Post-Soviet Dating

Why you should learn (a least a little bit of) Russian

2006-08-14T18:37:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-15T21:54:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-10T21:19:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-09T18:27:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-01T14:32:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-29T11:25:00.000-04:00

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

2006-06-19T22:00:00.000-04:00

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...

Getting ready for your first introduction

2006-06-11T10:43:00.001-04:00

I have promised to walk you through some of the different aspects of meeting a woman from Russia (or former Soviet republics) for marriage. There are a number of web sites dedicated to introductions and their quality varies. There are a number of assorted assistance and suggestions available here and there to help you. I’ve recommended Elena Petrova’s Russian Brides Cyber Guide and her book “How To Meet and Marry A Woman Like Me” for guidance about relationships and personal dynamics, and also her associated web site for introductions, Elena’s Models. They are hot linked from my Recommended Resources sidebar. As I am writing this morning, the cyber guide is actually unavailable due to exceeding its bandwidth traffic allowance. Love to believe it was because of my recommendations...

The best guides are often written by Russian women, and represent this perspective well. But there are aspects of what will be your experience as you go through this which they will only know from their husbands and male friends. If they have been in a happy successful relationship for a number of years, some of what they will say may be slightly dated. Perhaps in unimportant ways, and indeed three years from now, some of the things I am saying will be dated too.

Today, let’s deal with the first steps of finding a good woman for you. And the first step in that is to find a good way for her to find out about you.

There’s lots of websites out there for initial introductions. Do not walk into this blind: there are some scams (I never encountered any, but I was aware of some angles and scamming has become more sophisticated in some ways) and there are business models that are better than others for web sites that offer services to introduce you. The cyber guide is a good place to learn about these things and how to recognize them for what they are. Some introduction websites require that all communication is through them and filter out your communication so you cannot give an e-mail address, and they automatically translate mesages for you, which can seem nice at first, but get expensive fast. Others just allow the introductions and leave it to you to work out the communication. My experience was that you get what you pay for: the free services were disappointing (and actually ended up sucking the wallet dry might fast) and the decent services with reasonable upfront fees were worthwhile. I used Elena’s Models for all the successful interactions I had and recommend her service.

To get things started for your end of the introduction, you should get at least two good pictures of yourself in a digital format that show well at about webpage size, and perhaps a few others to keep to share as you introduce yourself down the road. Internet service tends to be expensive in Russia, and especially so on a Russian salary, so keep your pictures small enough to download easily and swiftly, though not so small they show nothing. In my experience, a few hundred pixels tall and wide in a medium quality JPEG compression seems to work well in balancing quality, screen size, and file size. Uncompressed formats (PPM, PGM), large pictures, poor choices... This is going to be annoying (and potentially expensive) for her and unproductive for you. Make sure at least one of these pictures, which will be your primary picture in your introduction, is reasonably formal: business attire with good grooming. Dress habits in Eastern Europe and throughout Russia are more formal than here, and whether you believe it or not, even in our own Western culture, T-shirt and shorts on your first meeting sends all the wrong signals. ZZ Top styling is not in either: be clean shaven or have your beard or mustache well kept and trimmed in the picture, and frankly, keep it that way. Again, that does not have much to do with Russia, but while it sends bad signals here (Really, it does!), it does so doubly there. You may be able to compensate partially for erroneous judgement in fashion on a first date here with your wit and charm. That doesn’t work through the internet and even in person, your wittiness might not make it through translation as well as you think.

You have at least two good pictures, the primary picture being in formal or at least standard business attire. A good possibility for a second picture might be a more active picture of you doing something you love, like running a marathon, kayaking, white water rafting, sailing, on travel, or something. It still needs to be a good picture that shows you well. Clothed is still probably best. Naked is right out. But even a beach shot in bathers is perhaps not the best choice: casually dress by the pool or tossing a frisbee on the beach with shirt and shorts is better. The idea here is to help convey that you are interesting person who is active and does things, and to give her a sense of variety and the range of what you have to offer.

Next, you should write a basic profile about yourself. Be honest and concise (I struggle with the concise part, as you can tell from the length of my posts to this website!), giving a sense of your interests, and explain what you are looking for in a relationship. It may sound trite or obvious that you are a kind person with serious intentions about wanting to have a permanent relationship and a family of your own (D’uh, why else are you posting your profile to an international matchmaking service?), but stating it outright and clearly does help you stand out from others. This is not the place for saying anything negative about your previous experience (save perhaps the martial status setting should say that you are divorced if you are, and that you have children from a previous marriage if you do). You want to convey a positive image and this is not the place to whine about how terrible your ex-wife was, the wretchedness of how you’ve been treated by women in the past, etc. In my opinion, those are things to share as little as possible (without of course being dishonest), but this is absolutely positively the worst place possible to bring them up. We have all had disappointments in life: now is not the time to dwell on them with total strangers.

If you go ahead and post that profile and pictures, messages will start rolling in without you doing anything more. And that’s without you having even gone so far as to start looking at the profiles that women have posted. So my suggestion, which of course is totally hypocritical because it was not what I did, is DO NOT POST THIS PROFILE! At least, not yet. You have one more important step to take: write a good standardized introduction letter.

Now it is a nice idea to write each person a totally individualized response, do not get me wrong. But you should have one good solid stable introduction letter in an electronic format like a Word document, and get that translated into Russian. That is not a cheap proposition: a good two page letter will probably be somewhere around 1000 words. Standard high quality translations take a day to three days to get done, and at 7 cents a word, you are looking at about US$70 for that letter. Elena’s Models has a less expensive translation service you might want to use, and they offer two tiers of service, based on the experience of the translator. Since there are turns of phrases that translate awkwardly, this is a time I recommend going for the best translation you can get. My sidebar includes a link to the very good U.S. based (but hence U.S. priced) Language Solutions International. Do NOT use a computer generated translation for this first letter: while these are getting more sophisticated, they regularly stutter out literal word for word translations that do not quite work. Try taking an English, translate it into Russian, then back again. This often works surprisingly well (and will give you a good sense of when you have a letter ready for your Russian friend later and you are writing back and forth more often). But more often than not, something does not work.

“My cat is chocolate siamese” becomes “Мой кот — шоколадный сиамский язык.” If you understand Russian, you are laughing already. “My cat — chocolate siamese language.”

Literalism also does not work. Consider the Russian insult/put down: “Гори ты синим пламенем!” Literally, it is comes out as “May you burn in a dark blue flame!”, but more correctly would be translated as “Go to hell!” (This is, by the way, not a terribly harsh curse. That said, I recommend wandering into the area of foul Russian with caution.). I got myself in trouble on this one myself: as Tatiana selected yet another dessert in the grocery store as we were shopping (and there was nothing in the handbasket but dessert, mind you), I lightheartedly said “You are EVIL!” with appropriate emphasis to show the humorous intent and to tease her about her sweet tooth. Opps: her English was good enough to understand what I said, but she understood it in a very literal fashion. Never ever tell a Russian (or other non-native speaker) that they are stupid, crazy, or insane unless really do mean it in a very literal sense.

By writing her a letter in Russian, even if she says she is fluent in English, shows seriousness about your pursuit, and makes you stand out in the field of men she may be hearing from. In every instance where I used such a letter, it elicted a positive response. Even from Olga, who made it very clear that I could and should write in English in the future, but she appreciated that writing her in Russian showed the seriousness of my intentions. She may have made other choices (I wrote her just as I was about to go on travel for several weeks, so I was not writing frequently and clearly at least one other person was both interesting and more available than I.), but even she, quite experienced and fluent in English, appreciated it.

This may be a generic form letter, by the way, but that does not mean it should read as if it was one. The benefit of an electronic format is that you are going to be able to put in personalized touches (and these are good to include), and then be able to easily exchange them when you send the letter to the next interesting woman. So do not hesitate to refer to her by name in your letter in a couple of places, and/or make specific references to being interested in visiting her in her home city. Expressing in this letter that your intentions are serious and that at an appropriate time, you would like to come to her home country at some point may not be a bad thing to mention.

A minor point that some men do stumble on. Be nice and polite and say some specific complimentary things. But keep it short, simple, mild, and not something you focus on. “You have a nice smile” is a nice low key appropriate compliment for someone who is, after all, a total stranger right now. “You are a goddess. You are the Moon, the Stars, and in my world, everyone shall worship the night!” Not so good (and flawed plagarism to boot). In fact if one reason you are looking for a relationship in Russia is because women here run away from you in fear... You might want to think about the way you talk to them. Don’t put a woman on a pedestal. She doesn’t want to be there and treating her that way sends all the wrong signals. Over the top compliments are worse than no compliments at all, and both are deadly sins in romantic relationships, here and abroad. Keep your cool even if she does seem absolutely unbelievably stunning in that bikini.

Once you get your letter back from the translator, look at your English and your Russian letter side by side and work out where there might be minor phrases in Russian that might need changing from one person to the next. “I saw your interesting picture and profile online, Julya, and I knew immediately that I wanted to get to know you better.” is a nice personalized touch in your letter. Better not send that without changing the name, however, to Natasha. Ditto for specific place names. Of course, this does require you to be able to at least decode cyrillic letters to spot names and places and know how to exchange them. There are a number of guidelines available online to Russian cyrillic spellings of common names (as well as common diminuitives for you to use once you get to know the lady better).

Post that profile online, and watch your mailbox start to fill...

Cultural Dissonance: Аэрофлот

2006-06-04T16:37:00.000-04:00

My aunt travels for her work a great deal. One of her sayings about travel is that if you have a choice you should never ever take an American flagged carrier if possible. U.S. carriers have minimual service down to a fine art, offering measly meals (if any), dubious quality food, well filled cabins, and so on. There’s no missing that you are travelling cattle class. Get in Singpore Airlines or QANTAS and the differences are marked, even if they have more in common than have in differences.

The one caveaut that my Aunt offered to avoiding U.S. airlines was this: the above rule doesn’t apply when the alternative is Aeroflot (Аэрофлот), the Russian national airline.

I’ve heard lots of stories: getting onto the plane and noticing screws coming loose as the plane takes off and wondering if the same thing is happening on flight critical surfaces. There was a terrible crash in Thailand some years back on Aeroflot where the captain has turned the controls to his son, who perhaps all of eight years old. For my own, I recall standing on the tarmac in Sochi (Сочи) lined up to get on the plane and watching fuel spewing out of an access port when the engines were started up (and yes, they started up the engines while people were still walking up the rampway to get onto the plane: a bit rough on the eardrums). Fortunately it turned out that the plane has just be overfilled with fuel and the excess in the line was working itself free. Still, not something that inspires confidence.

That all said, they don’t deserve most of the bad press they get. The service is basic, but no more so than any other carrier these days. Their flight safety record is not spotless, but this is hardly a unique trait to Aeroflot (though it should be said that Russian culture is not safety conscious in quite the manner typical in the West and most assuredly not the lawsuit crazed manner of the U.S. in particular). By and large this is a Russian airline and Russian people have different sensibilities than Americans, and Aeroflot actually makes a lot of concessions to Western sensibilities on international flights. On domestic flights where the passengers are much more likely to all tbe Russians, the seats are terribly small, fold every which way you can imagine, the overhead luggage racks are dainty affairs intended only for the storage of coats (though no one seems to obey the instructions to not put their carry-on there). In short, it is very Russian... and very similar to any other Russian airline you might be taking on domestic flights. Tupolevs and Yakolev aircraft don’t use the Boeing and Airbus seating configurations. Culturally, Russians live in much more tight quarters and have more relaxed attitudes about crowding and dense living than someone from the rural Midwest. Again, hardly unique to Russia: see what passes for family housing in a London flat. So a lot of harshness about Aeroflot is just the start of the whole “We aren’t in Kansas anymore” experience.

So why should you or should you not chose Aeroflot? In my experience, there are two compelling reasons to go with them. First, they often cheaper. Sometimes dramatically cheaper. If you are going to be shoved in a small seat for a great many hours, why pay more? The biggest service different I noticed of all the things was the lack of inflight movie. Bad movie, terrible sound... what are you missing here anyway? The food was fine albeit basic, they charged for wine and beer just like American airlines do, and they were kind and polite and efficient in my experience. They do offer some low cost/no cost assistance in Moscow with transfers to a local hotel and inexpensive accomodations. I’ve never used this. But even without taking this into consideration, Aeroflot is cheaper. There are better things to spend your rubles on than a seat in a tin can. Get a good book instead of watching a bad movie, or if you are one of those lucky people who can sleep on the plane, do so.

The other compelling reason, in my books, to seriously consider Aeroflot is that they are vastly more likely to have direct connections to Moscow (which usually the central airport into which you have to fly to connect to flights elsewhere. Not always, so check on this, but for the most part, flights into places in Russia tend to require flying into Moscow and switching there. This is becoming less true as time passes: there were international flights (with Lufthansa) directly into Samara and Ufa, for example, but it is still the most way into Russia.

On my most recent trip, a one month stay with Tatiana (I remind you: not her real name, just I ain’t Jack) in Ufa, airfares to Moscow on my usual suspects were pretty steep: about $1400 return or more to get to Moscow, and then there was the matter of connecting there to go on to Ufa. Aeroflot, on the other hand, was running the same flight (only once a week and only via JFK in New York, but none the less more direct than hopping through Copenhagen, London, Frankfurt, or any random combination of the above) for a rather more agreeable $700 or so at the time.

You might want to consider joining their frequent flier program, as if things work out, you᾿ve got years of travelling to and from Russia in your future.

I did have one terrible experience with them, but it had everything to do with the terrible American tour group on the way back. Know the phrase “whinging pom?” These were whinging Yanks. Much worse. In fairness to them, a few things had not gone well on their tour, but some people deal with challenges and differences from how things are done at home with a bit of grace and good humour (and you will need that: this is not your home and they just don’t do it your way). These were the sort of people who just could not deal with anything that did not go the way they expected, and whined and complained which made the whole thing feed on itself.

On the flight, some passengers in economy seats decided economy was beneath them and complained bitterly about the quality of the seats at the rear of the cabin, the fact their seats did not fold all the way down in the last row (a common aspect to all airlines and the last row in economy and hardly a travesty), the noise (again, economy is always aft of the engines and it is noticeable, but nothing that would not be true on any other airline or aircraft (In fact for the transatlantic flights, it is not only a 767, but one with Boeing seating configurations and style: I’d have loved to throw these people on a YAK-42 or Tupolev 154 with the standard Russian style seats which are very different. But I digress.)). They tried to pull me into their drama to get a sympathetic opinion (Buggered if I know why.)

A semester of Russian tuition justified in one sentence. Пожалуйста говорите по-русски. Please speak in Russian. They left me alone after that, and the computer programmer from St. Petersburg sitting next to me had a hard time containing his laughter, as no one with the slightest clue should have mistaken me for a Russian. And his English was good enought to understand these guys were total pains-in-the-ass and that I was willing to do anything to distance myself from them.

Take Russian lessons. You never know when it might save you from your own country men.

Facing some realities

2006-05-29T17:03:00.000-04:00

To my fans (yeah, all one of them: Hi Mum!), my apologies for the long absence from this column. Getting a fiancée visa is not a simple process. Learning Russian is not a simple process. Getting a kitchen completely remodelled before the love of your life arrives is not a simple process. Doing all three, and being employed, and getting rid of some oddities in the house, and dealing with an inheritence in furniture from a recently deceased relative, and indulging the regular pleasures of life… Well, that doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging. And I’ll take on day on the Appalachian Trail over an hour writing a web log without having to think about it any day.

So I have written a little about my experiences in Russia, with meeting Russian women, with some of the pitfalls and joys of those experiences, and a bit about my reasoning in tackling all this. I am now engaged to be married, planning to meet my fiancée there again in a couple of months from now, and bring her home for a terribly rushed wedding (courtesy of American visa laws), and it off to the grand adventure that is married life. And I have recommended other resources here and there for learning about the general business of overseas dating, how to approach meeting a Russian woman, and at least some of the kinds of common mistakes you might stumble through in the process.

So what is there left unsaid so far which is not already better covered at such sites as the Russian Brides Cyber Guide?

Let me walk you through a few realities here.

First off, meeting a woman from Russia for love and ultimately marriage is perhaps one of the most important things you will ever do for yourself and for her. Your marriage is going to be the most important thing in your life (or at least it will be if it is your intention to have a happy and successful marriage). Making this happen, and finding the right person for you, may well be the most important and dramatic thing you do for yourself… and for her.

If you are thinking of doing this for kicks and giggles, forget it. It’s a lot of hard work travelling to Russia to meet a woman, and you have to approach it was a good mindset if it is going to work. Everything that makes relationship challenging here applies there too, plus you’ve thrown in cultural differences, language barriers, and different customs into the mix. You do this because there is something unique and worthwhile about pursuing a relationship with a woman from Russia.

This means some realities have to be faced.

You are going to have to travel to Russia.

No getting around this one. Even if she is one of the very rare people who can travel to your home country, and even if she wants to and does for a visit (and if this is possible, I highly recommend it, but it is highly unlikely), you simply must go there. You need to see where she is coming from, to meet her family, to understand her culture, and generally get a feel for just what a dramatic change it is going to be for her to come and live with you. And travel to Russia is not a simple matter. I will talk you through some aspects of the experience of a man who went through this.
You are going to do your very best... and still screw up.

Yes, you have my divine permission to make a mess of things. There is just no nice way around this one: there are so many different cultural differences and expectations that you are going to do things without being aware of them at the time that are weird, strange, unacceptable, or even rude. And people around you will do things that look and seem pretty rude to your foreign perspective and are not rude at all, merely different (You may also have to deal with genuine rudeness, but in my experience it was really rare. The rudest people I met in Russia were American tourists, but thank goodness they were not at all representative of most Americans I met in Russia, most of whom had generally pleasant experiences like mine and were happy to deal with challenges Russia threw at them.

Be it being caught smoking in a no smoking public square because you couldn’t read the sign, and being asked to show your passport and pay a fine on the spot (Thank goodness I do not smoke!), to making a joke that backfires badly, to failing to offer your girlfriend basic courtesies she expects but you didn’t realize you needed to extend, to giving your hosts compliments about their home and finding them taking things off the wall to give to you (Be careful with your compliments!). Something, quite possibly quite a few somethings, are going to go wrong. And you are going to have to be man enough to deal with it. Politely. When almost no one arounds speaks your language.

Reading ahead a bit on books about meeting women from Russia, however, will at least allow you to avoid some of the more boneheaded mistakes, like giving a gal a dozen roses (Hard to pull that one off, actually, because any florist worth their salt won't sell you an even number of flowers. Hint: even numbers mean funerals.).
This is going to work.

Sounds at odds to what I have said before, but if you want this to work, it will. If you really truly genuinely want to have a long lasting relationship with a Russian women, it is going to happen. Your first meeting might not go well. You might meet and find that first match was not quite right in person: it was my experience. You can toss in the towel at that point. But if you chose to go back and look honestly at how it all worked out and did not work, you will find a good match the next time if you did not the first, and you will have a much more sure sense of what you are doing and why.

By the way, there ARE serial marriagers (if I can so coin the term) who get as far as getting married and then a few years in, it does not work out. And they come back and try again. With the same results. And again. And they pretty soon they blame Russian women. Alas, in the wise words of Despair Inc., “Have you ever noticed the one common element in all your dissatisfying relationships is you?” Take what I meant to heart: this will work IF YOU WANT IT TO. If you think you can be your regular bachelor self after taking marriage vows, and are unwilling to make the adjustments to being a good husband, then you won’t be a good husband. And that’s what she is looking for.
Either you are going to learn Russian or you are going to wish you did.

This is totally my own flaming opinion and I leave room to be wrong. An awful lot of guys do not learn Russian or do anything more than make the most rudimentary efforts. After all, the goal is to bring her back home with you, so she has to learn your langauge, so why are you learning hers if you are going to live in the U.S. (Great Britian/Canada/Australia/whereever), right?

To a point, yes. But don’t even begin to think that that first trip to Russia will be your last. In fact you will most likely take on a number of trips to Russia before you get her home for that first time. That means facing a lot of things there in Russia unequipped with the slightest clue. Get a clue. I’m not talking about reading Tolstoy in the original Russian (not necessarily a bad idea, mind you). But it is a really good idea to be able to tell the men’s room from the women, the different between entrance and exit, basic polite address, and at least some vague introduction to Slavic grammar so you can work out how to get from a dictionary term (always given in the nominative case and if approporiate, with the masculine word stem endings) to the word you really want. Your life, and your customer service experience, is going to be a whole lot better if they think you have made some effort. Your in-laws will be pleased. And your new girlfriend is going to be thrilled. Even sitting down and trying to learn some new vocabularly with her can be a fun simple private date together that’s a great ice breaker (your pronounciation is going to make her laugh: trust me!) and is one of the most straightforward ways you can show that you care and that you are dedicated.

But even once you are “home”, and happily married, you have a whole new family in Russia. You’ll be going back time and again. You are really going to want to know that language. When you have kids, they are going to speak both languages, most likely (who would deny their children the ability to talk with their grandparents, after all?).

Think about that.

I’ll talk you through some of the things you are going to face.

Cultural dissonance: Clean and dirty

2006-04-07T22:04:00.000-04:00

Russians are pretty obsessed about the subject of cleanliness. Your clothes get dirty, you change them promptly. Dirt on the shoes is wiped off quickly, and you take off your shoes immediately on entering a home, changing into Тапошкы (taposhki; slippers) or less likely, walking around in socks. Bare feet is unlikely and God forbid you step outside in bare feet. When I went to the баня (banya; sauna, roughly), I was issued little plastic overshoes you had to put on over your regular shoes before walking into the change rooms, rubber slippers to walk to and from the pool and changing room, and there was small shoe dipping pool in the entrance you had to walk through to wash your completely clean never been out of the building rubber slippers. In the airports, you have to take off your shoes, but it is just unthinkable that you would walk five metres on the floor (which, I should add, would be vacuumed clean on an almost hourly basis). No, little plastic overshoes you put on over the socks to go that tiny distance through the X-ray detector.

And keep in mind this obsession with cleanliness is coming from people unlikely to have a large wardrobe (so you can run out of clothes fast if you change twice in a day) and where clothes are usually hand washed. I rented an apartment with a washing machine both times I visited Ufa, which was quite a luxury (and the landlady insisted on a 10,000 ruble deposit at one place specifically because of the washing machine: not sure if she thought I was going to put it in my suitcase or what). I'm yet to see a dryer: people have clotheslines in the bathtub and perhaps on the balcony of their apartment. So washing clothes, which hardly an ordeal, is not quite as simple and fast as here.

Bring in dirty shoes from the street and chances are that you won’t be allowed to leave without someone brushing them off or wiping them down, even though they won’t be tracking anything into the home. Clean clean clean.

Which is very much at odds with the life outside the apartment. In fact just the stairwell alone is an adventure: never put down a bag in the stairwell since you never know what’s been on that floor at some time. Mostly it will just be trod in grime from the street, but sometimes there is an odd sour smell of stale spilled beer or cat urine. Cats are generally indoors creatures, but you’ll see outdoors cats that look mangy and grime covered and presumably are kept around to keep down the mice. In winter when everything is frozen solid, what other options are there?

Trash blows in the streets, abandoned and shattered bottles will be in all sorts of places, walking through public parks off the limited areas where attendents pick things up around the monuments is like a low grade landfill. Grass doesn’t seem to grow as well there, but also there seems little effort to replant bare patches, so dirt works its way into everything. In the malls, there is an almost perpetual team of mopping cleaners taking out the dirt tracked in from the street.

Last month, Gary Kasparov’s campaign manager was knocked unconcious from thugs who walloped her over the head with rubber batons, then gave her a thorough drubbing before tossing her unconcious to the side. When she came to, teeth loose and covered in bruises with no memory of the attack, she asked the obvious question of what happened. When she reported the beating to the police, they claimed she had been hit by a car (something manifestly not true from her injuries). She pointed out that her clothes were clean enough to wear the next day: if she’d indeed been hit by a Moscow car, she’d be covered in mud.

Why Russians are so conscientious clean in their personal space and oblivious in public space, I have never understood.

Behind door number three: Tatiana

2006-03-30T01:43:00.000-05:00

After the slightly dissettling experience with Natasha, I was quite ready to toss in the cards on the whole idea of meeting Russian women. It’s very hard going to travel all that distance, try to bridge the cultures, understand the expectations, work out all the details, and then end up with things working out just the same unsatisfying way as back home. I was quite prepared to toss it all in. I cancelled my subscription to Elena’s Models and figured “to heck with it”: what was meant to be would be and apparently this more deliberate approach to meeting women for marriage was not going to be part of it.

At the same time, I’m not a quitter. Witness that even when things did not go smoothly with Natasha over the course of a week, we kept in touch and were willing to give it another go. Yet trying the same thing over and over again the same way expecting different results is the essence of foolishness, so I needed a good reason to be coaxed back into the idea.

Lucky for me I had met Tatiana, and as it will turn out much much later, thank goodness for her mother.

Wipe your dirty little mind clean of that picture, thank you very much.

You may recall some time back I mentioned getting in touch with one gal, Tatiana, and being a little too impressed with the correspondence with her. Just too far out of my class, or as they say, too good for me. Well, oddly enough, even after my letter saying that I had chosen to pursue only one lead and it was not her, but that I’d be willing to stay in touch as friends, she did keep in touch. I had read her infrequent letters as meaning that she was not too interested and had lots of other interesting admirers. Turns out I was rather wrong about that: Natasha had excellent internet connection (She, atypically, owed her own computer, and had internet service through the ‘phone at her mother’s apartment. She had no telephone at all at home since the cost to get an initial service activiation with Volgacom was a somewhat astronomical 5500 roubles (around US$250), something I got for her during my visit. The telephone service is affordable once connected (but still pricey for international calls), but it is a wonder anyone can afford to get a new connection.), while Tatiana had less access. And she did not have swarms of admirers, though there was one fellow who wrote for some time.

Great unbelievable crap he wrote, I might add. Excesssively flowery you are a goddess, you are a queen, you are incredibly beautiful, blah blah blah. I really do not know what is in the minds of men who act this way around women. It doesn’t send messages of interest. On the contrary, it says “Run, do not walk, away!” Tatiana didn’s quite realize it, but knew something was a bit out of whack. And indeed two days before he was supposed to arrive in Moscow, meet her there, and fly on together to Ufa from there, he wrote “Goodbye” and no more with no explaination. Fool! Thank goodness for me perhaps, but never ever ever play with a woman this way. Not in person, not by e-mail.

Tatiana was pretty distressed by that experience, understandably, and having had only two different interested men, one who proved to be a d—head and the other who went off to pursue someone else (however nicely and politely). She was understandably a bit down on the whole thing and stopped actively looking much, accepting that she was probably going to be single and unmarried the rest of her life (She’d tried the local scene for what it was worth and found it well populated with bored men at work with nothing much to do but troll the internet but with no serious intentions or anything much to recommend them.). Unbeknownst to me, though, I had an advocate here. Tatiana had talked with her family about what she was doing and her mother was supportive of it. Apparently what she had heard of me had made a good impression, enough so that Mum had convinced her to keep in touch and see what happened. We kept things on a comfortable friendship basis writing back and forth now and again, with me always a little surprised to still be hearing from her. I did hear about the dipstick who ditched her with no notice or explaination, but mostly her letters were about the excitement and anticipation of looking forward to a trip to Turkey with her sister and brother-in-law in September. By the time she got back from that, I’d had my visit to the Black Sea that had not gone so well, so knew things were solidly never going to work out with Natasha at this point.

Tatiana dropped me a hint: “It would be nice to take a trip to Turkey with you.”

Oh. I am slow at times, but I got the hint. I realized that I just might have what I was searching for right in front of me, like the person searching for the pair of glasses they cannot find while not realizing they are already wearing them. If she really was genuinely interested in me, and at this point knowing me quite well over a period of several months with letters that were honest rather than geared towards making a grand impression… well, it was worth exploring.

Of course this made it a bit late in the year for visiting. I flew to Ufa in late November 2005 for Thanksgiving for a week. Knowing that she was very culturally educated and sophisticated, we planned out a number of culture things to do while I was there: a jazz conert with Igor Butman, an excellent jazz saxophonist touring Siberia, the opera The Magic Flute and ballet Sleeping Beauty at the State Ballet and Opera Theatre in town, scoped out the local museums including the small but quite interesting Nestrov museum (a late 19th and early 20th Century Russian painter that did the interiors of a number of cultural landmark Orthodox churches throughout what would become the Soviet Union), and generally came up with a busy and active schedule.

What a difference! Tatiana was every bit as out of my class as I expected :-P but quite interested in me at the same time. She was terribly impressed by things I did that I would consider routine or at least unremarkable (like washing the dishes, making dinner, and doing basic house cleaning without needing to be prompted). The only real surprise, and it should not have been since she told me she was this way, was that she was quite shy and it took a couple of days for her to relax a little, and ultimately I had to just give her a big warm lasting hug at one point that assured her that I was not just being polite, but was genuinely interested in her, and that was the ice breaker that made everything open up from there.

We had a fantastic visit. Just everything seemed to fall in place. Even when I managed to put my foot in my mouth terribly once (Let it be noted that certain phrases and comments like “You’s insane!” get translated in their minds literally rather than the figurative manner in which it was intended, so the reaction to the comment is rather more stern and out of kilter with the playfulness in which it was intended.), the process of sorting it out was reassuring. Relationship are not just about what things are like when they are working, but how you work together when things are not working. Natasha got angry and vented frustration at me. Tatiana got upset and tried to work with me once I got her to talk to me about what was on her mind. Natasha gave clear directions about how she wanted things done, Tatiana talked with me about ideas. It is not that there is anything wrong with one approach over the other, but Tatiana’s style and my own meshed in ways they never did with Natasha.

So here I am several months later, back in Ufa living and working here for a month telecommuting (A very interesting experience in its own right, I should add). Tatiana and I are engaged and working our way through the visa process to have her come to the States later this year. If all goes well, and it all seems to be, we will be married in late October 2006.

And maybe by 2050 I’ll be able to understand contemporary spoken Russian…

Cultural Dissonance: Sink Plugs

2006-03-26T01:41:00.000-05:00

Russians believe in the goodness and healthiness of running water. They seem to think nothing of letting the water run continuously. It is not, in general, a desert culture and water conservation is just not part of the local ethos. This is a wonderful attitude for showers, getting good clean fresh water from the tap (at least in places where tap water is drinkable: it often is not so great straight from the tap and water filters and filter jugs are not uncommon). If you shave with a regular razor, you’d just let the water run continuously while you shave.

To that end, it is rare to see a sink plug. In fact I am yet to see one in my four visits (to date) to Russia. This means when you wash dishes, you put the dish soap on the rag/cloth/scrubber, get it a little wet, then use it to wash the dishes under running water. It’s a strange way to do dishes to anyone used to a sink of soapy water and rinsing, but it makes sense in a land of unmetered water, unmetered natural gas for the heater, and no particular water shortages.

Of course I just cannot make myself do it and keep using the largest pot in the pile of dirty dishes and fill it with hot water, a dash of soap, and start scrubbing. Alas, the soap formula assumes it will be rinsed away rapidly, so it is not quite as concentrated as in the U.S. and thus doesn’t last as long in the pot. By all means, offer to help or do all the dishwashing (very unRussian and quite appealing to women there, so use local attitudes to your full advantage! An easy way to make an unreasonably good impression.)

Automatic dishwashers are completely foreign: they might have heard of them, but while some of the more upscale homes in Moscow and other large cities might have them, they are not common and I’m yet to see one even in home improvement stores or local home improvement books. Expect your Russian fiancée to be a little confused by the dishwaster, if you have one, when she first comes home with you.

Summary: Natasha and Zhejana

2006-03-22T02:34:00.000-05:00

For the most part, I have written about the experience of being in Balakovo for a week, and only hinting a little at what the relationship with Natasha was like. Unfortunately, in all honesty though there were a great many things that I liked about Natasha, we had a lot of odd problems time and again which left me in some doubt about whether it was a good idea to pursue things further or not. But for the most part, I was often not too sure just what had happened…

To give an example, I was seriously in the dog house one day. We took a nice long hike from the hotel in Volsk’ across the hydroelectric dam over the Volga River to Balakovo. Despite being May, it was a pretty warm day and the sun was staying up until 10 PM at night already (All of Russia is at a fairly high latitude: very long summer days, very short winter days). So we stopped at a small store and got some water for me, which Natasha declined, stopped at the bakery to pick up a nice birthday cake (Natasha’s birthday is in late April, so I had missed it by only a few weeks and we decided to celebrate again with me). But the cake was something like 400 roubles and I only had 1000 rouble notes which the store refused to take (Not a learning experience: I got in trouble with this again though in that second case, the problem was that someone had passed me “funny money”: the 1000 rouble note was from 1995 before Yeltsin renormalized the rouble and knocked three zeroes off the end of the currency, so that 1000 rouble note was theoretically worth 1 rouble, but of course completely worthless.).

Natasha, not entirely unreasonably, got the impression that I was baulking on my commitment to buy her a cake, and got quite angry. Unfortunately when Natasha gets angry, her German fails her and I got a piece of her mind in high speed highly aggravated Russian. My German is pretty weak, and at the time of this visit, my Russian was limited to maybe 40 words if that (The boy under the table, the elephant in the car, and not a heck of a lot else.).

I’ll pontificate at length about this later, but it is REALLY a good idea to get a basic grasp of Russian before you go. It will take you years of study to get anything like conversational skills, but a good command of real basics (How to ask where the museum is, how to read road signs, knowing the difference between Вход and Выход (entrance and exit: some busses you get on at the back door and exit at the front, paying as you step off. Others you get on the front and pay as you get on. Still yet others, you get on and pay the conductor onboard who comes to you.), and you do get better service and kinder manners from generally polite Russians (and please your prospective in-laws a great deal) if you have made some effort with the local language (not withstanding that smart aleck with Savavia at Domodedovo Airport…)

So I was getting chewed out, with at best a guess as to what it was about, and not quite enough language skills to explain I had the money to purchase the cake, just not in bills that the store would accept. Of course I was in the dog house because it SEEMED like I had spent my money on my water (something Natasha just didn't understand: the American attitude to water baffles foreigners around the world even as we wonder how the heck the rest of the world is not falling over dead at 30 from massive kidney stones). It took 24 hours before we got in front of a computer with the PROMT software installed for us to converse and work out what the heck had just happened. By which time a lot of damage was done: she'd been annoyed at me for a day and I had not done the right things to apologize and sort it all out. The reason for the sour taste might be gone, but the memory of the taste was there.

Two lessons here, I guess, and I'll call this one quite solidly my mistake. Always try to carry small bills and keep an eye on it and make change at the store with your purchases instead of giving exact change, at least often enough to always be able to pay two bus fares routinely (usually a few roubles: 8 roubles was the expensive bus in Balakovo, yet 10 roubles was standard in Saratov, 15 roubles was standard in Moscow). Always be prepared to pay for everything: Natasha expected it without comment like it was completely natural, and it is part of the culture there. You are also expected to be considerate, and to be able to read body language. That means she is not going to ask you for water if she wants it (and may say no when you ask the first time, as that is the polite pattern, even though she may actually want some water, so ask again. Elena Petrova actually says you should ask a third time, as it is polite to say no the first two times. My experience was that a second refusal could be trusted, and asking a third time got me a “are you some kind of broken record” look: try it once or twice and see what reaction you get, and calibrate from there.). You responsible for looking after her and knowing what she wants and making sure she is well cared for, which sticks in the American craw as sexist, but it is a different culture and world there. Welcome to the 1950s.

So… small change and a fair bit of it to cover little incidental things. For someone used to almost never carrying cash, this was an adjustment and I didn't always get things quite right, but the cake was the only real big stuff up on that front.

The second part of the lesson, that I would run into time and again, is that there are automated tellers in a great many cities and places. They routinely recognize the Visa card and offer a langauge choice when you insert your card, so don't be freaked out about needing to understand Russian for everything there. That said, there might well be only a few of them in town, and you may not be able to get to one exactly when and where you want. Visa and Mastercard would be accepted at ATMs (Bankomat: Банкомат) routinely, but most stores would not take the card, and even banks are not likely to take traveller's cheques. Plan accordingly. I almost never found anyone asking for American dollars or Euros, and in every instance where a place was accepting those currencies, they would accept Russian roubles. So scoope out where the Bankomats are located and visit them and fill up,

Unfortunately the cake incident was not an isolated problem. It would be very unkind of me to say that Natasha had control issues, but she was someone who had lived on her own as a single mother for many years, and became a single mother because her Russian husband cheated on her and was untrustworthy, so it was entirely logical that she tried to have a firmer grip on what was going on around her than an average person might. This sometimes grated against my own personality which is generally flexible, but doesn't respond well to being ordered around. I have no objection to bringing a sweater with me that I know I will not need, but I do object to being ordered to go back to the hotel to get the sweater in firm and not too terriby polite sounding German (German is a great language for yelling at people: nice hard sounds, sharp ennuciation. Russian is great for romance: lots of round soft sounds and a wonderful lilt and rolling Rs.).

So we had a nice, but highly imperfect visit. Worse, our diagnosis for what didn't work didn't match. Natasha was sure things misfired a lot because she was tense having to manage being host to me as well as juggling keeping things under control with her daughter (getting to the kindergarten in time to pick her up each day, getting Zhejana to accept me (which turned out to be a surprising non-issue. Zhejana is not used to men at all and usually is very shy, but the two of us got along with each other very quickly. My visit with her was totally successful.), think of plans for each day, deal with the language issues, while working around my mother's health which was not good. I was more under the impression we had a lot of cultural misunderstandings (I never did work out how to both be the second person off the bus to pay the fare for both of us and also be the first off the bus to offer her a hand getting off, something she took as rude, however unintentional, every time I failed to do it. Opening doors, holding coats, helping them off the bus: these nicities are generally expected there. On the other hand, cooking dinner, washing dishes, and taking care of the laundry impresses them far more than it merits since it is unheard of there.)

We talked it over via e-mail when I got back, and chatted on the telephone a few times as well, and eventually decided to give it another try, this time taking a holiday together on the Black Sea. It was high season on the beach, so it was crowded and hard to find a hotel (Thank goodness for PROMPT Online: I was able to find a good hotel in a small town of Novomihkailjovske even though all the information on the hotel online was in Russian. Yeap, language barrier or no, it was my responsibility to work out our accomodations and plans.). But we managed and had the same experience there as in Balakovo, but without Zhejana to break the ice at tense moments (She stayed home with her grandmother in Balakovo for the week). At one point, Natasha was barely speaking to me for an entire day because I had refused to purchase Kleenex for myself that I didn't need or want since I had several handkerchiefs. A smarter man might have read the situation more rapidly and shut up and bought the kleenex to keep the peace. Me, I got the silent treatment. There were a few funny incidents like this time and again, and we were just clearly not meant for each other.

That said, we had two wonderful vacations with each other, interupted by rough moments, but quite fun in general. I also got the surprise of my life in finding that my own fears about the idea of relating to someone with her own children even though I have never had any of my own was a non-issue. While a visit is not family, and things would be very different if I were to have become her father not the fun visitor who came and taught her new card games, I related to Zhejana very well.

Still, the whole experience left me with a slightly disappointed feeling. My experience had the fun and wonder of being in a new and foreign place, I made a fair bit of effort to adjust to the local culture and customs (with mistakes and misfires that are just impossible to avoid). Some of my own personality shortcomings manfested themselves and there’s no question I could have comported myself with better grace at times. But I was almost universally good about this, and attentive to when I stuffed up and apologizing. For her part, Natasha was open and honest about having a few issues of her own. One of evening of angry “Who is this Melissa? Who is this Rebecca? Who is this Holli woman? Amy?” got an apology for being so suspicious, but her experience with her ex-husband did not instill her with automatic trust, even though all but one of the names she asked about were people I worked with in work or social situations (I happen to be friends with my boss, my coworkers, the president of the outdoor club, but hardly that close.). For my part, I accepted that the questions were not attacks on me, even though they came across that way. But we just set each other off a little too frequently for happiness together.

We have remained friends and I care about her and Zhejana a great deal, but I mostly wish her best in her search for a good husband. And that’s not going to be me.

But heck, I can have a relationship that doesn’t work over personality issues at home. Coming to Russia and having the same experience was just a slow and more expensive way to do it with nice bit of cultural misunderstanding and langauge bafflment added to keep things more challenging. Not quite what I signed up for. After coming back from the Black Sea, I was ready to throw in the towel on the whole idea.

But the fact I am writing this weblog entry from Russia tells you things didn’t quite work out that way…

Speaking in tongues

2006-03-16T01:56:00.000-05:00

One of the horrific problems of overseas travel is most people in the world for some peculiar reason do not speak English. Barbarians! They think that just because they live in China, it is acceptable for them to speak Chinese. How terribly egocentric of them.

Bad example: more people speak Chinese as a first language than any other language on Earth. English does manage to come in a strong second though. I am not sure what comes third: Spanish would be my guess. My guidebooks to Russia claim Russian is the fourth most common language spoken, which strikes me as a tad bit unlikely. Russia is the size of the United States, or slightly less so, population-wise speaking, and has not exported its language with quite the efficiency of English. Certainly it was rather forcefully imposed on a number of so-called Soviet client states. Still, that’s hardly a billion extra speakers.

Be that as it may, let us be generous and presume that Lonely Planet guides knows what they are talking about when they make this statement. It would seem logical that a person visiting Russia would speak Russian, or make some attempt. If you are contemplating anything more than a tourist visit, I highly recommend learning some of the language. Even a tourist should at least take a good glance at the cyrillic alphabet to read signs, and ask a few basic questions in Russian. I’ll pontificate on this subject in the context of dating more in a later column, but in short, I very highly recommend learning the language. You may be at only a basic level at your first meeting, but it will make a lot of things about your visit much easier, not the least of which will be the pleasure others will take in your efforts to learn their language. It makes a good impression, even when you slaughter the language terribly.

But we are talking about me. Linguistically challenged. “With some effort, he has managed to just maintain a failing grade in this class” said my high school German teacher. In fairness, studying was not quite my thing at tenth grade and language is deadly to not study. Forced once again into language in college, I elected the easy way out and went back for German and managed straight solid B grades the whole way through. And naturally never had any use for it whatsoever since, so calling my German rusty would be a generous way to put things. One of the reasons I advise you to consider learning language is because I did not, and saw the price. At the time of this writing (ten months later), I’m well into Russian language instruction, and what a difference it has made.

Given my background in language when I visited, it is ironic that it was German that I spoke in Russia for over a week. See, Natasha speaks fluent Russian (no surprise), but was a language major in college in both French and German, both languages that she now teaches at a high school level (and she has worked as an interpreter in French in the years between college and teaching to boot). Alas, English is the imperial language these days and teaching jobs for French and German are getting harder to find as schools react to the student and parent desire for their children to learn English.

You thought Reagan won the Cold War? Nope, it was Bill Gates: the fundamentals underlying computers is English. Programming languages may not exactly be English as we know it, but it is the foundation, and the operating system and program interfaces are all fundamentally in English. There’s a language interface drapped over this, so Windows XP could me a totally incomprehensible error message in Russian, cyrillic alphabet and all, but behind that is English. It is the international language of trade. Most people in the world speak a language other than English as their first language... and most people in the world speak English as their second language. In fact more people speak English as a second language these days than as a first. And Russians know it and want to learn it. Being able to speak a second language is often seem as a mark of erudition and education: Tolstoy wrote War and Peace assuming the reader knew both French and Russian. These days, the first choice for a second language is English, and you will find random people at odd times with some command of English.

So Natasha is learning English as a (GULP!) fourth language. Me, after twenty years in the United States, I am still trying to master the vaguries of American English. I got the American accent down pat, but ohy the spelling... Why are Americans allergic to the letter “u”?

I did attempt to study some Russian before travelling. I’ve already recounted the amusing situation with the airline that managed to get me into. I would have to say that I managed to double my Russian vocabularly in the week I was there. But twice nothing is still nothing.

That left us working with a Russian-English dictionary that got looking quite dog eared by the end of the week, and a lot of German. Suddenly those classes in college, ten years too late, became terribly practical. It was enough to get me through basic conversation, but there was a great deal of conversation that also boiled down to “Could you say that again?”, hand gestures, confusion, annoyance, and reaching for the pocket translator.

There are some wonderful little pocket gadgets these days for translation between languages. They also have some features like a built-in alarm clock, a timer, some games. I can recommend them... for telling time. The blasted thing would not recognize almost any phrase in Russian Natasha threw at it and I had only marginally better luck in English getting back into Russian. Worst, I would get a translated word and then wonder how in the blindly blue blazes I was supposed to pronounce завтрак (zaftrak: breakfast) once it got the word on the screen. Natasha and I had a terrible misunderstanding one afternoon that took 24 hours before we could talk it out by working with PROMT (Project for Machine Translation) which has Russian-English software that works quite well (and a fairly good if limited internet version for up to 500 characters at a time) to sort it out.

Once you actually know a little Russian, the gadgets become a little more useful: you need to understand how to shift the word in the dictionary to the word you want with the proper Slavic word ending and conjugation.

What is worse, I have the tendancy of many language learners to switch foreign languages mid-stream when there was a concept I was reaching for and knew in one language and not another. The result: a sentence that might be predominately German yet be littered with a Russian noun here and there, bits of English, and why the heck not, a word or two of French in there too. Natasha almost always understood me, after all, so obviously it worked. Until I’d do something stupid like assume that because I could talk to her, I could talk to others, and would proceed to ask the price of a bottle of water in at least three different languages at once to some poor girl behind the counter who may or may not have ever knowingly had a foreign customer in her life. Russian lacks some language traits of other European languages to boot, and my tiny little mind could not wrap my mind around a language without articles (grammatically speaking the “the” in “the table” (der Tisch in German, le Table in French, стол in Russian, so out I would come with “der стол”).

Balakovo is not exactly on the Russian tourist circuit, recall, and Russia is not the most common of tourist destinations just yet, as fascinating a place as I might have found it. Not a lot of foreigners. I got some weird looks. And earned them all. On the other hand, I did get my bottle of water.

It was quite a jarring experience, in fact, to return to Moscow at the end of the trip for one night and suddenly realize that I had been making my way reasonably well for a week on German and English with smatterings of Russian and French... and now I was royally screwed if no one understand English because I was completely unable to utter a complete sentence in Russian. Except some terribly unuseful things like “The boy under the table” and “The elephant in the car” and so on, which is not so helpful when you want to say “I have a room reservation in the Izmailovo hotel, but I am not sure whether it is in building Delta or Gamma. Could you please help me?”

Izmailovo, by the way, is a huge hotel complex that could swallow all the Moscow airports whole and still have space for leftovers. Fortunately while most of the staff could not understand English, it was common enough that I was able to find out that I was in building Delta and needed to find my way to Gamma. At the Gamma front desk, one young lady spoke flawless English. Unlike the cab driver, but that is another story.

So for a week, I spoke sliding between languages and Natasha understood me, Zhejana looked at me like I was bafflingly stupid (until we played cards where my ability to count to ten in Russian stood me in good steed), and everyone else had to deal with a stream of one word sentences when I remember to speak the correct language. There was one quite amusing situation where I did not understand what had just happened, but it was clear there was vast confusion. Zhejana, like me, has dark hair and dark eyes and physically looks a good deal like me, or at least enough so that she could be confused for being my biological daughter. Natasha is short, blonde, blue eyed, with a round face and Slavic jawline rather unlike me and Zhejana. So in the store getting meat for dinner one day, the lady serving us assumed Zhejana was my daughter and was completely baffled when Natasha would ask me about the cut of meat in German, I would respond in English, and Natasha (at this point riding piggy back on me) would ask what was going on in Russian.

Bizarrely enough, I got a complete tour of the Balakovo Nuclear Power Station Information Center which lasted thirty minutes, and I understood everything but one word: soil contamination monitor. Out came the trusty Oxford Russian English dictionary for that one. The whole thing was done in German with the guide, with another guide occasionally sticking in a word here and there in English: “Science Fiction!” he declared as the regular guide in German explained the safety systems in place for dealing with potential disasters (flooding, earthquakes, a plane crash into the power station reactor core building, etc). So what was the fiction: the power plant safety or the chance of the portrayed disasters actually happening. If the power station is in as good repair as the roads, I think his statements may not have the meaning he intended...

Understanding an entire tour of a power station in German ought be worth at least a B-, though, don’t you think? Pity I went to Russia to brush up on my German...

The fine art of gift giving in Russia

2006-03-05T10:38:00.000-05:00

I once spoke to Natasha not long after returning to the U.S. after my visit. After basic pleasantries, she said, in accented but unmistakable English, was “You very bad man! Bad gift!” I must sadly admit that I did not need to know anything more to know (almost) exactly what had happened, and exactly why I had been a bad person.

Russians have some customs in common with the Japanese. One is the matter of shoes. When you get to a Russian home or apartment, there is a foyer area, often shared between apartments, where you take off your shoes and then walk into the apartment proper in socks, or more often, тапочки (tapochki; slippers). Your host provides your тапочки. Given that I am a tall man with narrow feet visiting homes of predominately short people with wide feet, the slippers didn't stay on too long. I got chastised once for taking off my shoes on one side of the foyer and then walking across all of two feet to the other side in stocking feet for fear I would track all that dirt into the home.

Russians are very clean people and quite conscious of this. To go the swimming pool, I had to put little plastic overshoes on over my shoes to get into the change room, wear rubber slippers in the change room and to the pool, shower before getting into the pool, and walk through a dipping pond reminiscient of those used to control the spread of Hoof and Mouth disease. It was much the same in airports: you take off your shoes to send them through metal detector and they issue you with plastic overshoes to walk through the scanner, then collect them up again on the other side. Heaven forbid that you walk ten feet in your socks on pristine clean floor.

Zhejana, being a young playful girl, got dirty from time to time. There was much fuss and brushing off and off home to get changed (if a change of clothes did come out of the bag on the spot). Nor was it uncommon to change clothes from the street after coming home.

Certain kinds of things were treasured which here would be considered trash. Specifically plastic bags. They are collected and used and used and used. You can spot the foreigners: they are the people on the street carrying things in anything other than a plastic bag. When one bag wears a bit thin, you put the next bag over it to have a double bag less likely to let go and more difficult (at least in theory) for someone of a criminal bent to slice in and grab things out of the bag.

At the same time, Russians have a pretty casual attitude towards trash. There seem rarely to be trash cans in public spaces and where I recall seeming them, they were overflowing (though in fairness, we went through the city park in Saratov just as the brigade of cleaners swept through, so they were just about as bad as they were ever going to get). Abandoned beer bottles were everywhere: I gather in winter it is vodka bottles that decorate the streets. Vodka bottles once were as valueable as plastic bags as you could not get new vodka without turning in the old bottles, but the collapse of the immediate post-Soviet era seems to have largely passed. Still, soda bottles are best held on to for filling up at the kvas sellers in the summer. It costs money to get bags at the market, hence the bag hording.

The trash aspect is very un-Japanese, even as the focus on personal cleanliness is very Japanese.

The other Japanese-reminscient behavior is the matter of gifts. It is traditional to have some small gift to give your hosts when you visit. Often it may be some minimal thing such as flowers or a bottle of wine, a small box of chocolates, and so on. For visiting foreigners, however, the bar is set a little higher. It is good to bring something from your home place, which is either unique or at least unusual in Russia. Soviet perfume is the right idea, but a nice French perfume is a prestige item and a rare and much appreciated gift. I instead opted for uniquely American items, such as dried cranberries and maple syrup. I also packed a frisbee for Zhejana, which she refered to as a тарелка (tar-e-yol-ka) which I took be the Russian word for frisbee until I was handed тарелки (the plural; dinner plates) to put on the table. I hope that Zhejana understands that it is not necessarily an American custom to take the plates after a picnic lunch and toss them around the yard. I also packed an American white wine (an Oregon Pinot Gris) which we had with the dinner I made for everyone (Американский шашлык; Amerikanskiy shashlik; American barbeque) one night. Wines in Russia come from Georgia and tend to have a much sharper taste to them (like a very young wine, argueably), so it was an interesting new taste for them.

It is also important to pack pictures of your family and some of the kinds of places you go to share. Russians are very restricted in their travels and their exposure to the West is limited. The way the American embassy treats Russian applications for tourist visas, it is going to stay limited (rude people that they are: 35% of all tourist visa applications are rejected, a figure that rises to almost 100% for single women or regions of the country determined to be economically depressed, such as most of Siberia.). But they are interested in the everyday aspects of life in the United States. It is quite different from their experience. To that end, I had brought pictures of my family and friends and home. The pictures of the cats, I must admit, were the big hit. Especially a pair of pictures of Carmel taken seconds apart: flipping between the two pictures makes it look like he is nodding his head up and down: Нет (nyet).

And then there was the gift that did not quite as planned. One of the ways I like learning about another culture is through their food, and I like to share this with others. Hence the maple syrup and cranberries and so on. Russia does in fact have cranberries, but they are not common outside of the northern parts of the country where there bogs to support them, and the dried cranberries are unheard of.

Where I erred was some native American style southwestern mixes. Specifically, I brought a Native Seed/SEARCH Habanero Brownie mix. I had been told by my semi-reliable Lonely Planet guide that Russian food was quite bland, and assured by Natasha that this was not the case and that spices were regularly used in food, including hot peppers. This indeed was the case. In fairness to Lonely Planet, the guide seemed not to get out of Moscow very much. And they still had Yeltsin running the country. So I thought nothing of an Arizona sweet and hot taste mix at all. If they like hot food, this will be an interesting variant they have not encountered before.

I did try to explain the taste and clearly this did not get through the translation from English to German to Russian. Thinking a sweet cake would taste good, then obviously the mix of the same would be equally good, Natasha tried the mix. Straight.

There is a Russian term for vulgar language, Мать (mat'; mother). There were, as Spock would say, many colourful metaphors uttered. Not the least of which is because the water in Balakovo is not drinkable straight from the tap, but must first be filtered and that’s not an instanteous process. So Natasha was there with her mouth on fire from her first (and perhaps only) encounter with concentrated Habanero Hot Pepper powder and delayed access to water.

I mentioned giving this gift to an American friend shortly after I returned from Russia, and my friend laughed and asked if I had been clear about what I had just given her. And then asked if I was still in touch with Natasha after my trip.

Russians are very kind and generous people. At least that is the only explanation I can give for the fact that Natasha is still talking to me.

And I am a very bad man.

My drinking problem

2006-02-26T21:40:00.000-05:00

Russia has a terrible reputation for rampant alcoholism. And all I can say is that I saw nothing to contradict the bad press. There were abandoned beer bottles everywhere around in public spaces. In summer, it’s beer, in winter vodka (and its popular Ukrainian cousin, gorilka (горика), which is any one of a number of interesting flavoured vodkas). However, I had a drinking problem of my own.

Water. Tap water in Russia ranges from safe to suicidial. Somewhat literally: Tchaikovsky committed suicide by deliberately drinking tap water in St. Petersburg. Of all the ways to go, cholera is not one that I would have chosen. Balakovo and Volsk were in the range where the water was potentially drinkable, but not advised. Every house I was in had a water filter or filter pitcher. Rather a bit like Washington D.C. where you don't know whether it is E. Coli or lead in the water that’s going to take you out. Visitors to Russia are strongly recommended to always purchase bottled water. It should be among the first words in Russian you learn.

The weather was warm enough most of my visit, and my character is such that I did a lot of breaking out into a sweat and feeling the need for water frequently. Buying water (вода; voda: yeap, I master that word in Russia might fast!), however, is a minor problem. Almost always it is sold as somewhat strange tasting mineral water (I hate the stuff in Australia too, but it is easier to avoid it when you have the language to express yourself). Still water is hard to find and no amount of trying to master Russian words related to this ever managed to solve this problem. So I just acquired a taste for the mineral water and allowed myself to be labeled the crazy American for buying water at least once a day.

I always offered water to Natasha and Zhejana and they never wanted it. But in fairness, they did drink a lot of hot tea.

Russians make tea like the British, which is to say absolutely wretchedly awful. Huge quantities of tea leaves to make tea that would peel the enamel off your teeth, then thinned to borderline drinkability with fresh hot water. The only thing worse is their coffee, which was universally instant. It rather reminded me of Australia in the 1980s. Australia somewhere in the years since 1985 when I left discovered a European coffee ethic, at least in the large cities, and decent coffee exists. Russians, though, are going to go gaga for Starbucks should they come to town.

The other ubitious drink there, at least in warm weather, is kvas (квас). It's a kind of lightly fermented bready kind of drink with a hint of beer flavour and a dash of fermentation, but low alcohol content (if any). Local custom has it that it brings health and vitality to you, and it seemed to feature in rather a number of meals. We went out for a picnic lunch on the beach at Balakovo Cove on the Volga Sunday morning, and what looked like potato salad to me suddenly got turned into a rather nice cold soup by pouring in kvas (This turns out to be a cold salad called oroshko, I think. It tastes a little peculiar since the kvas gives it an unfamiliar tang a little slightly slightly fermented cider, but it’s actually quite good.). You can buy it by the small glass (three quarters of the cost is the plastic cup, mind you), larger serve, or by the litre. Bring your own container. If your container is not one of a clear and believable measured amount (such as a former 1 or 2 litre soda bottle), they carefully measure out the litre in a measuring cup and pour it in for you. All this is coming from a large 200 gallon drum like thing with wheels that clearly can be mounted on a back of a truck and carted around town. The carts are all over the place and all look the same, but are totally unbranded. But it was always the same sellers in the same place day after day, so there must be some kind of francising or something of the sort. It is clearly a homebrew kind of thing too: I never saw designer bottled kvas in the stores or anything of that kind. Mind you, Russians haven’t quite taken to that concept yet, but Western companies have invaded and penerated the culture. My mineral water was always branded and priced like designer water here would be.

One evening I had dinner with Natasha, Zhejana, and Natasha’s mother. The custom is to do a round of toasts with your drinks. That was just fine when we started with a nice local (well, Georgian: wine grapes cannot really take the Russian winters too well) wine. Mrs. Shishkova (not her real name) did not join us as she had a medical condition that meant she could not take alcohol. It must have be some short lived medications since she joined us in imbibbing at other times. The first toast is for health, the second for family, the third for love (and I got an interesting look on that one, so I could see something coming down the road). Alas, another Russian habit is to push food on the guest faster than it could be possibily consumed. Drinks were no exception. I’d hardly had a chance to sip the wine before being told to “drink drink” and shot glasses come out and there is some homemade blackcurrant gorilka served up in shot glasses... and you start toasting all over again.

I have never ever done vodka shots in my life and I can tell you that sipping a little of that stuff was enough to make my toes curl. Good stuff, but more than one glass and they would have been pouring me down the stairs. Yozswa! Fortunately Natasha is every bit the hard drinker I am (i.e. not at all) and could not do more than sip either, so not getting to the third shot was not ill manners (or maybe I just had good company in my bad manner. I do not know which.).

The occasion for the meal was celebrating, a couple of weeks late, Natasha’s birthday. And my drinking got me in big trouble.

No, not at the dinner table. It was the water.

The afternoon beforehand, we walked from my hotel room on one side of the river across the Moscow-Saratov train tracks and down to the hydroelectric dam and across the river. It was a warm day and a pretty good long walk (at least six or seven kilometres), so I stopped at a store to pick up... yeap, you guessed it, water. Let me tell you, I needed it! I also got some juice for dinner at Natasha’s request at the same time. We then went from there to the bakery before heading to Mrs. Shishokova’s apartment for dinner.

And the bakery is where I got on Natasha’s s—tlist. I had plenty of rubles with me for buying the cake as promised, but there was an unexpected problem. I had thousand ruble notes and only some smaller bills. It was almost, but not quite, enough to get the cake and there was no convincing the bakery to take my large bills (all of about US$35 or so, mind you, and the cake was 200 rubles or thereabouts, so it was not entirely unreasonable of me to have expected to be able to use my money, just as you sometimes get a hot look here for handing the cashier a $20 bill for a $2 purchase, but they take it.). I tried to explain this to Natasha, but clearly she thought I had spent the last of my money getting myself water forcing her to buy her own birthday cake because because I was greedy little bastard thinking only of myself and water water water always the crazy American with his water...

I did try to explain that I had the money and I would pay her back immediately and could even give her 1000 rubles for her 50 right now, but she already knew what was going on in her mind and there was no breaking down that barrier of disgust and anger.

It did get sorted out later when she was not quite so mad and I found an more artful way to explain what had happened. Which mostly involved a certain amount of grovelling and having access to her PROMT Russian-English computer translator at home.

Be that a lesson: stay away from the water, and always carry small bills in Russia.

I suppose it only adds insult to injury that this was the one and only time in all the ten days I was in Russia I found plain old ordinary still water instead of mineral water. Same company, same logo, but you had to look carefully on the bottle to see the different water label in small print in cyrillic at the bottom...

The only other drinking problem I had was having my canvas bag mistaken for a special bag for vodka, since one saves all bags in Russia, but the really good high quality ones are reserved for the valuables, namely the bottles of vodka. Plastic bags are carefully kept and used and used and used until they die. But the really good quality canvas bads are for the important stuff. Vodka.

Russian Roads

2006-02-23T20:41:00.000-05:00

One question I meant to ask before I travelled to Russia was what side of the road do Russians drive on? In Australia, South Africa, and England, the answer is the left side. The United States drives on the right. In my experience to date with overseas travel, I seem to always end up in countries where everything happens on the other side of the road.

It turns out, the question is somewhat moot. First because not only did I not drive anywhere, but neither did Natasha. Like most Russians, she does not have a car and relies usually on public transportation. Also, while the driver is located on the left of the car for right side of the road driving (usually: Japanese cars are popular in Vladiovostok despite having the driver on the right side of the car), the side of the road is quite irrelevant.

Russians have an Italian attitude to road rules. They treat them as a set of interesting recommendations for your consideration, not hard and fast binding law which must be obeyed at all times (That would be the attitude of Germans: a friend once explained that the problem with traffic in Boston is that Italian and German immigrants mix on the same roads with deadly results.) Russian drivers also weave and bob madly over the entire road surface in search of a section of road less marred by potholes. With the economic collapse that came with the demise of the Soviet Union (and the not so grand state of affairs before), road maintenance is not quite as intensive as in the West. It should be added that Russia has roughly the population of the United States (minus a few tens of millions or so) but geographically spread over vastly more area. Add that cars are not mainstream, so the ratio of gasoline-tax paying customers per kilometre of road is poorer still. Add to that Russian winters which are so brutal that even Minnesoteans might admit that it is “a mite bit nippy out.” That kind of weather is very hard on tarmac. Road crews make reasonable efforts, but the work is a patchwork of small filled in spots and a rather uneven surface. Summer is not quite the epic season of road construction as celebrated in the United States.

Thus driving (or at least being in a car) is something of an adventure. In some ways the terrible road conditions just might be a blessing. In Moscow, the roads were in good repair which permitted higher speeds and hence much more terror. I was rather pleased to hand over my rubles and get out of the car at Izmailovo: The driver believed no problem could not be solved with a high speed U-turn. I would accuse him of poor driving, but the truth is that I was steeled for the experience when it happened from watching the first half dozen cars ahead of us come off the ramp, pick up speed, and then perform abrupt reversals. I suppose someone actually uses the ramp to get onto the road going the correct direction in the first place, but there was no evidence of it.

The average life expectancy of men in Russia is somewhere in the mid-50s. I had always thought this reflected the wages of alcoholism and depression, but now I am not sure that road accidents might cast a long shadow on the census statistics.

Most cars on the road were either Ladas or Volgas outside of Moscow. During Soviet years, the inner party circle were driven in Russian limousines, usually Zhighuls, and usually black. This has the interesting consequence now that the most desired colour in a car is black as it is seen as a mark of prestige. Of course amongst the wealthier class, a foreign car is a mark of distinction, so Audis and Mercedes were present in high numbers on the roads of Moscow. I saw very few such cars around Saratov and Balakovo, though Hyundai seemed to be developing a major presence.

When I booked my ground transportation in Moscow, I had to specify that I wanted the “tourist class” Volga taxi service and not the Mercedes VIP service Russians seemed quite keen to provide to foreign guests (for a higher price of course). The Lada models are small compact cars roughly analogous to perhaps Renault. The larger Volga is a more standard size sedan with the look of a Holden Commodore or Ford Taurus, very roughly. Despite their smaller size, they are fairly heavy cars: nominally this is supposed to be to make the cars more durable in the more severe winter weather, though it might reflected less advanced metal panel shaping machinery and computer control systems used in car manufacture.

One thing I never saw on the roads at all were SUVs. Which is somewhat ironic since the roads really called for something a bit more on the rugged side.

I would have included pictures of the roads, but frankly aiming a camera out the window would have been hazardous to my health. I was trying to hold on to the seat belt for dear life. If only I could have worked out how the buckles worked so I could actually wear the blasted thing. The taxi driver only put them on as we passed the police post at the far side of the hydroelectric dam.

Ministry of the Interior (UVIR): my brush with the authorities

2006-02-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

During the bad old days of Communism and Western angst, Russia was largely a closed society to overseas visitors. The few permitted to travel were restricted in ways unheard of elsewhere. The angst and the restrictions are largely gone, but some of the bureaucracy and habits of those former restricted times still exist. One of those is the business of registering visas.

Getting a visa for Russia is an interesting process, but it should be said in advance that the embassy service tries to mirror the experience and hassles which Russians encounter trying to get visas to visit the United States. The poor Russian embassy service: the American embassy in Moscow is so terrible to Russians that trying to be as bad to Americans back here is beyond their ability. Somwhere around 35% of all Russians applying for a visa to travel to the U.S. are rejected. 95% or more of those applications from single Russian women will be rejected: the U.S. considers them too unlikely to return (The United Kingdom, by way of contrast, has a similar visa screening process, but grants all but perhaps 1% of the applications, and this seems to work for the most part.) The Russian embassy just cannot quite stomach that level of obstinance and obstructionism. But their fees perfectly mirror those in Russia (which is ridicious, of course, as US$100 to an American is an affordable nuisance, but the US$100 fee to apply for a visa to visit the United States is the better part of a month’s salary for a Russian. And yes, the American embassy has the gall to bill in U.S. currency. But I digress...) The tourist visa to Russia enables you to stay for up to 30 days. In theory. But it actually is made to mirror exactly your plane ticket. So there’s no changing your plane ticket to stay an extra day on a whim, or else (bizarrely enough) you won’t be allowed to leave the country. And you are strongly advised to proof read your visa to be sure the dates do in fact match up. On my way out of Moscow, one poor (but highly rude, so I had difficultly summoning too much sympathy for him) soul had not checked this, changed his departure by two days, and couldn't make his morning flight since the office to rectify the problems would not for several hours. Not something you want to face. Especially not if you've gotten up at 3:30 AM in the morning to get the airport in time for your flight.

You should see the visa application form: two pages of incredible detail: where did you go to school, what dates, what degree, birthplace of your former spouse (if you happen to have a former spouse: mine isn't talking to me, so it was a bit hard to ring her up and ask where the heck she was born since I wanted to go to Russia... I made my best guess and presumed the embassy was on their own trying to verify it), patronymic (I have no intention of letting anyone call me “Royovitch”), and so on. Needless to say, pretty much nothing would ever be verified. Except perhaps for the one thing I had the most trouble finding out, the address of the hotel at which I would be staying. The hotel Blue Bird does not yet command a presence on the internet and Natasha didn’t seem to understand the question and gave me something that looked a bit dubious. It was what I had and I gave to the embassy and they did not bat an eyelid (but accepted my money order with much happiness), and “not less than three days later” as promised, I had a tourist visa to Russia.

As you fly in to Russia, you must fill out two copies of a two part migration card. Naturally I got limited instructions in Danish and handed only one copy and had to work it all out for myself. The customs folks at Shermetyevo helpfully directed me to a second copy to fill out and made me understand that there was nothing wrong with the first copy, just that they needed two. The second one, of course, was completely in Russian, so I dutifully copied line for line from one to the other and hoped for the best. That worked. I got one half of one copy and kept it with me at all times. Ditto for the customs declaration which was mostly an issue of documenting that I had some valueable items with me that I would not be leaving behind and hence did not need to declare on the way out (?). I think I did not need to do this, but with a rather nice laptop in tow with me, it seemed best to be overcautious rather than get slapped with a 40% duty charge on the way out. No one even asked, as it turned out...

But it goes on. Not only do you have all these mountains of documents to get the visa, and you must show the passport, visa, and migration card at all sorts of odd occasions (as you check in for your next flight, as you go to the hotel, every time the police decide to try to shake down the taxi driver for not wearing his seat belt, etc.), but you are not done even still. At each and every place you stay, you must register your visa. If you are going camping, there’s a bit of black hole in the rules, so most backpackers register a reservation with a local hotel or bed and breakfast to have the documented trail, then cancel the reservation (which is totally illegal, but when there is no law covering your circumstances, you chose what law to break. This seems to be the approved method.). But for the more average person staying in a hotel, you just hand your passport over as you check in and the hotel registers you visa with UVIR (The Ministry of the Interior. I am not sure if that brings up shades of Orwell or Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Ministry of Silly Walks.).

When it works, it is all pretty simple, if important to make sure that it gets done. In Moscow at Izmailovo Hotel my last night, it was smooth as clockwork, totally hassle free, straightforward, no charge involved (or else I guess it was built into my inexpensive fee for the night actually).

But Balakovo... нет (nyet; no). The Hotel Blue Bird is not set up to do this. So the first thing we do on Saturday morning after I arrive is head for the local UVIR office in New Balakovo (the newer part of the city where government offices are located on the eastern side of the river, not the island part of the city). Having arrived rather late in the morning and slept ‘til well into the morning, it is around 10:30 AM or so when we get to the offices in a very Soviet seeming building. All grey concrete, narrow winding stairs, all public space in the core of the building with no air conditioning, no fans, no windows, and lots of people and lines and offices with people with papers going from place to place to place with papers. I have no idea what everyone else was doing, but clearly they were not all Swiss tourists getting their visas registered.

It being a Soviet bureaucracy, things went wrong immediately. It turns out that we cannot register me in the hotel because this is Balakovo. The hotel is in Volsk, on the far side of the river. You must register in Volsk, or be the guest of a person in Balakovo. Ah, says Natasha, he is my guest. Papers, please, says the UVIR officer. I hand over my passport, immgration card, guest card from the hotel, customs slip... something else. I know I was missing something. But then it turns out that they also must have all the papers for the person whom is my host.

Uh oh. Meanwhile I understand almost none of this and poor Zhejana is trying to work out what the hell is going on with this strange man and I am trying to work out what is going on with the UVIR office. I just know something is wrong and there is much Russian going back and forth between Natasha and the officer and I understand nothing.

Zhejana, I should introduce at this point in the narrative, is Natasha’s going-to-be-six-in-three-weeks daughter. A very fun young lady whom I will eventually get to know, but she is always a bit shy and nervous around strange men, and wants to cling to her mother. Who is having none of it since she’s trying to deal with the registration issues.

So off we go at a dead run (Offices close at noon) to get a bus back to Old Balakovo where Zhejana and I are left to stare at each other for a while as Natasha tears off into the city streets to get home and get her internal passport and other papers necessary. Zhejana is not thrilled. My ice breaking joke earlier about how Americans all have 11 fingers didn’t work out as planned seeing as how I don’t know the word in Russian for 11. Or fingers. And Zhejana, bless her little heart, knows how to count in English. To ten. Just like me in Russian. Ah well (I can explain this joke in person to anyone who asks: it works very well at the six to eight year old math level because they know something is wrong, but cannot work out quite what it is...).

However, it turns out I have another secret weapon. A camera. Zhejana must have a future as a runway model as this brings out all smiles and posing. From there to a game of hide and seek is but a little simple step. Note to men: if you are visiting a women with young children, pack a digital camera if you can so they can see the pictures immediately.

I dearly hope the men and women of the Red Army who gave their lives defending the Motherland do not mind too much that the granite slabs honouring and listing them at the Obelisk of Victory and the Eternal Flame of Rememberance got turned into obstacles in a game of Hide and Seek.

Natasha was not amused to not be able to find either of us when she got back with the papers, though neither of us was actually hiding all that effectively. Off we go at a dead run back to New Balakovo on the bus, race back to the UVIR building, up the stairs, make it there at 11:45 AM, get the paperwork signed after some more questions (There is some confusion about how I can be born in California, yet 37 years later not be living there. Blah blah blah Arnold Schwartnegger blah blah blah.), and go downstairs to the payment office... and it closed at 11:30 AM.

And it next opens on Tuesday morning. And the you-must-obey-these-rules-on-pain-of-never-being-allowed-in-the-Federation-of-Russia-ever-again say you are an evil evil evil person if you do not register within 48 hours of arrival (subject to a certain rather astronomical fine). Well, the papers are signed by UVIR, just not finalized and submitted to the central offices. We have done everything possible. So it is off to the market, bank, and on to other adventures for the day.

But this adventure of course is not yet over.

Come Tuesday morning, we come back to the UVIR office, this time sans Zhejana who is staying for the day with her grandmother. Good call: there cannot be anything more boring that sweating in the sultry heat indoors in line for an hour or two. Despite getting to the office just as they theoretically open, there’s already a lone line for all the payment counters.

Russians are experienced line standers. Americans will stand in line meekly and quietly and generally in good order. You want to calm down an unruly crowd of Americans, get out the velvet ropes and make them stand in a long line. Russians, on the other hand, are aggressive about reshaping the direction and order of the line to suit them best. However, they respect the line completely... if you challenge them for cutting in. “Oh, the line does not go here?” they say in apparent complete innocence which is, of course, completely fake since this happened time and time again. But they will respect the line completely. In some places, people looked for the well hidden piece of paper and added their name and left to come in the afternoon for the line to that office when it opened.

Eventually (the babbling babushka having a long conversation with her friend and ignoring the teller, then interupting the next three customers in a row to get her business done, then turning back to her friend...) we made it to the front, paid the 150 ruble fee, got the receipt, went back upstairs to finish the registration... No cigar. That office does not open until 2 PM.

I am not sure how much of this was acting, how much of it was knowing when it was time to turn from the soft touch to the hammer fist, and how much of it was frustration at having spent so much time dashing all over the city with the papers trying get this done, but Natasha did what my mother called her American Bitch Lady act (and the fact there is this term for dealing with comparable situations in Australia makes me suspect that Natasha was doing the culturally required thing, not genuinely losing it). I of course understood nothing of it, but there was "this man" (этот мужчинa) babble babble babble babble babble and so on. Suddenly an office is opened, all the papers signed, another question about the passport issue location, and then we are ushered into The Big Office. Big Desk. Big man in big scary green uniform with big red epaulettes with big gold stars and decoration all over the front. Pictures of Stalin on the wall. And Lenin. And Marx. And Engels. No Yeltsin, no Putin, no happy smily local mayor of Balakovo. This is the room in which you show total respect.

And the only time anyone other than Natasha or Zhejana would ever say a word in English to me in Balakovo.

The official looks at the papers, stamp, stamp, stamp, hands me back my papers, and in perfect if very accented English says “Have a nice day.”

Lenin frowned. Apparently I am not the first American to come through town.

It took more than four days to find out that the scene Natasha threw was demanding instant and immediate service for this poor person who is a Very Important Person visiting here from the U.S.A. I to this day do not understand the Russian deference and regard to foreigners, nor the habit for officials to take orders from whomever is dishing them out, including the irrate customer, but it sure worked miracles. Natasha never quite had to do this ever again to the same extent, but I heard “VIP from U.S.A.“ more than once (and discovered that I had been put in the VIP room at the hotel, for that matter) and suddenly things changed and service improved and Russians whom almost never smile in public were suddenly looking very kind and friendly.

As a foreigner, you may never really find out what the “real Russia” is like as everyone scoots around on their best behavior and offering the best they have to you. Dangerously so. Be very careful saying that something you see looks nice, meaning it merely as a compliment, or it might get handed to you as a gift.

Where the heck IS Balakovo?

2006-02-16T20:30:00.000-05:00

Not being one of the Great Cities of the Earth (New York, London, Paris, Chepachet), Balakovo does not exactly string up great name recognition. So being the satellite remote sensing geek I am, here’s the answer in satellite imagery, with captions. All satellite images or mosaics shown here are derived from NASA data, with further imagery credit provided with each image as relevant.

I have generated all these images from freely available public data, data sources for which I have provided links. All captioning and labeling has been done by me, so any errors are my own, not those of NASA, USGS, NCEROS, SSDOOEIEIEO, or any other acronyms you might think to come up with.

Blue Marble MODIS mosiac showing Europe, and a white square marker for the area shown from MODIS below.

MODIS Rapid Response imagery of the lower Volga basin, acquired by Terra MODIS on 12 June 2005.

MODIS Rapid Response imagery acquired by Terra MODIS on 12 June 2005, close up at near full resolution on the Volga River between Saratov and Balakovo.

Venice on the Volga! The city of Balakovo with some major milestones from my story of my visit marked. Satellite image obtained by Landsat 7 on 1 June, 2000, provided by the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility.

I should add that in EVERY instance of images shown above, I have downsampled the data to show the areas I was interested. In other words, the full resolution versions of all these data are better than shown here.

Big Brother is watching you... and so is NASA.

Behind Door number two: Natasha and Zhejana (II)

2006-02-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

I left you at Domodedovo airport last time. Fitting. I was stuck there for a while myself with no clue quite what was going on around me, signs in Russian, people speaking Russian, and a large unwieldy suitcase in tow since I could not check it in yet. I cashed in a number of traveler’s cheques at the bank (once I found the bank, which involved finding the foreign exchange, being told in hand gesture that they do not take traveler’s cheques, being then told in more hand gestures that they do not take Visa cards, being told in hand gestures to use the automatic tellers (which were broken), being told in hand gestures to go the bank which I was directed to through solid walls, and then trying to find my way around to discover there was an entire well-hidden back area of the airport with restaurants and seating and more automatic tellers that either did not work or were out of cash. And a bank.).

The lady behind the desk for the traveler’s cheques was friendly and polite... and spoke only in Russian and hand gestures to me. I think studying to be a mime might have been better preparation. This would have been just fine: I expected it and my own Russian was not up to extended communication. But what made it baffling was that at the same time, she had propped open a door from her office to be able to chatter to the next teller, telling him a humorous situation she'd gone through recently (of which I only caught about a quarter of the story) IN ENGLISH! So she’d talk about what her mother had just done in English, then turn to me and ask me in Russian to date the cheques and sign them at the bottom. While holding my American passport, so she cannot possibly have thought that I did not understand English and only spoke Russian.

Eh?

It is a slightly odd sensation to see something totally familiar with the same design and logo... and with the store name in a completely foreign alphabet. I got dinner at Сбарро which is the same pizza/Italian chain we know here as Sbarro. It recommended itself over other possibilities because I could see the food, point at the food, and expect to be served the food without much in the way of extended conversation required. It's too bad to limit your exploration because your language is not up to the experience, but there are only so many problems you can solve. A few days later, I would spend some fifteen minutes staring at a menu with a dictionary in hand trying to work out even just a tenth of the offerings and what to therefore order. Meanwhile, Natasha sensibly ordered a full dinner for us without my realizing it and I was just working out a few things to ask her about when the waitress took my menu from me.

I recommend the fish. But I digress...

Finally I was able to check in for my flight. Forewarned that a passport needed to be turned over with my ticket, I walked up to the counter, said Привет (privet; hi) in my best Russian and handed over the ticket and passport. She started checking me in, told me which gate (fortunately, a gate number lower than ten so I would recognize it from language, though it was also imprinted on the boarding pass). Then there was a whole bunch of Russian I did not understand and she was waving her hand at another desk where I had to go before she would complete my check in. My confused look convinced her I had no idea what was going on. I would have worked it out: the excess baggage claim receipt she handed me at the same time was in both Russian and English. So she smiled and said in flawless (if lightly accented) English “Why did you speak to me in Russian if you only speak English?” and then proceeded to explain that I needed to pay 500 rubles for the extra baggage.

She’s got a U.S. passport in her hands, mind you, so she knew about the English. Personally I think she knows she is among the first people new visitors meet in Russia and has a bit of fun with it. She certianly seemed quite amused. But friendly and efficient none the less. I got the baggage claim paid, got ushered to the front of the line again, handed the passport, ticket, baggage receipt (They are meticulious about checking that your bags and the receipt match in Russia, unlike the U.S.), and boarding pass and pointed me on to the gate security.

Security is a bigger deal there than here, if not dramatically so. You absolutely must take off your shoes, open the camera and remove the lens to demonstrate it is a camera and there is nothing hidden in the lens (Lest that sound paranoid, camera lenses shaped guns were snuck into the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1950s by Puerto Rico independence freedom fighters), and switch on the laptop computer and boot it up to demonstrate it is a computer and not a laptop-shaped bomb. But also I got my first introduction to the Russian habits about shoes, which they fuss over. To walk ten feet through the metal detector in socks was not acceptable: they issued you with little plastic slipper things to slide over the socks rather like those in bunny suits in clean rooms. Mind you this was indoors in a well maintained and cleaned building. I’d come across this many more times in my travels.

They also are better set up on the far side of the detectors to pull people aside and make them disassemble their cameras and so on without creating a terrible backflow of people behind them. This was quite the pleasant contrast to Dulles Airport in Washington on the way in where it was an hour to get through the long lines through security largely because the personnel had no place to pull people aside for checking without creating a backlog, which they did with glee. Americans pat you down and wave a frying pan thing at you, Russians run hands very lightly over you with gloved hands. Both make you feel a bit like a suspected criminal, but the Russians are totally businesslike about it and do it to EVERYONE and do it swiftly and simply and have shoe horns everywhere for you to get your shoes back on. Granted, they also have a lot less travellers going through most airports.

For all that, the flight to Saratovo was not that long: perhaps an hour and a half in a small jet (YAK-42 for the tail spotters amongst you: a small plane roughly analogous to the Boeing 737). The spare tarmac and runways at Domodedovo are littered with partially gutted planes everywhere. There may be quite an influx of international travellers to Moscow, but not a lot of domestic air travel as it is quite expensive to fly planes (in the Russian mindset that is: my return flight to Saratov was around US$200, comparable to what a similar flight here in the U.S. might be absent the discount airline fares.). Foreigners pay a good deal more than locals, but it was pretty clear from my fellow passengers that even economy class passengers are a cut above the average fiscally there. Russia has its ultra-rich, but it is not a rich country. When the Soviet economy imploded, air travel plummeted, in much the same way air travel in the U.S. imploding after the 11th of September, 2001.

Lest you be feeling smugly superior and American, the difference between Russia and America in this regard is where the planes get shoved. In the U.S., there is a huge dedicated facility in the Mojave desert littered with semi-abandoned planes left in storage until air travel recovers enough to justify putting them back in service. Russia just doesn't have such a large central facility in a stable climate, so the planes are stored openly at the major airports.

Unfortunately the same is true of their excess nuclear powered submarines which are sitting in docks literally rusting away in Murmansk and posing probably the biggest threat of nuclear contamination in the world. So perhaps you can feel smugly superior after all. In American, we box that stuff up and send it underground in Nevada and hope for the best.

Saratov is a reasonably large city, but at night I did not have much chance to appreciate it. It was also when I was trying to pay attention to Natasha, who met me at the airport, and discovering that a 150 km road trip was going to take about three to four hours. And it was obvious why immediately.

Moscow may have had smooth well paved roads, at least on the ring freeway and feeder roads (Later when I had a chance to go into the heart of the city, I noticed the roads were actually in good shape most everywhere.). Saratov most assuredly did not. I had neglected to ask which side of the road Russians drive on. In theory, it is the right side just like the States. But in reality it was a mad dodge across the tarmac everywhere for the least potholed surface. Only the large electric buses (tied down a bit by their overhead wires) and street cars did not wander the road surface much. Natasha and I chatted a little in German, but most of the time she was giving directions to the driver in Russian (of course). She had studied in Saratov and knew the city well. The poor taxi driver barely knew Saratov at all: you do not get a lot of people asking for a fare from Balakovo to Saratov and back. Most take the bus. It just doesn't run at 10 PM at night when my flight came in.

Thank goodness I said no to the offer to come in on a later flight.

After circling around in Saratov for a while (or it sure felt like we were going around in circles to my mental compass: later in daylight, I understood that in fact we had come around in almost a full circle, but the airport is on a high mesa area and the bridge across the Volga to Engels is almost directly underneath, but it is a winding path through the city center to get down to the bridge), we crossed the Volga. At Saratov, it is quite an impressive sight of Mississippi proportions. The eastern side across from Saratov is the city of Engels (Russians do love their Marxists) and thence up the road to Balakovo.

Natasha and I got well acquianted here. Not only did we have several hours together in a small space, but the dodging path down the road meant we kept getting thrown into each other’s lap. I like a gal who throws herself at me, though this was not quite what I had in mind.

Finally after a few hours in the bucking bronco, we arrived at Balakovo, drove across the Volga again to Volsk, and took me to my hotel, синяя птица (sinya ptitsa; blue bird), check in, and at long last, bed. Natasha headed off with the taxi driver (happily clutching a month’s worth of income and a 10% tip that clearly is not the standard Russian custom to judge by his pleasure) for Balakovo, with promises to see me at 10 the next morning.

The room is nice if slightly basic. I later realized it was one of the VIP rooms (the other VIP room is larger for a family, but most of the hotel is block rooms of a more Soviet standard) with larger room, a small refrigerator that is most assuredly not standard, and a satellite TV that brings in German and English language cable television when it works, which was never when I was there. I didn’t come to Russia to watch TV, but I would later learn that some of the reasons Natasha directed me to the VIP room had good reasons for her.

But for now, I am in Russia and very very tired and care only about the bed. Dulles was 36 hours and 3 million potholes ago.

Is it a boy or a girl?

2006-02-08T21:15:00.000-05:00

Russian, like many other European languages, has the concept of both grammatical and logical gender in its nouns. That is to say, female nouns that refer to female objects (мать; maty; mother) are feminine. Adjectives associated with feminine nouns take the feminine adjectivial endings. Male nouns refering to male things (отец; otyets; father) take male endings. Hence глупая мать, but глупый отец (stupid mother, stupid father respectively: note the feminine adjectivial ending “ая” and masculine ending “ый” on the adjective глупый.).

However there is also the grammatical gender concept. While we think of things like a car, a table, or the sea as being neuter objects, in Russian they have gender, and the gender is very important to how they are spelt and how adjectives are conjugated based on gender. Fortunately in the nomative case (the subject of a sentence: this is the form of the noun you will find in dictionaries), the spelling of the noun tells you its gender. If it ends in any of the 20 consonants, it is male. If it ends in “а” or “я”, it is female, and any other vowel is neuter. If it ends in “ь”, you have to memorize the gender. There are the odd words that don’t conform to this pattern, but there is an overriding logic: logical gender trumps grammatical gender. Hence папа (papa; dad) is spelled with the feminine noun ending, but it is a male noun and conjugated in the masculine. To use the examples at the start of this paragraph, стол (stol; table) is masculine, мачина (machina; car) is feminine, and море (morye; sea) is neuter.

This is why there are certain sound patterns you will hear a great deal in Russian, as all the adjectives and nouns will have endings consistent with the noun gender, and hence those adjective ending sounds appear time and time again. This is what the name “Concord-ski” (The disparging name for the Soviet Tupolev 144 supersonic plane that looked suspiciously similar to the Concorde) refers to. Along the same lines, there’s also the shuttle-ski for the Soviet space shuttle, Buran, U-ski Two-ski for their version of the U-2 reconnesaince plane, and so on. The nominative masculine ending on many adjectives has the "ski" (сый) sound (the ый is the adjectivial ending, but many adjective stems end in с or ск). Interestingly, it would never been Concord-skaya: we may not use grammatical gender in nouns, and yet there is still the idea certain things ought to strong and masculine.

This all seems a little confusing at first glance. And it turns out that even Russians might not have as a good grip on this as you might think. In some instances, certain proper name places have two spellings, one with a feminine ending and another with masculine depending on what gender they think it is. The largest (and one of the most active) volcano in Eurasia is in Kamchatka and named Sopka Kluchevskaya (сопка клучевская) on some atlases, but Sopka Kluchevskoi (сопка клучевской) in others. It seems even Russians are not sure whether it is a boy volcano or a girl volcano.

Behind door number two: Natasha and Zhejana (I)

2006-02-05T19:59:00.000-05:00

After the slightly odd experience with Julya in Kyiv, I was prepared to call the whole experience of meeting Eastern European women online a loss. But I am not a quitter, and I could not help feeling that I perhaps the problem was not the matter of the online matching, but in my approach and my choice of which service to use in seeking possible contacts. So after giving it a bit more thought, I decided it was time to actually research my choices.

I did a lot of online searches looking very briefly at a large number of different websites that advertised international matching services of one sort or another. Most had structures similar to Russian Ladies and Global Ladies with minor variations. I also found quite a few Russia-based agencies located in a single city in Russia specifically providing match service for just that one city. And not just major cities, I should add: in addition to the obvious choices like Yekaterinaburg, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Volgograd, much smaller cities like Balakovo and Sochi might pop up. If, for some reason, you already know that your heart desires a gal from Yaroslav, I suppose that’s a workable approach.

Ultimately I found a good site with good reviews and a very different model for membership and subscriptions and translations at Elena’s Models. I’ll leave the details of the site and why I chose it, reviews, and other associated information in a later post. Suffice it to say this was a site with more in the way of up-front costs to get started with a full membership, but without the death of ten thousand paper cuts tokens for each letter. There is actually a way to subscribe and only pay on a letter for letter basis, so you can preview what you are going to be able to do with a greater membership.

The quality of the profiles here were generally better. Women tended to post more verbal profiles, though it still had that strange (to someone used to online sites in the U.S.) brief comments about what the seeker seeks in a relationship, but with very little in the way of information about herself. The y would write about relationship goals instead of their own interests and activities. This reflects, I presume, rather different and more focused goals, and very clear ideas about why they are online: they are looking for a high quality husband and describe their vision of him, rather than saying that much to call attention to themselves.

Having done a bit of research on how approachs through an online forum work best (writing an excellent letter of introduction is an art: I can highly recommend How to Meet and Marry A Girl Like Me (not withstanding it’s odd title: Elena’s Models is a strange name too: it suggests runway models and that they want you to focus on appearance, but it’s character and personality meshing that makes a relationship.)). I wrote the best introduction letter I would work within the guidelines (Elena recommends a reasonable introduction to be around two pages, and translated into Russian by a reliable translator. It is much much easier for a Russian woman, even one fluent in English, to read a Russian language letter and it immediately sets up apart from others.), but of course started hearing from some women before that letter made its way through the translation. As before, many of these were not good matches: women with very different interests than I (usually they would talk about themselves in their first letters, but not in their profiles). I quickly settled on four interesting profiles, and wrote each. Three were interesting seeming people that fell in my basic parameters, but after a little correspondence with each of them, we headed our own ways. One clearly was getting lots of letters and replying to her correspondence with form letters: she was interested enough to reply a couple of times, but the canned responses made it clear she was shopping for the best match (fair enough) and I wasn’t breaking from the pack enough to merit a personal response. Another had already found a match and politely let me know, and the third did not seem as good a match after a little writing back and forth.

If you are wondering how I could spot the form letter, by the way, it can be done easily. A paragraph was a cut and paste, word for word (slighly odd phrasing and all) from her profile, another paragraph so heavily overlapped with the previous one (repeated sentences, or the same phrases), that at least half the letter was stuff I had read before. The next letter would have more details, but again the same exact langauge in other paragraphs I had read at least once before. I DO recommend getting a good solid letter of introduction, and perhaps having a second follow up letter in Russian to cut and paste from, but keep track of what you have written and don’t repeat yourself.

The fourth I was almost nervous to write to: just a bit too good to believe. Quite attractive (and her pictures did not do her justice at all), very tall (I think I mentioned being kind of attracted to that idea being tall myself and finding eye level contact to be very important to me.), a few years my junior but not very many (I am not comfortable with a large age gap, even though many Russian women are more comfortable with wider age gaps), very active and interested in the outdoors and sports (her pictures, of which she posted several of varied quality, from a very blurry picture of her with Keishka, one of her family’s two cats. She wrote at length in her online profile and it spoke volumes and stood out from the pack. After summoning the courage to write, I modified my letter of introduction (Yes, form letter from me: cut out "Moscow" in one sentence, replace it with "Saratov", replace the name.... mind you, I know enough Russian grammar now to realize that I failed to put the place names in the prepositional case, so I took a beautiful letter and threw an odd grammatic error right in the middle of it... Ah well.).

Her first response back to me made me jump: I was way out of my class. Very smart, very well educated, and much more sophisticated than I with interests in a wider range of musical interests like jazz, opera, and classical. Interested in ballet, history, and culture, already knowledgable in at least passable English. She was interested in cars at one point, so took apart and reassembled an engine block. Reasonably well travelled with past trips to Italy and Austria, the latter a ski trip with her family. She was just a little too much and too good to believe. Write down to writing me a nice long detailed reply letter, most of it in English (though she jumped back and forth between langauges).

At the same time all this was going on, and I was learning about the form letter writer, I also got a very nice letter from a lady of my own age, a divorcee with a six year old daughter. Not quite what I had laid out for myself as guidelines, but egregiously outside of them, and she understood French and German fluently (but not English, interestingly enough). I’ve always been a bit in awe of people skilled with languages, but German happens to be one I understand at least a little of myself. So this is what my college German was for!

We developed a friendly dialogue fairly quickly: she would write back to my letters quite swiftly, and frequently. If I wrote her, I had a response in less than a day and often within hours. We quickly developed the pattern of her writing in English to give her practice as she was teaching herself (and catching on to the language very rapidly, I should add: she is genuinely gifted in this regard) and my replying in Russian. At first this did not work well since it would take me a few days to get write a letter and get it translated, but I found a reasonable automated translation program online, Project for Machinine Translation (PROMT) that seemed to create reasonable Russian from my tests (running English into Russia and back again, and getting something only slightly garbled). Later I would learn that a good deal of Natasha’s English was initially coming from PROMT’s desktop software which she had (and which would prove a life saver later).

Meanwhile the fourth lady who was just seemed a bit too classy for my league, who will we call Tatiana, wrote me now and again, but her letters were infrequent. I presumed with as much as she clearly had to offer that she was swimming in letters and perhaps not so interested in me since I’m not God’s gift to women. I would later learn that I was wrong about though (about her interest. I could be wrong about being a divine gift to the feminine world too, but indicators do not point that way at this time.). Natasha, on the other hand, was clearly quite interested and writing regularly and our conversation and communication felt very comfortable and natural (not withstanding my intimidation at her langauge skills: she was typically Russian in being very soft-spoken about her skills and abilities, so I tended to pick up on her abilities indirectly.). After about a month, with only the correspondence with Natsha and Tatiana continuing after some other brief contacts, and turning down some other letters that came in (the most disconcerting being a 35-year-old divorcee with two children from Sebastapol whose pictures were very Nicole Kidman-ish. I’ve mentioned my fixation on this before, have I not? You would not confuse the two of them (if you could, I'd being thinking it was a scammer, though Elena’s Models confirms its profile to be sure they are real people.), I decided I needed to pursue one lead only, and reluctantly told Tatiana that I was pursuing my one other lead (She had known she was not my sole correspondent.), but if she was interested in staying in touch on a friendship basis, I would enjoy that, but really needed to focus relationship-wise on the lead with Natasha.

She was kind, understanding, and even supporting: when I got in a jam working out how to get between airports and a hotel in Moscow on my way back, she helped me find a pre-booked service online. We did indeed keep in touch as friends for several months after I made my decision.

I also let Natasha know that I had decided to pursue the lead with her, and wanted to come and visit in person. We settled on my coming to meet her in her home town, Balakovo. Unfortunately Balakovo is not served with an airport despite being a good sized city (around 400,000 residents), so I would fly into Moscow, switch airports (most international flights come into Terminal Two at Shermeteyvo, domestic flights leave from terminal one on the far side of the runways and hence a fifteen minute bus ride away, or at one of two other aiports around the city, most of which go out of Domodedovo Airport on the far side of the city, about an hour or more by taxi. This is what I needed to do.)

There is a reason you’ve never heard of Balakovo. It’s about fundamental to Russia as oh... say, South Bend, Indiana is the United States. No, that’s not fair to South Bend actually: it at least manages to be right next door to Chicago. Flint, Michigan, perhaps? I once read that Balakovo is the Venice of the Volga. I never found that sentiment echoed anywhere else, and the claim seems to be based solely on the fact the city (or at least the old part of the city) is entirely located on an island across the Volga River perhaps 150 km northeast of Saratov. There is a major hydroelectric dam across the river here, and a shipping channel on the far side of the island for traffic going up and down. Balakovo is the scene of the annual international collegiate watersking championship competition, has a nuclear power plant that generates enough electricity for a couple of million homes (between the hydroelectric plant and nuclear power plant, perhaps 3% of the country’s electricity comes from this city), and has a major plastic parts factory for the aircraft builder Yakolev, car manufacturer Lada and Hyundia. Not exactly a tourist mecca.

Balakovo does not have its own airport (though it has its own international airport code: BWO. I presume it had an airport at one time and it has since been closed. I never worked it out.). So instead I flew to Saratov, met Natasha there, then took the road trip back to Balakovo. 150 km should be around an hour and a half, I thought. Ha ha. Spot the person who has never been to Russia...

Free tickets are creative. In my case, I flew Scandavian Airlines out of Dulles through Copenhagen to Moscow, ground transportation to another airport, switch to the local airline Sav Avia (Сававиа), meet Natasha, took a taxi to Balakovo (!!!!). On the way back, bus from Balakovo to Saratov (at 10 PM at night, there was no bus service to go to Balakovo and courtesy of the vaguries of visa registration, Natasha recommended against my staying in Saratov my first night and taking the bus out the next day), overnight in Moscow for all of eight hours (but I was not willing to sleep on a bench in the airport, so got an inexpensive (read Soviet) hotel room for the night), thence on Lufthansa from Moscow to Frankfurt, then US Air to Philadelphia, and then from there to Baltimore. This oddball arrangement worked, but it was an interesting game of global pingpong, especially considering that I returned to a different city than I left.

Moscow is a peculiar city. It is roughly the same size as Washington D.C. (including its suburban environs in both cities, that is), though with more high density housing and thus a city of some 13 million. Moscow is quite different from the rest of the country, as I would learn soon. It has a ring road freeway system not unlike Washington, and not unlike Washington, it is a god awful mess of traffic. I had the singular lack of vision to arrive in the early afternoon on a Friday. This is a very very bad time to try to get anywhere on the Moscow roads: many residents of the city try to get out of the city early on Friday to spend the weekend at their dachas. In late spring when I flew in, many head out with heavily laden cars filled with plants nursed through the winter in balconies in the apartments, now ready to be planted and provide summer vegetables. So the roads were jam packed.

Moscow has four airports, scattered around the city. Two airports, located a few kilometres from each other, are both called Sheremetyevo (Шереметиево). Shermeteyvo 2 is the special international terminal built for the 1980 Olympics and pretty much an independent airport. Shermeteyvo 1 is all domestic flights. On the opposite side of the city is Domodedovo (Домодедово). Almost all service here is domestic flights, though interestingly, British Airlines flies into this airport having gotten fed up with lousy service at Shermetyevo 2. In fairness, Moscow was not a major tourist destination in 1980, but in post-Soviet Russia, the tiny airport has something of the order of 11 million passengers a year pass through its doors. This for an airport roughly comparable to Des Moines, Iowa. In between, but not relevant to this story, is Vnukovo airport, which is the main government service airport, and also serves as a major domestic service airport as well as newly international destinations (i.e. former Soviet republics such as Belarus and Ukraine).

Russians have an Italian sensibility about traffic laws. They are a set of recommendations, not binding contracts. Just because there are two lanes of traffic painted on the road does not mean you cannot have three or even four lanes of traffic if you have the driving acuity to make them... and everyone thinks they have that ability. So terrible traffic jams were made truly epic by driving mannerisms that are quite agressive.

There was no mistaking I was in Russia. All signs were in cyrillic... except for the sex industry ads. I guess Moscow is turning into a sex tourism destination to judge from the signs in English with young ladies with chestlines that make Dolly Parton look flat, temptingly revealed, and clear directions in English about where to find the club at which delights await you, the English speaking man. Not the image of myself I wished to cast. Fortunately such men seem not to venture beyond Moscow, or at least not the English speaking ones, as I escaped those ads beyond the city.

My driver was friendly (other than his driving) but spoke only limited English, so unfortunately we were not able to make much conversation. This did give me a chance to admire the very different landscape around me, from high density housing to roadside Macdonalds (Макдоналд) to dachas and boreal forests, predominately of birch trees.

My Russian may be flawed, but I was able to quickly decode many basic signs in cyrillic... and then be faced with a meaningless word. The cyrillic alphabet (Russian is not the only language which uses this alphabet) is quite maddening to the latin-trained eye. About a quarter of the letters in the language look like and are pronounced like English letters. Another quarter look like English letters, but make very different sounds (B makes the V sound, H makes an N sound, b is a silent character guiding soft emphasis), another quarter or so of their alphabet are greek looking letters (Г looks like gamma, and makes the G sound you would expect, ф looks like phi and is pronounced with an F sound), and then there are letters that look like a dyslexic nightmare (Я is "ya", И is an "i", ч is "ch"), and then there are just plain you've never seen this before letters (Д makes a D sound, Ж is "zh", ш is "sh, not to be confused with Щ which is "shch" (think "fresh cheese"), Ц... and so on). I felt like a six year old trying to read everything and sound out all the words in my mind.

It is a humbling feeling to realize you cannot read a damn thing without very distinct effort, save perhaps for twenty or so nouns. Practical ones: I entered Russia knowing "men" (мужчины) from "women" (женщины), so I knew my bathroom signs. Context quickly also got me "exit" (выход ).

Once at Domodedovo, having thanked my driver (I learned the word for "thanks" later in the trip (спасибо, pronounced "spasibo"), but didn't have it in my vocabularly yet, alas), I went to check in. The electronic signs alternated between English and Russian (Thank you British Airways!), but there was no sign of anyone at the designated counter. With a bit of struggle, I was able to work out that they do not start check in until a couple of hours before the flight. Even with the mayhem of Moscow traffic, there was more time than this still left: I had five hours between arriving in Moscow and getting on the plane to Saratov. So I took this chance to look for a bank, got myself bazillions of rubles (the exchange rate was around 24 rubles to the U.S. dollar when I planned the trip, and running around 28 to 29 rubles to the dollar when I arrived. It was somewhere around 30 to 31 when I left. The only currency I have seen letting out so much wind so fast before personally is the Zimbabwe dollar.). Of course a slice of pizza and a bottle of water was a few hundred rubles. It's not the defunct Lira all over again, but it is a strange experience to see such large numbers for everyday items. Later you get used to it and then it is bizarre to see how little some things cost.

More about the rest of the voyage to Balakovo, and my adventures with meeting Natasha, next week.

A triumph of American engineering

2006-02-02T19:30:00.000-05:00

There is story told often, in an almost urban legend style, about the early days of the American space program. Very early in the manned flight program, the astronauts noticed that in the near-zero gravity of their space capsules, a number of things that worked just fine on the ground would not without gravity. Much humour has come of their efforts to deal with bladder challenges. One of the less humorous challenges was writing: ball point pens (biros to the non-Americans in our audience) would not reliably write. You could shake the pen and it would work for a moment, but the ink pooled by the shaking was quickly used and without gravity to make new ink flow in, the pen would stop writing.

With good old American ingenuity and tenacity, engineers developed a special space pen. Using pressurized ink, the pen would write in extraordinary extremes of cold and heat, on surfaces that ordinarily would not take ink, and in extremes of humidity, not to mention the zero gravity environment of space flight.

In the urban legend version of this story, the U.S. spent 24 million dollars (There is at least one claim of 24 billion dollars, but since that’s about the cost of the entire Apollo program...) developing the space pen.

The Russians used pencils.

Of course that is something a simplification of reality for laughs. The story does not quite end there. Technology transfer means that the pen technology shows up in high end pens: most pens that advertise that they will write in cold weather or severe humidity are based on this technology. The so-called space pen can also be bought as a plain old ordinarily looking pen at NASA visitor centers, the National Air and Space Museum, and similar institutions for a few dollars. If the U.S. really did sink 24 million in developing the pen (a suspiciously high number: 24 million was one hell of a lot of serious cash in the early 60s. This was well before the era of 1 million dollar air-to-air missiles and 40 million dollar aircraft, and an F-14 is a heck of a lot more complex than a ball point pen, even one built to the now obsolete mil-spec.)... well, I think the government got its money back in sales taxes on pens.

Now we have really cools that write under almost any circumstances, and the Russians have spent decades replacing air filters on Mir and other space stations as they clogged up with pencil shavings.

Still, there’s an underlying truth. The Russian attitude towards engineering is often “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.“ So they have rocket technology developed in the 1960s that was proven worthy and has seen little change since, allowing them to made cheaply and efficiently on assembly line processes. The American attitude is “If it works, clearly it does not have enough features.” So we have mobile telephones that can do almost everything but make coffee in the morning (and I am sure someone is working on that too), but it is the Russians who are able to get up to the International Space Station routinely and reliably.

Behind door number one: Ms. Kiev

2006-01-28T14:30:00.000-05:00

So far I have been dispensing lots of my insights on the field of international matchmaking: why it exists, who uses it, and their motivations. In the process I spoke at least briefly about my own experience online. I'm going to share more of this experience with you in detail, as this will help me talk about some of the insights I learned along the way, and some advice you take or leave as you wish, but might help you prepare for the realities you are going to face if you pursue meeting a Russian woman for marriage.

I will not repeat the details of how I first got interested in the idea of international matching. Suffice it to say that my first steps were somewhat tenative. I have talked about the myths and prejudices of the so-called “mail order bride” business in my earlier posts. Starting out with this possible online search, I suffered under the weight of many of those prejudices myself. I did not fully understand the motivations of Russian women seeking a foreign husband, and I had my doubts about the kind of person who would seek a Russian wife online. It certainly did not sound like the kind of person that I am. My first attempts to explore online international dating were therefore very cautious and reflected poor understanding of the motivations of the women I might meet, as well as a great deal of misgivings about whether this was what I should be trying.

One mistake right up front was to not research the agencies too thoroughly. After all, I was just looking to see what was going on and get a sense of the possibilities. I was not commited to the idea. Partly this was shaped by having explored, with mixed results, online matching services locally, and thinking that this was more of the same. Online here, I met a lot of interesting women, but usually met them only once. I ended up discovering some really cool people who are good friends, but not the permanent lasting relationship I was seeking. I had visions of the same happening again, but instead of a one-time meeting over a cup of tea at Teaism, it would an evening of struggling with a foreign language in Vladiovostok and realizing after 40 hours of travel just to get there that we did not have much in common. Not exactly the most inspiring of starting mindsets.

Courtesy of not researching things carefully in the name of uncommitment, I stumbled onto the first easy site to find. The agency in question was Russian Ladies. Nice easy name to remember. I could post a profile there for free and browse their profiles online without having any commitment. You can send free "Hello" notes, up to twenty a month, and receive unlimited notes from women interested in you based on your profile. Women pay to subscribe to the service, so it has a smaller collection of women but they are quite committed to their search. You pay to read more substantial notes, or send them, for a token each for a 3500 character message (about 700 words).

Poking around, things were not promising at all. Unlike profiles on Matchmaker.com and their ilk, the profiles tended to be brief, almost painfully so. There would be some basic biographic information (first name, date of birth/age, height, weight, number of children, religon, education, profession, home city, and language ability) and then two actual field with descriptive information. But these were often anything but descriptive. Interests: “My interests are different.” Self Description: “I would like to meet serious man for happy family life.” Всё. That’s all. There would be at least one and often several pictures. There could be lots of really interesting people with intriguing possibilities behind all this, but how the heck were you supposed to be able to tell with so little information? Base it on whether or not she has a nice smile and sexy eyes?!? The young lady from which I cribbed the above example, I should add, has had that profile upline for at least a year: I recognize it from this time last year when I first started exploring. Clearly it is not working for her. And yet it is still there.

I divert the topic for a little rant. Most people do not have the slightest clue about how to write a good, effective online profile. Russian gals using online sites, American men writing theirs, and the whole Match.com scene here. One of my many frustrations with online matching services is that it is very hard to find interesting and worthy matches based on the scant information available. Some sites are better than others, and some people have cottoned on to how to write a good profile. If you do decide to go down this road, please read about how to write a good profile. Think about what the person reading your profile is getting from reading. Be creative, be different, but please actually include something that gives someone a sense of who you are. Okay, rant over.

One hidden feature to all this, at least at first, is that your free membership in Russian Ladies also gives you a free membership in Global Ladies. This site has much the same basic structure, look, and feel. This, however, has a much larger database of women as it has no costs to the women to subscribe. It reaches into Russia, but the site seems predominately focused on Ukraine more than most others I would explore. And the profiles were the same very sparse information: single sentences or perhaps two or three for a total description. “Nature is the source of joy for me. I like being outdoors. I like travelling. Everything new inspire me to create. I like singing.” Eh?

Actually that’s one that has a bit to offer: if you like outdoors stuff like backpacking, camping, hiking, and so on, this gal might be a promising lead. But an absence of that information in a three sentence profile is hardly telling you much. It tells you basically was at the front of her mind when she compiled the profile on the fly when she first logged on, and had not thought too much about the entire process and what the questions would me to someone else reading them. The profiles tend to be very stable: they do not learn that they are not attracting the men they want, go back and revise, and see what works. There’s also no evidence that the women are getting any kind of coaching into what they should expect from foreign men, and what kinds of things help them attract the more promising men.

The other thing about Global Ladies is that logging into Russian Ladies did not get me letters writing me first, and I initiated contact with the small number of possible interesting leads I found. Global Ladies, on the other hand, flooded me with correspondence. In the first day, I must have had ten letters at least, and this pace did not slack off for a few weeks, and even then it only slowed. Most every time I logged on there would be at least one new profile.

And here’s the rub. Free is not actually free. To read the notes I was getting, I needed to spend a “token” and these cost US$8 each (though you could get a bulk discount). Just politely reading these first messages of interest could eat through lots of money very fast. Sending messages to interesting women was the same price: one token a letter, and the letter was limited to 2500 characters, or less than 500 words.

At first, I opened all the letters, and sent a polite no thank to the most obviously mis-matched women (The 21 year-old girl who was pregnant from her boyfriend and now seeking a husband overseas, for example. Cute, nice, arguably well meaning, but awfully young and this was not my problem to solve.). I could not keep that up for long. I had to come up with a strategy for dealing with this. One benefit of this for me was it forced me to sit down and think seriously about what I was doing and what I was seeking. I decided to look at each profile of every sender and anything that did not match up to my criteria of interest would not be read. If there was a potential for a match, I would read their letter, but only reply to the most promising.

Nice idea, pity about reality. I was away for a week and had something like 20 messages when I got back. Most I could eliminate immediately as unpromising: far too far outside my self-imposed criteria, not even a suggestion of common interests. That left a few possibilities, but nothing really promising.

But there was one profile that was outside my criteria: she was a couple of years younger than my lower limit, shorter than the lower limit height I had set for myself (I am tall and it is nice to have eye contact without getting your knees... but it is a pretty superficial criteria), and with less language skill with English than I said I would be willing to consider. There was nothing explicit to suggest that she was really interested in the same things as me, but perhaps a slight hint of an interest in the outdoors.

You know how to sometimes see a woman and for no reason you can explain, there is some electricity there right away? She may not necessarily match some culturally definition of stunning, or have any obvious characteristic that you could label. But there is something inexplicable? This has happened to me twice (and alas, never with someone I ended up dating: the other time was being stuck in an airport in a snow storm and there was this girl waiting for her flight on the other side of the lounge... I got in fifteen words with her. Nearly twenty years later and completely remember her clearly.). I really do hope this happens to other men too, as otherwise I am just balmy. Anyway, something about her picture got me to completely ignore everything I had set for myself as must-haves. I opened her e-mail, read it, tried to read 37 million different things into every word that was not there, and spent at least a day trying to respond the best response I could.

As you can tell from the length of my posts to this web log, I love writing, and at very great length. Cutting a message down to 2500 characters was pain beyond all telling. But after lots and lots of word smithing, I got down a reasonable introduction and sent it off, sitting on pins and needles for what would happen next.

Julya (not her real name) lives in Kiev, has almost no background in English, though she can read our alphabet and knows a few words. Translation would be vital with her. She was fully ten years my junior, and not one of the world’s taller people. Still, there was that nameless something in the pictures. I was prepared to accept that maybe I was too hasty in setting arbitrary limits for age and height. Language was solveable: I went out and got the Rosetta Stone DVD for Russian (They do not have one yet for Ukrainian, but Julya explicitly mentioned Russian language in her profile, not Ukrainian. In eastern Ukraine, Russian is very useful, but as you go west from Kiev (or Kyiv in Ukrainian), it gets to be considered more and more the language of the opressor and you may be better off with English than broken Russian. In Kiev/Kyiv, both coexist within some tensions.).

Ms. Kiev, as one friend took to calling her, was a very nice young lady. She was clearly pretty patriotic about Ukraine and about her home of Kiev, and she expressed great interest in meeting me there. She usually wrote back to me within a day or so of hearing from me. Her letters were frustratingly short, but she was clearly working inside the same 2500 character limit as I.

I tried to get around this by sending an e-mail address, but that of course got filtered out. I also tried to write something I considered a decent regular letter, which ended up taking five messages at 2500 characters each, and ate through tokens fast. It was maddening. Julya was clearly trying to write reasonable letters to allow me to get to know her, and sharing a little about herself in her letters, but the length really curtailed much in the way of real correspondence. Finally she sent me her regular street address.

Global Ladies, and some other online resources, claim that it is unwise to send letters from the West to Russia and former Soviet republics. Seeing a foreign postage stamp, the letter was likely to be set aside by underpaid postal service folks and opened in search of cash. They recommend instead one of their services where you write the letter to them via e-mail, they translate, and then drop it in the post with local postage stamps that the letter does not attract attention. I cannot speak to the truth of this allegation of poor postal service, but my own experience in later months would be that I never had any trouble sending mail to Russian addresses (though it was important to get the address correct: use cyrillic characters and write it in the Russian format, where the address goes from the general to the specific instead of the other way around (i.e. country, then region/oblast/region, then city, then street, then person). At the same time, I was more than once told to seal my letters very thoroughly with tape to be sure the postman knew he was not going to be able to open the letter easily.

I opted to try to translate my letters in Russian on my own using an online translator tool, PROMT Online (Project for Machine Translation: they turn out to be a firm in St. Petersburg), and send it via Federal Express so it was guaranteed to make it.

Ouch! It worked, but FedEx and its friends to Eastern European destinations is breathtakingly expensive. But she got a real letter, and not one that was just 500 words long.

Alas for me, as FedEx was winging its way to her, she dropped a bombshell on me. For reasons she did not explain at all (but did clarify that she had not met someone else), she really could not continue with online correspondence. Maybe at some future time we could meet and she would show me the beautiful city of Kyiv, but she has other things that command her attention right now. Пака. Goodbye. Hrmph! Well, at least I got a couple of months of correspondence in rather than the mere fifteen words with the magical mystrey lady in O'Hare airport.

I have no regrets about the experience: I learned a great deal in the process of getting to know Juyla: about Ukraine, about their culture, about what women might be truly desiring, about what was really going on behind those sparsely written profiles, about how free was not free at all. I had a small number of other brief correspondences with others I met through the Global Ladies site (and one very nice polite thanks, but you are not what I am looking for from an intriguing lady on the Russian Ladies site) , but nothing that captured my heart or suggested much prospect for anything more to come. Eventually I cancelled my membership and had a serious think about whether this was what I was going to actually want, and if the answer was indeed yes, what would I do differently.

Eventually I did decide that this was not a fair test of the experience of meeting a woman from Russia, and that I needed to research to see if there were better online resources, more information, better rating information to help me judge the effectiveness of my approaches, and better understand the underlying dynamics.

To this day, I have no idea what was going with Julya that caused her to back out. Ultimately, it does not matter: I did attempt to write her one more time, with a more carefully translated letter, and never did hear back at all. In hindsight, I was misled by that magical somthing: She really was outside my criteria and they did make sense. I would ignore them again one more time, of course, because we are not all fast learners.

And lead this me to Natasha, the lady behind door number two.