From Russia with Love

Slice of Life

The following are some funny slices of life from my last week…

One of my required classes here is Phonetics and is of utmost importance for any foreign student of Russian as the sounds and rises and falls of the language are incredibly foreign (even for those who have spoken it their whole life. My friend Josephine (see last post) is a native speaker of sorts since she grew up in a Russian household in L.A. Her accent, however, leads most Russians to think that she’s from the Baltics). I greatly enjoy my phonetics class because the homework often involves studying elementary dialogues and classics of Russian’s popular music repetoire (including bardy). As someone who believes that music is the best and most accesible window into a foreign culture, you can imagine the fixed smile on my face as I sing our songs louder than any of my other classmates.
The air was definitely let out of my balloon of elation with Phonetics last week when our teacher introduced movements and hand gestures into this week’s song, Povorot (Turn) by Mashina Vremeni (Time Machine), a group reminiscent of a Russian Beatles. I love this song, and the teacher’s gestures were helpful in remembering new vocabulary (for example cliff, take-off, whirlpool, etc.), but performing these gestures while walking (turning, if you will) around our classroom’s table changed the topic of the day’s lesson from the distinction between hard and soft consonents to a lesson in public humiliation.
The university buildings are set up so that directly outside our classroom’s window are the windows of the adjacent building’s ladies’ restrooms where, at various points in our 1.5 hour-long lessons, you can see girls fighting for a place infront of the mirror or delinquently smoking their cigarettes while hanging out of the window itself (smoking is prohibited in the university building, but this rarely keeps students and faculty/staff members, for that matter, from taking smoke breaks without braving the cold of the courtyard). Somewhere in the middle of the first chorus of “Povorot” I noticed a group of girls hanging out the windows across the way from our room, some smoking, all watching our dance and sing-along in Phonetics class with enormous smiles. They were obviously laughing at our rediculous language practice and everytime I saundered by the window driving an imaginary steering wheel our mimicing an imaginary whirlpool with my right index finger, I did my best not to notice them and remind myself that “They don’t know me; I don’t know them; therefore, it doesn’t matter if they see me making a fool of myself.” On my third or fourth pass by the window, I noticed that one of the girls had gotten out her digital camera and was shooting pictures of ‘those crazy foreigners across the way.’ I couldn’t hold back my embarassment any longer and immediately turned redder than the Communist flag on May Day! I’m sure that sometime before next semester, those photos will be on the RGGU (my university’s) website. Here’s hoping I’ll be long gone before then.


You don’t need to be a Russophile to know that both the USSR and the Russian Federation have struggled with alcoholism as a national epidemic. Before I came to Russia, I prepared myself for displays of public drunkenness that would make my hazy memories of many swim team parties at Middlebury College seem like a sober elementary schoolgirls’ sleep over in comparison, but last night’s events proved to me that even my wild imagination couldn’t have prepared me for the levels of drunkenness Moscow nightlife has to offer.
Two of Josephine’s friends from school who are studying in Tel Aviv right now came up to Moscow for the week to visit her on their Fall Break, and we all planned to go out for drinks. Adam and I decided to go out for a beer while we waited for them to finish dinner and found ourselves on a patio café on Tverskaia Boulevard (the 5th Avenue of Moscow, if you will). After maybe five minutes of polite conversation into our two glasses of Königsberg, we heard a loud thump come from the sidewalk next to our café. We looked over to see a man lying facedown on the cement and couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive; the passers-bye simply walked around or even over him, not a single one stopping to see if he was okay or even breathing. Adam and I started our stop watches to see how long it would take someone to help him, or at the very least acknowledge that a man was lying facedown in the middle of the street.
After what seemed like five minutes (in reality, only ninety seconds), two security guards from our restaurant walked over to check on the drunk. He was indeed still alive but totally unresponsive to the two large men. Not bothering trying to talk to him, the two guards picked him up by the arms (at which point, the drunk showed his first signs of life by picking up his not yet empty bottle of booze that had to that point been abandoned next to his lifeless body) and dragged him over to the bench at the nearest bus stop, laying him down across the bench to sober up. Adam and I decided to keep the stopwatches going until the man finally made it to his feet.
We returned to our conversation about or friend Lizi’s experiences in Siberia (see her blog link), and after a couple of minutes, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. The man, in an attempt to sit himself up, had fallen off the bench and was once again facedown on the concrete, bottle still in hand. He had apparently sobered up to some extent since instead of lying dead on the concrete as he had before, he made an attempt to get himself back onto the bench, steadying himself with his free hand, but to no avail.
Realizing that it would be a while before he made it back to his feet much less out of our plain sight, Adam and I returned to our discussion which was now monopolized by the struggle of the drunkard ten feet away. It was like being at a high school football game, and we had become his personal cheerleaders. As such, we decided that the drunk needed a name if we were going to cheer him on properly; we decided on Vova (a diminutive of Vladimir) and checked our stopwatches: six minutes and counting since the fall. By this point, Vova had made his way back onto the bench and was sitting up. This was definitely cause for celebration, and Adam and I rose our glasses to Vova’s accomplishment.
As we finished our glasses over the next forty minutes, Vova had made his way to his feet, leaning against the weather-protecting hut of the bus stop, even three feet away from the stop, standing, or moreso leaning to and fro, feet firmly planted on the sidewalk. This didn’t last very long, and he retreated to the hut, trying to work up enough guts to sit himself back down on the bench. It took three failed attempts to do this before he actually made it back to a sitting position. Adam and I finished our glasses, cheersing to Vova’s valient attempts and inhuman courage in braving the mean world of humanity on one’s own two feet.
This was about the time that Josephine arrived with her friends and we all departed to find a bar, leaving Vova, still sitting on the bench. About three hours later, as Adam and I were walking home along Tverskaia, we saw the café across the street where Vova, like any good high school quarterback, gave his all for the team. We remember his many victories and defeats as though they were our own and smiled. Just then, a stumbling, giggling man cut his way between us and Adam and I both did a double take.
“Was that?”
“No, it couldn’t be!”
It was! Vova was on his feet with a fresh bottle of Vodka in hand, stumbling down the street, a whole busy intersection away from where the saga began! Before going home, Adam and I bought a bottle of Champaigne and toasted Vova’s final victory…although it’s still unknown if he made it home in one piece.

posted by Misha Molodoi @ 2:48 PM