of the touristy sections of St Petersburg. The world-famous art museum is also apparently the least concerned with, well, everything. Considering all of the priceless art within its walls (not to mention its priceless walls!) there sure was a shortage of monitors and security officers wandering the premises (in relation to other sights.) It was also one of the only venues not to provide its visitors with plastic “slippers” to protect its awe-inspiring hardwood floors. Additionally, SP venues had the odd tendency to request visitors to pay a fee for permission to photograph the spaces (how law-flouting Russians ever came up with this is beyond me) but as I personally found out, the Hermitage doesn’t give a hootenanny about visitors who fail to pay this fee. Peterhof (the Summer Palace) was different in this regard in that they gave me a Post-It™ to hang on my camera as the best tour guide of my life herded our group through the Grand Palace. What they don’t know, however, is that I got in on a high-schooler’s ticket. Schweet. The two venues were my favorite tourist stops, along with a fabulously entertaining canal tour my cousin Vicka and I went on. That reminds me: the corpse. So we were hanging by the waterfront, negotiating with a tour guide over the boat ride, when another boat caught our eye. Two or three people were pulling up another man. Basically all I remember is thinking, “Why in the world does he look so yellow?” before I heard Vicka scream right as it hit me, too. After that she refused to go on any boats and even I felt some discomfort. Nevertheless it meant more to me to do the dang canal loop, and I was finally able to talk her into it (offering to pay for her helped.)

CITIES THAT SP REMINDED ME OF
Prague
Melbourne
New York City
Kiev
Amsterdam
Vienna

FAMILY TIES
I’m not a huge family person, nor is my family huge. My attitude has been changing over the past 5 years, but this trip has finally done me in. I love to uncover stories about family members, especially when the only effort it takes is to sit in one place and nod from time to time. My aunt and I bonded one night after I came home from Peterhof (Peter the Great’s summer palace) and she divulged to me that it has the location where she had met her husband (my mom’s cousin, who passed away 11 years ago.) It’s funny the places that conversation took us, except to say that I didn’t cry as much on the entire trip as I did that night, and that afterward I felt great pride to spend time in the same apartment my grandpa’s sister had lived in for 20 years. I know very little about my grandpa’s side of the family and it was fascinating to hear about how their side had turned out over the years. It really pained me to have never known my mom’s cousin; he sounded like a really good man, not to mention how different all of their lives would be had he never gotten sick. Conversation naturally turned to his son, Kostya, who I was astonished to see turn out so well considering he’d been without a dad since age 7. That’s when I realized I had been chosen to love him for all the people who couldn’t or didn’t have the chance to. Just as the convo was getting really emotional, the phone rang, and from my aunt’s tone I could tell it was from America, someone from my family…my mom…my dad…no, it was my grandpa. As if it had been some movie. I completely broke down when I heard his voice; I don’t think I’ve ever missed him so much in my life.

All this info was nicely complemented by my Uncle Alex, a distant nephew/cousin/someone of my grandpa. He kindly filled me in on all the relatives going back to my great-great-grandfather. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until I had spent the night at his 41-year-old daughter’s and had walked the whole of the Winter Palace with her that I worked out in my head that she was my third-cousin. (At first I was kinda standoffish toward them ‘cuz they had torn me apart from my “family” but our second encounter was much warmer and we have even been keeping in contact over email; she’s already invited me back for New Year’s. Oh can I can I can I please?) In any case, discovering relatives you had no idea about rules!

One other interesting aspect to all of this is that I always considered all these relatives “my Jewish relatives,” whereas they are actually less Jewish than I am. I hate to get caught up in all the hoopla of what Semitic blood indicates, I just find it interesting. My brother told me he didn’t feel Jewish, and from I gathered he barely acknowledged the ethnicity. Whereas his sister Vicka considers herself half-Jewish, though by (I would think) more standard accounts she is only a quarter. I also wonder if, at least in regard to my bro, I have made them think a bit about our common ancestors. He had never even seen a photo of our common great-grandparents - how sad is that?

Moreover, I am still deciding how much I believe in the whole business of personality traits being passed on through family members. All I know is that Kostya and I were cut from the same cloth. Or how much my brother actually reminds me of my grandpa. Makes me think about what an extraordinary person my great-granddaddy (or great-grandma?) musta been. I still know just about nothing about them.

So, loyalty or family ties: I don’t know what I got caught up in more. After a week of listening to my bro dog America (I’ve written it off as an inferiority complex mixed with patriotism - see above) I asked him if he considered me to be American or Russian. He replied, “Russian,” and that my departure from the region didn’t change the fact that I was Russian. I agreed, but added that I still in many ways thought like an American, to which he recited some proverb along the lines of “The mind will never understand the Russian soul” (discussion welcome.) I don’t know what to make of that saying, but it kind of reassured all these unusual spiritual feelings I had been getting while I was there, as well as the discrepancy I always have between my two homelands. Some time later, a friend of mine paraphrased a famous quote about how the more languages you know, the more people you become. I agree that through the use of this language I have entered this ‘other’ life as a different person, one in whose skin I am not always comfortable. In short, I tire of being ME. But I do not remember getting such a feeling during my stay in SP.

TOP 3 QUESTIONS I GOT ASKED
"What brand’s your cell phone?"
"Is it true everyone in America is fat?"
"Is it true there are black people all over in America?"

Even my 70-year-old Uncle Alex asked about my phone. Are we just as obsessed about our Nokias but I just haven’t noticed or something?

russia, kiev, st petersburg, family, travel, culture

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