But I digress. I am once again living for just under half a year in another cold country. This time, it's Russia. It's been a month since I got here, so I've taken some time to get my thoughts in order again before they fly away, borne on the gentle wind of change along the Moskva (bonus points to you if you got that reference).
 |
| Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. Alexander II, aka the Liberator, aka the best Tsar, was murdered here. |
Why Russia?
This question's been thrown around quite a lot. At me, from me, around me - it's the question that never goes out of style for the first month or so, and it's also something like #3 on the "list of top 5 easy and cheap conversation starters between locals and exchange students".
There are several reasons for me, none of which should be considered in isolation or taken as the "main" reason:
1. It's another cold country, and I've spent my whole life in cold countries, so I won't even pretend to enjoy hot countries. Seriously, Barcelona, I love you, but you almost permanently melted me.
2. It's one of those cultures to which I have been exposed in little bits and pieces. For example, we had plenty of квас/kvass, and mouthing the lyrics to the Chinese version of Katyusha was a common pastime in Shenyang (I was a weird kid). The Metro series of books by Dmitry Glukhovsky and the games made from them also gave me a tantalizing view of what this culture would look like in a hypothetical post-Apocalyptic world. But the full picture of this culture has never been revealed to me. So I'm here to download the rest of the damn picture.
3. The history and the literature. It's hard spending a large chunk of your secondary education learning about everything between Alexander II and Gorbachev and letting all that knowledge go to waste. Seriously, Russians from Russia are probably the only people I can have a conversation about Stolypin or Zinoviev with. I also think it would have been crazy to go anywhere other than Russia after reading War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, etc.
4. I wanted a challenge. In Norway, the magic words "Unnskyld, snakker du engelsk?" formed a powerful Scandinavian spell that would conjure a fully fluent anglophone in front of you, complete with more knowledge of current events in most of the anglophone world than, say, your average Canadian. In Russia, the same spell "Извините, вы говорите по-английски?" would usually conjure a very Slavic "нет". This leads me directly into the next section.
 |
| The Hermitage, or, as I knew it, the Winter Palace and the place where Bloody Sunday happened. |
The Language Barrier
Yeah, remember that challenge I said I wanted? Boy, did I get it. I'm not sure if I've practiced my Russian or my Charades skills (also known as a dialect of Italian) more here, but it's been great. I can't quite say my Russian is improving faster than my Norwegian did because the latter is by far closer to English and was therefore more intuitive, but I can say that most of my progress in Russian isn't coming from Duolingo. But I feel like Norwegian didn't have enough time to solidify in my brain before Russian kicked down the door, so now one grows as the other decays. More on that later.
The Company: Exchange Cohort
The mix of exchange and international students is fascinating.
Inexplicably, there are something like 20 French students (insert obligatory joke about la Grande Armée coming here to finish the Emperor's job). This has proven to be the best and first true opportunity to use my French since the 11th grade. All I have to say is, désolé, mme Barell. You were right, we were wrong. Forcing us to speak French 100% in class definitely ended up being good for us. Or for me, at least. The moment when two Frenchmen pause to consider switching to English to include you in the conversation, and then settle on continuing with French because you're also considered a francophone, is pretty magical.
And then there are a handful of Norwegians. All from NHH, where I was a year and a half ago. Big country, small world, huh? I honestly never expected to have a chance to practice Norwegian after leaving Bergen, and certainly not so soon.
Now, a note about how languages work in my head. By default, English and Mandarin are the ones I can both think and speak fluently in without major struggles. That makes French the one where I can fake being fluent for a glorious 3 minutes, and Norwegian the one where putting it on my résumé/CV would make me feel massively guilty.
What happens when I have to try to use both French and Norwegian in a relatively short span of time? I mix them up, of course! "Maintenant tu vente på l'aéroport?" is legitimately a sentence that has passed from my brain, through my fingertips, and onto someone else's screen. I conjugated a Norwegian verb using French conjugation because my brain refused to give me the right French word in time (it was attendre, or "to wait", in case you were wondering).
Anyway, this is all getting a bit far away from Russia.
There are obviously a lot of speakers of other Slavic languages here. It is endlessly fascinating for me to ask them how similar and different their languages are to Russian, and how much they can understand.
I'm also living with an eclectic group of flatmates (a Dutchman, a Finn, a Japanese, and an Englishman) in the student dorms, none of them in my program, which is always nice because it provides perspective.
There are countless interesting people whose company and conversation I enjoy and whom I would love to get to know, but the personal nature of this kind of blog prevents me from getting too specific.
 |
| St. Petersburg Mosque. Damn shame I didn't get a chance to go inside. |
The Company: Russians
Chinese are good at math. Germans are punctual. Americans are (overly) enthusiastic. Russians are cold and distant. These are universal truths that we all accept so there's nothing to write about here, right?
Yeah, no. Completely wrong. But not necessarily in the way you'd expect. Russians are cold and distant. And so were Norwegians, but I still had the time of my life in Bergen. Why? Because the onus isn't 100% on Russia or Norway and their people to make visitors welcome. I chose to be here; that implies also having chosen to make a commitment to meet the locals halfway when it comes to communication.
But more to the point, just because Russians don't smile at you and ask after you, your family, your dog and your dog's favourite toy, doesn't mean that they aren't warm or caring people. The trick is to establish some sort of relationship beyond a surface-level interaction confined to the academic or work setting. For some, this could be as simple as grabbing a drink together. For others, this might be a frank conversation about some topic where you get to know each other.
This is also made more interesting and complicated by the presence of Russians who are of mixed ethnic heritage or Russian nationals of a different cultural background, or both. The truth is, people are much more likely to think of Russia as a homogeneous country than they are the U.S. or Canada, but this would be a Russia-sized mistake.
I want to end this section with some food for thought: друг literally translates to "friend", but Russians use this word much more economically than the average Canadian or Australian would use "friend". What is a "friend", really?
Closing Thoughts
So many misconceptions about Russia. It's not safe; the people aren't friendly; you'll get swindled; the list goes on and on. It might sound bizarre, but the place and benign ignorance shown towards this country both remind me a little of home (no, not the one with poutine, the one with 1.4 billion people). Some of it is superficial; the residential apartments look just like the ugly old buildings in Shenyang on the outside, while many of the actual rooms inside are renovated and clean, again like Shenyang. Some of it goes a little deeper: the importance placed on deep relationships (yes my 华人同志们, the Russians have 关系 as well). But all of it works together to give the impression of a city and culture that is oddly, vaguely, sometimes infuriatingly familiar while also being vastly different.
This basically concludes my initial thoughts on my experiences so far.
If you made it to here (without skipping anything!), congratulations! You've earned a cookie. They're quite cheap and good here, I heartily recommend it.
Join me next time when I plan on sharing my thoughts on the "metalhead" side of things. I've talked a lot about culture, but I'm saving the most important culture of all for part 2.
До свидания!
