Why you should learn (a least a little bit of) Russian
My apologies for the long delay since my last posting. I did, in fact, have to pack, and after returning from collecting Tatiana in Ufa, visiting Moscow for a few days together (WOW! Definitely do not waste time you could be spending with your date in Moscow instead, but when you can explore together, do not miss this city. But pack your wallet: it has New York City or London class prices.) and London to meet my mother. Fortunately we left London before the excitement about liquids on the planes. As it was, Tatiana’s skis got to stay in London for a little longer than we did... Arriving back in the U.S. in the midst of a heat wave meant we didn’t miss the skis too badly. Entering the country with all the K-1 visa papers was relatively straightforward and the immigration officials promised the provisional green card and such would all come in a few months after the marriage. Promises... I guess we will see. By and large the process actually has all gone smoothly and at the promised pace, to my pleasant surprise.
Having arrived here in the States, my first priority has, of course, been getting Tatiana oriented to how things work and where things are, meeting a few friends, finding connections with the local Russian community, and explaining some American oddities (like the failure to use the metric system: I got weird looks in the Russian deli yesterday trying to explain in broken Russian what a pound was in kilograms. When I say it was a Russian store, I do mean Russian. The gal behind the counter didn’t understand English. The signs were in cyrillic. Most of the food was in Russian or Ukrainian labeling. And definitely Russian food.). Such things, and all the usual comedies of living together for the first time (having your dental floss disappear into a cabinet it has never been stored in before,
etc.), and the sheer pleasure of being reunited with Tatiana... well, writing this web log has been a low priority!
By the time you have gotten to this column, you will most likely have started to communicate with a women in Russian or former Soviet republics, or perhaps you have several women with whom you are corresponding and working through your best contacts. At some point in the near future, you will be travelling to meet her.
Now in all honesty, speaking the language is not necessary: there’s a lot of ways to get around language barriers and basics of travel are universal enough that you can get through customs and immigration and so on without issue while possessing not one lick of Russian (or Ukrainian or whatever local language might be). On my very first trip to Russia, I knew a sum total of 20 words, of which one was the highly useful word слон (
slon: elephant). The practical words (exit, enter, toilet, men, women) you can work out from context quite fast. What’s more, even with a year of study, you will be totally unequipped to deal with the pace of language and people will do dastardly things like not stick to present tense and use only the five prepositions you know, or even ask one of those questions you know, but in a way that doesn’t match the textbook example.
Still, a little Russian goes a long way. My experience was that a foreigner who has at least made some attempt to reach through the language barrier gets better service and attention, and more toleration for fumbling with things than one who launches into English to a total stranger, expecting a sensible response (and then repeating it again, slower and louder, as if this improves comprehension...). It is also a good ice breaker with your date. It makes a good impression with your potential in-laws, and these are people who you really want to have in favour of the change. And knowing the sign says “No smoking” can keep you from an on-the-spot shakedown fine from the police should you be a smoker. Being able to read the alphabet sure makes telling what street you are on and reading basic signs much much easier.
Russian language is also usually taught with a bit of history and culture that comes along with it, and knowing even just a few more basics can help you understand what is going on around you.
Your date is prepared to learn your language. Making some attempt to learn hers is hardly asking that much. And think about it: you do want this relationship to work. If it does work, you are going to be going to Russia now and again for the rest of your life. If you have kids, you can bet they are going to learn both Russian and English since ever grandparent desires to be able to talk to their grandchildren, and you really should fulfill that. And you don’t want to be the only one in the family who doesn’t understand when your kid uses foul language, right?
And it is very strange to be in a store in your own country and find that the lady behind the counter cannot talk to you because you cannot speak the language.
Russian has a reputation, not entirely unearned, for being a very hard language to learn. But once you get past the strange alphabet (which is actually much more logical than English: the symbols and sounds match up better than in English and while there are a few vowel assimilation rules and such, there are not many and they are consistent. No silent “k”s and other wonderful landmines of our mother tongue), it is much like any foreign language. A lot of hard work to learn as an adult, but you’ll have a loving tolerant tutor soon.
Packing for your trip
In my last column, I promised to talk about learning to read and speak and understand Russian.
Liar liar pants on fire: I’ve decided to leave that until next time again. I’m going to talk about packing your suitcase for the your trip to Russia, very much on my mind as I procrastinating from exactly that activity by writing this weblog instead.
There’s a few unusual things you will need to bring with you that standard international travel does not usually require, both because of Russian customs and because your goal of winning her heart (or working out if winning her heart is a really bad idea) is not one of the usual trip. So some things to pack:
- Your papers. I’ll carp on this one more time. Make sure you have copies of everything. You will not need any of the 37 different pieces of documentation on any one trip, but Murphy’s law guarantees that the one time you forget to bring a copy of the Letter of Invitation/Tourist Voucher you used to get your visa will be the one time you get stuck for two hours in a stuffy UVIR office getting a lecture on the evils of travelling without your proper documents. I was never asked for them before, and never since, and I have travelled to the same city with the same person and sat in the same building to go to a difference office with a different officer who was kind, polite, nice, efficient, but did suggest that I stay off the streets. A folder to keep everything organized is a good idea also. If you are freaked out about filling out documents asking you for details of your travel in Russian on the immigration card, also pack a copy of the form translated into English and peek at it as you fill it out. You can find one here. Just remember this is a sample, not a real card, Аерофлот will just hand you the forms, but Lufthansa (bless them!) also handed out a translated cheat sheet in English and German. I do not recall what they did on Scandivian Airlines when I came in with them. Mostly I recall the Dane sitting next to me assuring me the coffee was excellent (and it really was). You hand in one half of the card as you enter the country, and get the second half registered each time you move around, and turn this in as you leave. Don’t lose it.
- Clothes. D’uh, right? Well, recall that off the beach, the dress style there is a bit more conservative and appearance conscious than the typical American go to church in shorts and a T-shirt that says “Prime Grade A Beet” across the front (Did I say church? I meant to say Mass. I’m Quaker, not Catholic, so I have rather a more lowkey mindset to dress code, but I could barely believe it.). Bring some good trousers (dressy jeans are okay, but make sure these are stylish, not plain jane factory offcuts), a couple of dress shirts, dress shoes, etc. Think of it as a date and pack for this. Also if you are doing to meet her parents and family, you want to make a reasonable impression and dress is going to part of this. Pack clothes for cold weather if you happen to be going at that time of year. You don’t know what cold is until you’ve stood waiting for a bus for ten minutes when it is -35° C.
- Gifts. Russians a little Japanese in this respect: it is good manners to bring a few little things to give family (if you are meeting them), any children your Intended might have or that her sisters or brothers might have, and of course for her herself. It’s easy to go nuts on this. Don’t. It is not a rampant consumerist culture, and you should bring something nice, unique, but generally simple to be appropriate. Generousity is valued and considered important, but excessive generousity seems odd and potentially offputting. You’ll likely be given a few things in the same vein (and be careful about admiring things in the house as they may get handed to you!). Things that went over well in my experience included a frisbee for Zhejana (no batteries, simple to understand, but new and unusual to her), postcards with Turner reproductions from the British Museum which I gave to my future mother-in-law (She is looking forward to visiting Washington, but what she really really wants to do is visit London. Go figure.), and really good chocolate (They can get Lindt and that ilk there in theory, but it is a luxury item few would think to obtain.). If they are things unique to where you come from, or related to what you do, they may ellicit extra interest. I brought, for example, a book heavy on pictures and light on text about the sights of Baltimore.
- Personal gift(s) for your date. There are (at least) two schools of thought on this: nice but sparse (my thoughts) and generous (assorted others). My feeling is that you should pack a small number of small but thoughtful gifts, but I do not hold with the school of thought that you should have something new each day for her, culminating in an engagement ring. I think you should be planning on several visits to Russia, and the formal proposal and its trappings should wait for a later trip. My web log, my advice, ignore as you wish. A simple but nice piece of jewelry, perhaps a good perfume (or in my case being completely ignorant of such things, a small sampler collection), and perhaps some interesting unique packaged food (so it doesn't suffer from transportation). Really good chocolate, chocolate covered cranberries (they have cranberries there, but they still seem unusual and doing things like covering them in chocolate is new to them in my experience). I'd skip Tim Tams (for the Australians out there) as there are some things that cannot be explained. Please please please dear God in Heaven do not bring Vegemite. It is vile, it is wretched, she should hurt you for offering it. Perhaps a small something for the cats: I gather it is a natural flea retardent if cats eat a little regularly, and my two guys actually like the stuff because it is a little salty. Why why why bring axle grease only more putridly smelly to Russia? Okay, rant over. If you are Australian, a cool idea I read from one other guy was bringing a small koala pendant with an opal: it can be a nice yet inexpensive piece of jewelry. Another guy packed a locket and necklace with a small picture of each of them inside. Sappy but appropriately so.
I brought the engagement ring for Tatiana on my second visit, after we decided to get engaged after the first visit went so well. That was also the trip I brought the well received Turner postcards, a T-shirt that was just epically too big for my future sister-in-law with the NASA logo on it (where I work, which my in-laws think is really interesting), a laser pointer for the cats, and a few other things that I cannote recall offhand. The laser pointer was a total failure, by the way. The models that run off the little mecury batteries somehow manage to run them flat in ten seconds. Oh, and I brought a space pen for one of Tatiana’s co-workers who had done a great deal to help us before I arrived to get internet service in our apartment so I was able to telecommute from Central Russia for a month. He thought it was really cool. I guess in a way it really was. You know, I ought to get one of those for me one of these days. I mean I do work at the place... Turns out the oversized shirt was a better idea than I guessed, as Dina announced her pregnancy while I was there on that visit, and something loose suddenly was seeming like it might be a good idea. Prophecy? More likely nice polite manners on her part to suggest it was a good gift.
- A bi-lingual dictionary and/or electronic translator. On my first visit to Russia, the electronic translator struck me as a badly overpriced travel clock, but having run the batteries dead on the thing since from excessive use, I have become a convert. You can get them in Moscow and probably get a better price there than here, but since the whole point of needing one is that your Russian is not so swift, do you really want to spend time in ГУМ (Государственный Универсальный Магизин: GUM or Universal State Store, the Russian equivalent of Myers (for you Aussies) or Sears (Yanks) or... does Britian have something halfway between Tesco and Harrods?) trying to find what you want, talk to the sales agent, etc. My feeling is that they are not so expensive here as to justify waiting to get there to get one for less. A decent dictionary above and beyond this is not a bad idea. The Oxford Russian Dictionary is a reasonable size: a bit too big for the pockets, but not so large that it is unthinkable to carry it with you in a bag for the situations where the electronic translator either barfs or give you so many different options (consider the word "stock": do you mean head of cattle, stocks and bonds, vegetable broth? And there can be several different Russian words possible for each of these meaning: there are four words for blizzard, for example.). Of course then you are staring at a bunch of cyrillic trying to work out how to say the words, or mindlessly pointing at the screen trying to get the young gal behind the bar to tell you where to go to get завтрак (zavtrak: breakfast) which you have no idea how to say it. Which returns me to the subject of the future column, learn some Russian!
- An ice breaker. When your date first meets you, there will be funny awkwardness. The whole thing is weird after all: you may or may not be her future husband, but right now you are a total stranger speaking a foreign language dressing and talking weird and looking with fascination at what are to her the most ordinary of things. Like advertising. You would expect some tension or trepidation and it is going to be your task to work out ways to break through some of that initial oddity and become a real and enjoyable person to be around in her mind. Some simple ideas include bringing a pack of cards and asking her to teach you some basic games like дурак (durak; fool). This is a good way to introduce yourself to her children if she has some too. I played Concentration with Zhejana who had never seen the game before, but took to it quickly and she enjoyed showing off that she could count in English while teaching me basic counting in Russian. A pocket travellers backgammon or chess or checkers can be a way to being together and having an ordinary interaction that makes you seem fine and normal without requiring languages skills that might be a little rough and ready on both your parts.
Another possiblity once you get there is to watch a Russian movie on DVD with English subtitling, so you both can follow along. I actually packed my laptop computer on all but the Black Sea trip (and this forthcoming one) to be able to share family pictures, some Russian language examples and information of the work I do, and incidentally (and unplanned by me in that regard) to be able to watch movies. I have Netflix and brought a couple of things with me to see if Tatiana was interested in them. The Dish while a wonderful movie was too much about cultural references for its humour to be fun for her. Interestingly and unexpectedly, she really loved the episode of Mad About You as the humour generally translated well. I think the fact it was about a young couple working out how life being married was going to be was a good part of the appeal, but then the running humour about their dog, Murray (It was from the second season where the producers started to work out the character and storyline for Murray: the first season, he just had bit parts.) seems to appeal to her. The Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire pilot episode was good for some humour and giggles, though some of the humour (Lisa’s intellectual monologues in particular) clearly did not register.
There are some things more bizarre than hearing Kermit the Frog speak Russian. I cannot think of any right now, however, Children’ movies (or those merely young at heart) can be fun things to do together, and give you a chance to experiment with Russian language, show some curiousity about Russian life and manners and customs, and start conversations about how things are different in the West (like how common it is to see a frog on a bicycle, I suppose).
On the Russian side, good date movies include Служебный Роман (I get "Official Novel" from my translator, but I think it is "Office Romance" based on the plot), a classic romance comedy from the Soviet period (Мосфильм 1977). The scenes of all the gals coming into the office and spending the first several minutes at their desks adjusting their makeup is particularly amusing. Other things will require your date to translate for you: I would never have realized the main character was called back home in the middle of his dinner with the boss because his two boys had managed to get a cat stuck in the drainspout (!). Another fun possibility is a children’s cartoon, Твое из простоквашино, which is one of the adventures in the collection of stories Дёдё Федор, Пус, и Кот (Uncle Fedor, Dog, and Cat), a set of stories about a young boy who sets off on his own with the talking cat from his family’s apartment complex, and then goes on to adopt various animals in the home he makes away from home, and the amusing adventures that follow. The books are geared for 10-12 year olds, I think, putting firmly beyond my reading ability, but we had fun trying.
- Condoms. My keyboard is blushing. DO NOT COUNT ON NEEDING TO USE THEM! If this does not happen, even if everything else with the interaction has gone well, do not treat it as an expectation or a failure if a romp in the hay does not happen. Attitudes to sex and sexuality are just as individual there as they are here. I’ve had my Australian high school friends (long time ago admittedly) express envy about my going to the United States because American girls are easy (We were 16 and all virgins: forgive us our fantasies.). I had several Americans (okay, they were all men) inquire with apparent earnest about if it was really true as they had heard many times before that Australian girls are easy. Needless to say, both are myths (or maybe I just hang out with the wrong people). Suffice it to say that Russian attitides seem as individual as anywhere else: from quiet and conservative and not comfortable with the subject to quite open and direct. If you have heard anything about how uptight or sexually starved and voracious Russian women (and men) are, treat that information as urban legend.
With that said, there are two things to note. First, the Russian language is incredibly rich language with shades of nuance and meaning. Yet there is no polite word for sexual intercourse in the manner of the English (admittedly awful) verb “to make love.” Vulgarisms of the equivalent of “to f—”, that they have. When pressed on the matter, Edward Topol (author of Dermo!: The Real Russian Tolstoy Never Used) got his Russian wife to admit that it is not a subject for polite conversation and hence there is no polite term. Instead, Russian uses gutter talk or terms borrowed from other languages. Thus should not be surprised if sexuality might be a slightly awkward topic of converstation when it first comes up.
Second, culturally men that the lead in matters of romance. You are supposed to suggest which musuems to go see, to offer plans, to suggest going out for dinner, to ask her up to your room for glass of champagne and see where things lead (much easier in an apartment where you’ve made her a nice dinner and pulled out a bottle of bubbly to go with it, or introduced her to Bailey's Cream as an aperiff). It also means you take lead in regards to responsibility and being properly prepared with prophalatics. Furthermore, it’s just plain good sense: it is entirely possible there is a public health issue from a previous boyfriend of hers and this is not the time to be foolish.
In Soviet times, quality control was dubious, so the most predominate form of birth control was, alas, abortion. During that time, the pill was available but might or might not work, and the same was true for other methods. Quality control is generally much better now, but attitudes and habits are not fully adjusted to the new realities. In this day and age, there is simply no excuse for getting your date pregnant. It is your responsibility.
And plan on bringing every last one of them back with you unused. Maybe things will lead down that road, maybe not. Do not count on it. Do not treat it as an expectation or necessary condition for your visit to be considered a success. But Be Prepared, Enough said.
Next time, and I do really mean it, some thoughts about preparing yourself with some rudimentary langauge skills. Now I really should go and actually pack my suitcase instead of procrastinating on the web...
Planning your trip to Russia
You are going to travel to Russia. Congratulations! There are several things to arrange to make this all happen, some of which you may not have encountered on your previous travel to other countries. Let me walk you through the procedures and provide links to places that provide support you will need for your travel.
- Work out your plans. Sounds obvious, but actually this is quite important. Your flexibility to change your plans later may slightly limited: you can change your internal travel dates within Russia with a minimum of fuss (and usually skip the formal procedures altogether as the authorities seem pretty low key about this generally. I’ll outline things for you none the less as some places are more touchy than others.). The one thing that will be pretty well fixed, though, will be your dates for entering and exiting Russia. If you plan to stay for less than 30 days, you can get a tourist visa, which will be good for the dates between your planned entry to and exit from Russia. If you plan to stay longer, you will need a business visa, and you will need a multiple entry visa if you plan to go to Russia, leave, and return again. Plan to stay in a hotel or apartment, not as a guest of your potential in-laws as the procedure to get a visa to stay with a local family is complex, annoying, and slow. You are better off booking as a tourist staying in an apartment or hotel and changing your plans and registering that with the Ministry of the Interior (UVIR or OVIR) when you get there. Also a bit of pain, but nothing compared to how things are to get the visa to stay with a Russian family. This is one of the holdovers from Soviet days and the bureaucracies have not been purged of the idiocies.
- Get a letter of invitation. In Soviet days, this was yet another way to control and monitor visitors, and to keep tabs on those whom might be bringing visitors in from overseas. The control is (largely) gone, but the procedure remains... or has morphed into a way for agencies to collect a little more in the way of fees. It's minor and a pretty straightforward requirement. All it requires is a Russian tour agency to write the invitation letter for you, e-mail or FAX it to you, and it's done. Your fee, perhaps all of US$30, covers not only the letter of invitation (also known as a tourist voucher) but any changes you need to make once you arrive, and a revised letter should have changed plans to get around certain bureaucratic obstructions (More about that later.). I’ve worked with Visa To Russia. One problem: it is very easy to mix it up with Visit to Russia (“You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different...”), and alas I speak from experience.
- Apply for a visa directly from your appropriate Russian Federation consulate or embassy. There are companies that offer to help you with the visa application, but basically you are going to have to do all the hard work giving them the necessary information, pay them for transcribing, send them your itenerary and passport, and add a few days to the process. Why not do it yourself? The U.S. Embassy in Washington D.C. is linked here. I recommend picking up the electronic Word document form so you can cut and paste next time. If things work out well, you’ve got a few more trips to Russia in your future.
- Get a passport sized and formatted picture for the visa application. Places like Kinkos can do this with a digital camera, give you a chance to reject bad pictures (Ain’t digital cameras grand?), and get several at once for a very small fee. It think it was US$12 for four pictures. I went through them in the course of a year and needed more...
- Submit your visa application with your U.S. passport and travel itenerary and a copy of your letter of introduction. Your passport will need at least two empty pages and have at least six months from its expiration (which is actually standard to most other places too). If you anticipate needing new pages in your passport any time soon, another trick: DON’T GET THEM AT HOME! The U.S. State Department will take six to ten weeks (They are open about this on their home page, by the way) and charge you something like US$50 for the privilege. Pay more to get it in two weeks. Or you can walk into any U.S. embassy overseas and have the pages added in about fifteen minutes for free. Not that I suggest paying $600 to visit London to save $50, but if you happen to be overseas already... If your passport is close to full now, but okay for this first time, check out the office hours for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and plan a visit.
- If you are the trusting sort sure everything will go smoothly, you can start booking airlines tickets without your visa or passport (but do write down your passport number, issue location, and expiration date before sending it off as you may be asked these details). If you are concerned, and have planned ahead, you can wait. It makes no difference. I tend to get tickets first, visa next, and people’s eyes have crossed when I have mentioned. It has never ever even come close to being an issue.
Shop around a few sites for ticket prices. I found little variation between the popular sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia, but some services were better than others than giving you options for dates and times. I found some times that it was worth getting a schedule from one of these services and spoon feeding it back into the airline with which I have the most frequent flier miles, United Airlines to find the flights I wanted and get some bonus miles for using the United site (which really sucks as a search site, but 20,000 bonus miles? Where do I sign up?).
Аэрофлот does have an online site worth exploring, but unfortunately it is difficult to order and purchase tickets online through them at this point in time. However, they have direct flights to Russia, which most other arlines will not (at least from the U.S. or Australia), and often are markedly cheaper. I’ve written about the merits of using Russia’s national airline elsewhere before. In the future, Аэрофлот plans to have its own terminal, Sheremeteyevo 3, which make a very compelling case for flying with them. At present, however, there’s no sign of the new terminal and no discount I could discern for booking your ongoing travel in Russia with them. A Russian tourism agency such as Go To Russia (Do not pass Go, do not collect 200 dollars?) can find you reasonable tickets for domestic travel in Russia: very few sites I found outside Russia were integrated into the Russian systems.
- If you do not already have one, get a folder to carry all these papers in. If you staying in major cities and hotels all the time, this organization and protection of your papers from wrinkling and weather may be unnecessary, but it is a good idea to have all your papers just in case. Print out a spare copy of your Tourist Voucher/Letter of Introduction which you will need to register your visa with UVIR. Having everything in one easy to reach place with so many papers just makes life a lot easier. Photocopy your passport picture page and the visa. When you enter the country, you will fill out a two part immigration card, and need to keep your half for visa registration as you travel, and present this as you leave the country.
- Accomodation. The easiest way to go is to stay at a hotel. However, Russia is a bit conservative in some ways, so you will almost certainly have to book a seperate room for your date, even if you end up sharing a room. It preserves certain decorum for the hotel and they may even challenge her to show her key or proof of reservation before allowing her to enter (and they may politely do the same for you for form’s sake). You cannot pull off “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” when you are obviously a foreigner and she just as obviously is not.
Hotels in smaller cities and towns may not be equipped to register foreign visas. In towns, you may further find it necessary to go to the nearest city to register your visa. Plan on this taking perhaps a day or so to complete. Your agency that issued your letter of invitation may claim that you need to get a revised letter from them when you arrive, but in my experience, a copy of the original letter of introduction does the trick and spares you having to call Moscow, send a FAX of your passport pages, wait a while, get the FAXed letter back, and then take the bus to the UVIR office on the other side of town, stand in line for an hour, fill out some papers, stand in line some more, get them stamped and signed, pay the fee... well, you can see how a day passes while doing all this. More than one day if you make a mistake, forget a paper, find that one critical office is not open, fail to reach the Moscow office, have the FAX fail to go through, send your requst by e-mail to visatorussia.com instead of visittorussia.com, etc. What a pain!
It never ever went smoothly for me, but at the same time it never ever failed to work out in the end. On one occasion, I forgot to bring my letter of introduction, having not needed it before, and got the new revised one via FAX from Moscow... and got a ten minute lecture in high speed Russian of which I understood essentially nothing, about the evils of travelling without your tourist voucher. On the original letter, it said "Ваучер" quite clearly, but the revised letter said something else DESPITE HAVING THE SAME ACTUAL CONTENTS. He then stamped all the papers, sent us on to the next office, and the visa was recorded and registered. Interestingly enough, there was no fee, where I had had to pay 120 rubles on the two previous occasions. The next time in the same city in the office, but having to go to totally different doors and people, no lecture at all (but a polite suggestion to Tatiana that I not be allowed to wander the streets since I didn’t understand the language), all kindness and politeness and the entire episode took half an hour. If only the DMV could ever manage to be so efficient.
So why go through this? One is that if you go to a smaller town, you may not have a choice. Grin, take it on, and deal with it. And maybe even learn some bad language in the process! UVIR is a terrible place that no one likes. Even the UVIR officers: one stormed down the hall muttering “Шорт” (“Hell” or “Damn”, I think). Tatiana and I giggled about that slightly when the officer was out of hearing. One young gal went skipping down the hall after getting her foreign passport to allow her to travel: everyone was smiling or giggling a little once she turned the hall and couldn’t see us anymore.
The other reason to take this on might be to take on another adventure I highly recommend: renting an apartment for your stay instead of a hotel room. Why? First of all, you can avoid all the conservative angst of being in a hotel with someone you are clearly not married to. You don't have to eat out for every meal, which can be expensive if it is not part of the hotel service (and in some cities, the hotel dining room can be more expensive than eating out; In Novomihkailjovsky, on the other hand, the meals that came with the hotel room were dirt cheap, but very basic and authetically Russian. The cook found out I was a foreigner and took a shine to me and kept trying to offer me seconds. I was polite, but second helpings of liver and onions was not quite what I was looking for...)
An apartment gives you a better sense of what life is life, albeit an imperfect sense, a chance to wow her with your cooking skills, and a comfortable place to be together where she doesn’t have to be self conscious about being in her own home, with her family, or whatever. A simple candlelit dinner with spaghetti made by you can be a romantic dream for her: men generally do not cook in Russia. Don’t take it as an opportunity to live down to her expectations, but to make a wonderful impression. This is also a good wide to polite sidestep issues you might have with being a picky eater or any religious or culinary restrictions you might have: vegetarianism is not mainstream at all, but if you are the cook, just making a good rautoiulle with rice is a simple way to make a perfectly fine meal without this ever becoming an issue.
If this is all foreign to you, I suggest taking up a copy of Win Her With Dinner and picking up some simple meals you can make no matter how untalented you may feel in the kitchen.
- Arrange a car transfer. If you arrive in Moscow and need to go on to another city, you are going to have to make a transfer between airports. Terminal One and Terminal Two (the international terminal) are at opposites sides of the runways at Sheremeteyevo Airport, which is a good fifteen minutes by bus. There is a transfer bus which is free, but took me a while to pick out, a city bus for fifteen rubles (and for which you might or might not be asked to pay a second fare for your luggage: that caught me totally offguard and my Russian was only good enough to know that there was some problem involving my suitcase... and the driver was not going to give me the slightest bit of help working out what was wrong.) So if you get on the city bus with your suitcase and the driver says something like “blah blah blah blah baggage blah blah”, you have to pay for your suitcase. You may also need exact change, a slight challenge if you have just walked off the plane and haven’t anything but a few hundred ruble notes you got back at your origin. So if you have the chance to do so, get some local currency at the exchange desk at Sheremeteyevo 2 before heading out the doors to get some local coins (or at any of the banks in Domodedevo if you happened to fly in there).
The taxi drivers in Moscow are sometimes called the Taxi Mafia by Lonely Planet. They will prey on you given the chance. “Only one hundred fifty rubles!” was a regular promise. That sounds like ten times the bus fare, but Tatiana later told me that it was even worse: they were offering me 150 rubles PER KILOMETRE.
If you need to transfer to Domodedovo (the large, growing, and more modern Moscow airport, which British Airways now uses for its international flights after years of problems with Sheremeteyevo Two) or Vnukovo Airports, you can easily lose your shirt with a standard taxi. My recommendation is to book a car transfer with an agency such as Go To Russia. Knowing that you’ll have a safe trip to your Moscow hotel, if you are staying overnight, or to your domestic terminal, gives nice piece of mind.
So... that was a bit more complicated than your normal trip planning, yes? Now sit back, relax... and starting thinking about learning a bit of Russian language, the subject of my next column.
Your first visit
In two weeks, I am off to Russia. Yet again. But this will be the most exciting trip of all I’ve taken yet: it is the trip to meet up with “Tatiana” (I have a Belarussian friend of that name and I hope she doesn't discover I’ve been using her name for anonymous cover for my fiancée...), spend a few days in Moscow, thence to London to meet my mother, and finally to the U.S. to start the first steps in our life together, with a wedding in late October. It also means that pretty soon my attention is going to elsewhere than submitting new content to this weblog. With that in mind, I’ll be wrapping up the last posts in the next few weeks.
May your exploration of meeting a Russian woman go at least as well as mine.
In my last (serious) post to this column, I talked about getting your first profile together, sifting through the hordes of fantastic pictures to find the right woman, or more likely, women. Most good sites will include some advice about your communications, some of which I have shared, translation services, and so on. Unless your correspondents are fluent in English, and perhaps even then, you should be writing in Russian, which will be slow as you want to have these letters translated. Over time, you should find that most of your correspondences filter themselves down to a small number of promising leads. My experience was that I got down to two promising leads in a matter of a few weeks, but ended up trying to narrow that to just the one unwisely and was able to recover from the error to my good fortune. Most people with whom I have conversed did not have this experience and found that the one right person was obvious within a few letters. It might well also be the case that you will have to write quite a few people over the period of a few months before you find that most special woman, but unless you are extraordinarily selective or inattentive, you’ll find one truly stellar match to your desires.
The next step from here is to meet her. If you have more than one really good lead, it might be tempting to plan one trip and meet several meetings, but from everything I know and have heard, this usually backfires and you end up having no good meetings: each one is aware you are uncommitted and it erodes the dynamic. So you need to plan separate trips if you still have multiple points of contact you still wish to explore, and commit all your time and attention on your trip.
The next question is where to meet her. There are two schools of thought: on neutral ground where you are both visitors, or on her home turf in her home town. My own inclination, based on my experience, is that there is not a perfect correct answer. I would suggest that you visit her in her home town, where ever that might be, as you get to see her in her normal environment. If things go well, it is easy and natural to meet her family and begin that vital part of getting to know your future wife. However, this also puts more pressure on her to be in charge and arrange things for your visit. This twists the dynamic: she’ll be looking to you for guidance and direction, yet also be in charge of setting things up and providing advice and direction and what to do. But in my experience, that home visit went better and was more insightful than a visit someplace exotic.
Others advocate, with merit, meeting on neutral ground: have a good holiday with each other in an interesting and new place to you both. Most countries are a bit daft about Russian tourists, but some are less crazy and discriminatory that others. I think the visa restrictions and controls on Russians is inexcusable, but I don’t set immigration policy. The U.K. in particular is going to pay a heavy toll if their discriminatory practices towards many nationalities does not change before the 2012 Olympics. The appalling nonsense they have put Tatiana through for a four day visit to London with an ongoing ticket is beyond belief. Fortunately I was not on the scene to deal with the problems as I would have probably used a goodly number of Anglo Saxon utterances. The British do certain things well. Cooking and customer service aren’t are two examples of things they really f— up royally.
Research this issue. Some places that have, at some times in recent history, proven a little more welcoming of Russian tourists with visas issued on arrival for a small fee, include South Africa, Cyprus, Jamiaca, Cuba, and Turkey. Check on Cuba as you have may have special problems from the U.S. State Department if you are American. Since Russia has bitter cold winters, and a land mass that could swallow Canada nearly twice, but the only beaches ice free all year long are collectively about the size of the coast from Delaware to the Outer Banks, they are a bit nuts about beaches. Scarcity and severe winters add up to desire: a holiday trip to a resort is something quite special. If you can work it out, another possibility might be a trip to the Russian Black Sea coast, which has the advantage of putting her on home ground when it comes to language, but with the benefits of exotic locale. Of course you will be sharing the beach with a few thousand other enthusiastic Russians...
However, if you are coming to the whole meet her for the first time affair at the wrong time of year, this may not work to your advantage. Sochi in January does not have quite the appeal it does in August. But if you’ve found the right gal for you and want that first meeting and it is November... Prepare for extreme cold, but go for it. Your heavy winter coat is going elicit humour at the foolishness of packing a “spring” coat, and you will not be playing outside as much as you might in June. But this is your chance to get one of those funny fur hats and discover just how practical they are. I travelled to Balakovo in May, Sochi in August... and my successful and most pleasant trips were Ufa in December and March. Go figure.
In my next column, I’ll talk about what it takes organizationally to put together a trip to Russia. It is not quite your usual tourist destination... but this isn’t your usual tourist trip either.
Cultural Dissonance: A small matter of flowers
I recently went hiking (a favorite activity of mine, usually with the
Maryland Outdoor Club) with a club member from Hungary. She expressed some frustration after going out on a few dates with American men: they did, to her, unbelievable unpardonable errors. Showing up for dates dressed in jeans, for example, failing to open doors for her, basic courtesies missing,
etc. What interests me most when I share the story of her telling about “horror” dates is that most Americans react with comments about how she needs to accept she’s not in Budapest anymore and she needs to adjust to American norms.
Now I don’t want to say that my American friends are wrong on this, but my own reaction is not that Katalin (as always, not her real name in order to protect the innocent and guilty alike) has things wrong, but it is actually the American men who are clueless about what WESTERN (even AMERICAN) women look for in clues whether their date is worth keeping or not. Western women will not ever say they rejected a date because he showed up in jeans and a T-shirt, but look at what they really mean when they articulate “the chemistry wasn’t there” or any one of the typical rationalizations that you hear from them about why a date didn’t work out. Women, Western or Eastern, are a lot more attuned to how an interaction “feels”: they may not be able to articulate clearly what signals told them the guy did not merit their continued attention, but actually for all that is said about different Russian and Eastern European women are from their western counterparts, most of it is actually about who men do not understand how to attract and keep the attention of WESTERN women and then when they encounter Eastern women and the advice and direction about how to interact with them, they consider it odd or unusual.
Trust me, women may not recognize that the signal that you didn’t show care or attention to her was something as obvious as showing up inappropriately dressed for the occasion, but T-shirt and jeans is as deadly a sin with a western woman as it is with a Russian: you are sending signal you don’t necessarily intend or realize about the value you place on meeting with her. Katalin just happened to be able to place her finger on a very clear signal about the value you place on the meeting. That has everything to do with being a woman, and nothing to do with being Hungarian (in her case) or Russian or any other Eastern European nation.
But with that said, dress code values in Eastern Europe are a bit stuck in the 50s (to our way of thinking). You do dress appropriately for going out and your look and appearance are always something you check before stepping out the door. It might seem daft to us who accept constant casual dress at the office, but the truth of the matter is that they, not you, are in touch with reality. Your appearance does always send signals about who you are, what you care about, what value you place on certain things. The British Prime Minister doesn’t address Parliament in his P.J.s. There’s a reason. If you’ve had a string of odd failures on dates with western women, you might want to take a look at your wardrobe before you start looking at Aeroflot tickets as the solution to your troubles.
One other story Katalin told, on the other hand, really DOES show one rather dramatic difference across the no-longer-existent Iron Curtain (and we will never miss it nor mourn its passing) is the matter of flowers. Katalin tells with humour the “clueless” American who offered a Russian woman he was meeting a bouquet of a dozen roses.
Guys don’t get the flowers thing. Heck, I don’t get it. Just trust me on this, flowers are good gift at random, infrequent, unexpected times. At a time they might be expected, they are nice. But when they are totally unexpected... well, they have a lot more effect then. Keep them rare so they are a treat, but not so rare they never happen. I don’t have a rule at all on this, but suggest a few times a year is not too bad an idea. But surprise and unexpected is really important, so showing up every day doesn’t work after the first few weeks.
But in Eastern Europe there’s a little wrinkle. If you buy your flowers from an Eastern supplier, they probably will not allow you to screw this one up. But you need to bear aware that an even number of flowers, no matter what the number, is appropriate for FUNERALS. So there’s a very good chance that if you buy a dozen roses from, say, a Moscow street vendor, that you’ll get a “baker’s dozen” (or more rarely, get short changed one flower). This is quite different from the West where bundles of a half-dozen or dozen of flowers are a signal of affection. My opinion (and that is all it is) is that you should send a single red rose to any woman that takes your special interest, damn the obscene costs of overseas flower delivery, but only very rarely and perhaps even only just before you are about to meet her for the first time (to signal your genuine interest and assure her you’ll be there at that first meeting when you do come). There’s levels of meaning to not only the number, but the colour of the flowers in question, but nine times out of ten the subtlies of that will be somewhat lost on your date. Stick to the red rose for a first time or two as a sure bet, and experiment with assorted colours only at some later time.
I sent seven roses of various colours to Tatiana for her 30th birthday and got back pictures (from her,not the florist, though some offer the service) with the flowers. In part she was thrilled because they were a novelity (no one ever sent her flowers, and this was my second time doing so), partly because they were special, but mostly because she took them for what they were: a signal of genuine deep affection. Send them in the wrong number, too frequently, too infrequently, and they lose that meaning.
But never never ever give an Eastern European women an even number of flowers. They might as well be black roses.
You fool (quoeth Katalin).
Make wise choices
At this point, if you've been following my advice, you've got a good profile with a nice formal dress picture of you in the profile, a good well-translated Russian langauge letter with a few personalized touches, and you've posted it to one of the better introductions websites. In the first day you've had that up, you've received e-mail from several women in various places scattered through Eastern Europe. And you've not even written anyone! And some (if not all) of those women are simply positive delicious to the eyes...
Sounds like a bit of a fantasy, but it is actually how things are very likely to have played themselves out. Unfortunately it is really easy for this to go to your head and for you to get distracted by this. It is equally easy to be distracted when you do your own browsing through the posted profile by certain gals. The better introduction agencies are giving advice to women about how to pose and what to wear in their pictures, and they know that a good looking gal in a nice portrait ought to be attention getting, but she'll get five times the attention in the same post with the same gal in a swimsuit. And Russians do not wear one piece swim suits.
Russians in a Black Sea resort town. The beach is stone and pebbles, not sand, but don’t think for a moment that curbs their enthusiasm. This is one big crowded party. And everyone wears skimpy bathing suits: hot women, dowdy babushkas, athletic men, middle-aged beer gut guys, the lot.
What's more, while it is fundamentally a more conservative society than ours in general (there is a special formal form of address in Russian you use with all authorities, people of higher standing than you (boss, government officials, your parents and in-laws,
etc., formal dress in public, polite manners like holding the door for women), they are a good deal less uptight than Americans on the subjects of sexuality and religon. Remember the whole “wardrobe malfunction” episode? Such an event on Russian television wouldn't merit comment: Russians certainly are not tolerate of public nudity, lewdness, and pornography is far from mainstream. But at the same time, censors are not liable to cut a scene from public broadcast for having a brief flash of a woman’s breast. So while they are definitely the minority, you might see one or two profiles of women online wearing surprisingly little, be it a tasteful if highly suggestive pose where she topless with her back to the camera, but her face turned back towards the lens, or a tad more explicit like one gal who wore a completely formfitting fishnet leotard and nothing else. Both of these, by the way, are real examples.
I’m not prudish enough to suggest you not admire any such pictures. But at the same time, it is far too easy to be distracted by the bikini (or less) picture. Look at her written profile, the kinds of things that she mentions being interested in, what she is looking for in a partner. If there seems to be a match, or at least hints of a reasonable match, bookmark that profile and continue on. Eventually, from the correspondence you get when you first sign on (There's always a rush of mail when you first sign on, but once your profile is no longer listed near the top of new profiles, it will slow down.), and from the profiles you flagged as interesting, chose perhaps the best three or so that seem the most interesting, edit your introduction letter to match, and send them along. Much more correspondence than three people runs a high risk for you to lose track of who said what and say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and for you to just sink more time into it than it will merit all at once.
At this point, you should not only save the interesting profiles to your local computer disk, but also print them out. Assuming everything works out in the end, you’ll need to show this history of correspondence when you apply for the necesary fiancée visa later. You are going to end up throwing a great deal of this out as all but one of these initial contacts will fall by the wayside, so it might be tempting to only keep the files on your computer. Just be sure to have a good backup strategy in place if that is the case: if six months from now, your system goes through an operating system upgrade (and that kind of things is not uncommon), some files might get lost or scrambled. These will be vital later, so treat them that way. In my experience, I got a folder with the profile and correspondences of about six or seven women with whom I had correspondences that lasted more than a first few letters. All but one of those got recycled, obviously, but that record of months of contact from the initial meeting to the first visit, copies of ‘phone bills thereafter,
etc. were all vital in the visa process (which I will write about in a future post).
What will happen in the next month or so of those initial contacts is that you will get a lot of letters from nice women who just are not matches to what you are looking for, and several of your first leads will not necessarily work out. Maybe because they are not as interesting after a few interactions, or they are not as interested in you, or they have several different leads with some promise and for whatever reason, you are not the most intriguing of those to them. It should not take you long to winnow it down to two or three solid points of contact, each interesting and potentially intriguing after a few letters. Working where to go from there is harder, but even then it should probably be clear that there is one point of contact that just seems to have a lot more promise than another.
Elena’s Models, the primary site that I worked with, has a sidebar on their pages with “Newest profiles” and a longer list of “favorites” (meaning gals who are getting the most e-mail). My own take on the favorites that these are gals who are getting more attention and with whom your profile is thus liable to stand out less. A good introduction letter in Russian might jump you over that crowd, so I would not suggest you not write them. Just be aware they have a higher chance of chosing someone else than most. Elena’s Models also gave a weekly mail notice (which of course you can opt out of) of those she gave the very unfortunate title of “Least Favorites” which are wonderful gals who just have not been getting e-mail. Elena, if you are reading, please please please rename this. “Overlooked Gems” would be far more fitting! “Least Favorites” sounds like the rejects when what they usually are are really nice interesting women who didn’t get, or didn’t get the memo about the swimsuit thing. I found profiles here at least as interesting as those I found on my own or in the “Most Popular” categories. I have a vague recollection that Tatiana’s profile might have been in the “Least Favorites” list, but I’m not sure of that. She certainly didn’t do the bathing suit thing and several of her picture were, quite honestly, so blurry they could have been anyone. But recall that I was intimidated at first by just how much she had going for her...
My own experience, recounted elsewhere in this blog earlier, was that I ended up with two quite promising leads, thought one really fascinating lead was just too good for me and chose the other, and eventually worked out that I was wrong. Bless my luck that I had not damaged things irreperably with the wonderful Tatiana, and that the one other guy who got in touch with her was something of a clueless wonder.
Just one last point: one of things you’ll find listed on the womens’ profiles is their language proficiencies. A lot of sites recommend that you only seriously consider women who already have some spoken ability with English. There is a good reason for this: that language barrier is not a minor hurdle to leap, especially in trying to get to know a stranger and engaged in the small talk that gives you insight into that person. One thing that happens, I have heard reported, is that men come to meet a gal who speaks limited English and so they get a translator to work with them. But on that first date, the girl talks to the translator and doesn’t make a lot of eye contact with the guy, because she’s talking Russian with the translator. You tend to face the translator when speaking... and the whole interaction dynamic is wrong. It is not at all uncommon for the guy to end up going out on dates with the translator rather than the person he came here to meet.
But with that said, if you find someone who really is a good match and yet she doesn't have the English language skills, don't be too shy about getting in touch and exploring that. My own experience was that creativity and a good sense of humour could work through all the barriers and while I never needed a translator, there were times where language tangled things up. My future mother-in-law (who, granted, I wasn’t ever asking out on a date) and I have been able to get along well and have pleasant if somewhat simplistic conversations even though my Russian is terribly limited, as is her English. With Natasha, she spoke only a little broken English, but since she was fluent in German and French, my college foreign language course requirement suddenly (for the first time in over ten years) became useful and we communicated in rather basic German.
And perhaps you should consider the merits of learning a bit of Russian.
Cultural Dissonance: Train schedules and a sense of time
Many characteristics of a culture defines that culture. What makes a culture unique, what aspects it shares with other cultures, where overlaps and dissonances occur. Russia, especially post-Revolutionary Russia, has embraced a great many aspects of our familiar western culture, yet at the same time re-interpreted them through a Russian lens, and hung on to Russian traditions and practices.
One way in which Russia is quite different from an American sensibility is their sense of time. As a foreigner, I never penetrated that mysterious veil of differing expectations, but got hints in little places.
Americans, by and large, are a timely people. Not Germanic by any stretch of the imagination, and there's quite a difference between the hectic New Yorker and the laid back calmness of, oh, Madison, Wisconsin. Still, all in all, things in the U.S. run approximately on time, and in all but a few rare instances, we expect people to show up pretty much around when they are supposed. A few minutes one way or the other is okay, but when your date is 15 minutes late, you start wondering if they are going to show at all. 30 minutes is downright rude (and a sign that maybe you’re just a tad bit desperate to have waited that long).
21 years into living in the U.S. and I am still baffled by one glaring exception, which is parties. The start time seems to be the time you shouldn't be earlier than, but coming four hours later is just fine. It's so at odds with the rest of American values on time that it never ceases to amaze me.
If 21 years is not enough to penetrate American understandings, I certainly cannot claim great wisdom with it comes to Russian sensibilities about time. It could be that I merely observed aspects of the two individuals I spent time with. Still, it seemed in general that Russians were pretty relaxed about time in family and social settings, but demanding of positively Germanic to-the-minute precision when any kind of booking or stated time in a community context. Thus the concert starts at 8 pm and you absolutely must be there by then (Actually you need to be there several minutes before to turn in your hat and coat to the cloakroom, which is a social expectation. You do not take your coat into the theatre or concert hall. Usually it is a standard service of the location rather than a paid luxury as it usually is in the West, and tipping is not expected. Because everyone turns in their coat, everyone tried to get it back all at once at the end of the performance, and since Russians believe in a much more maniac style of queueing, it’s pretty wild. Your date will expect you to get both your coats and she’ll stand waiting for you outside the press of people. Needless to say, in such a mad dash, the clerks have no time to accept a tip.). If you make a booking at a restaurant, you need to be there right on time.
Social occasions, on the other hand, seemed to always have a much more relaxed style and manner. If your date tells you to take a taxi to meet her at the Obelisk at 10 am the next morning after you go back to your hotel room for the night, be at the Obelisk at 10 am just to be correct and polite... and don't be surprised if she isn’t there for a while longer. This is a chance to try out your Russian on the street side kvas dealer and try a little cup of the beverage, to walk down the Avenue of Socialism (unless the city has been subjecting to post-Revolutionary revision of street names: Moscow taxi drivers in particular were forever getting lost trying to find addresses they had known for years as street names reverted to names not heard in 80 years). Notice the differences in style of dress, hair styles, how people talk to each other, differences in cars. Try decoding the pronounciation and meaning of some advertising you might see around you. In short, do things to occupy your mind so that the half hour wait for your date seems trivial and you are in a good frame of mind and not at all impatient with her when she arrives. Sit there, do nothing to make the passing of time trivial, and fume about her late arrival and she’ll not understand the fuss, since it deserves none in her mind, and she’ll be upset at what she sees at boorishness on your part if you complain. Let it go: it is not important to them and you need to adapt, at least for now. Her time of arrival just does not mean what you think it means.
Or at least that seemed to be what I got from my meetings there. Evidence that maybe it was just the personalities of the two women I met there also exists. When Tatiana and I were supposed to be at her family’s apartment for lunch at 3 pm, the mobile ‘phone rang at 3:05 pm and it was my future brother-in-law asking where we were. On another occasion where Tatiana was running a little behind schedule, Bulat pulled me aside and explained in simple Russian that Tatiana had, shall we say, a Southern sensibility about punctuality. So it could have just been her. We did have a ten block sprint once to get to a concert before the doors closed... The next night, it was only five blocks.
Two great words: медленно (med-len-oh: slowly) and немедленно (nee-med-len-oh: the &8220;не#8221; prefix on the front of a work usually negates the meaning in Russian (roughly meaning “not”), but in this instance it goes a bit further. Немедленно means “immediately.”)
One place where things absolutely, positively, without exception, always run on time is transportation. Trains leave right on the schedule, and I never experienced a airplane flight that was not precise to the minute. Trains, however, are notoriously slow. For my mother-in-law (okay, the wedding is still a few months ago, but this is where things are going) to go to Yekaterinaberg by bus from Ufa, it will take eight hours. By train, 16 hours. That train will run right on schedule all the way through, but even though the train tracks are in good repair and the roads have potholes the size of Ladas, the bus does it in half the time. Some times there are express train services that get from place to place more promptly, but they are not the rule.
One of the most exasperating parts of train travel (beyond the slowness) is that a train will come to an unexplained halt for ten minutes or so right outside of town. Nothing is wrong, there is no signal telling them they cannot go ahead, there is no other traffic. They just sit there and stop... and then pick back up again to roll into the station right on the schedule.
The explaination for both the slow pace and annoying halts lies in the driver’s paycheque. In an effort to improve efficiency and timeliness, the State instituted the rule that train operators would be paid according to their record for arriving on time. But of course the folks who know best the travel time on the tracks from Moscow to Saratov are the train operators, so guess who constructed the schedules? Knowing their pay depended on the timliness of their arrivals, schedules were padded so generously that only the worst possible mishap would prevent them from getting their timeliness bonus.
So rest assurred that your train will be at the station exactly when it says it will, leaves exactly when it says it will, arrives at the destination perfectly on time. And pack a lunch. Maybe even a few meals. You are going to be on the train for a while.
Of course then there is also the question of whether the train schedule is on Moscow time or local time. No one ever seemed to be able to discern which was which...
