Bloody hell, another blog post? Must have been an uneventful week. I've been variously laughing at Americans (they're lovely really), waiting for the bridges to go up if I've stayed up past about midnight (or the first metro, at about half five), playing/teaching guitar (my cheap Russian guitar is also lovely, but cost and feels about a quarter of the price of my actual acoustic at home) and occasionally working at Russian. Y'know, when I've ran out of other stuff to do or something.
(Hoho, aren't we feckless arts students feckless. No fecks to be given here - I feel like I'm in some kind of Communist Father Ted tribute.)
Anyway, the main thing that I thought I'd talk about this time around is food. It seems to be most of what people want to know about when they're doing the politely-asking-about-your-year-off-why-haven't-you-got-any-proper-work-you-bastard thing over Facebook chat. Many have asked me whether the only sustenance to be had is actually various forms of cabbage soup washed down with vodka and the tears of the oppressed populace. This is emphatically not true - I provide the tears myself, on being faced with another bowl of lukewarm shchi with bloody buckwheat on the side.
Just kidding, folks! It's actually fairly passable. I opted to be in a homestay while I was applying for my neshing-out-of-a-year-abroad university course, so I get home-cooked food made by my landlady along with vaguely sardonic comments - I can't tell if they're genuine criticism or just being jokey. For example:
(Landlady has made some coffee for me in the coffee machine. The cup is standing there on the opposite side of the kitchen. As it's breakfast my brain has yet to wake up, hence the coffee.)
Me - (after a pause) "Is the coffee ready?"
LL - "Yes. I thought you weren't going to take it."
Me - "Oh, no, I just thought you were going to give it me." (considering she'd made it and laid the rest of the table)
LL - "Never do much for yourself, do you?"
What the fuck do you say to that? I mean, there's also the additional thing where I'm worried I've missed a nuance, or failed to take into account that my landlady can be absolutely bloody terrifying in the way that only a single mother of three can pull off (Hi Mum! I'll ring next week, promise?)
In the end I went "Well, I'm usually afraid I'll break something", to which she replied "Mm-mm". It's an infuriatingly noncommittal Russian noise (sort of a low-mid-low nasal tone thing, kind of a cross between "uh-huh" and "ah") that they make given any opportunity, and the worst fucking thing is I've started doing it in English as well. Also, when written down it's spelt "ugu", which is just ridiculous.
When I first arrived, I got what appears to be the usual Slavic thing of being sat at a table with approximately every item of food available in the surrounding area arranged alphabetically, with a few more that I'm pretty sure haven't been available since Soviet times and were defrosted just for show. The Slavs, apparently, like to put on a spread. So, wanting to show willing and avoid the silent look of female Russian reproach that I'm so familiar with from first year grammar class, I tried a bit of everything. I've got to say, some of it wasn't half bad. They do a thing with fried mushrooms that's actually pretty good (though I get the feeling I'd die if I ate it more than once a fortnight), and being quite into their soup I've been fed a lot of shchi (cabbage soup) and borsch (beetroot soup), often with some chicken or beef sitting in the bottom for flavour.
Comrades, they fucking love dill. I have no idea why - it has hardly any flavour and the main plus seems to be that you can grow it in a window box even if you live in a high-rise apartment (protip: that's pretty much everyone in cities). An indication of the slightly worrying dill-fixation is that the Russian word for dill is derived from the word for "to sprinkle" - yup, while we think of sprinkles as some kind of hundreds-and-thousands job that you put on your ice cream as a kid, to Russians it's a nondescript herb. Woot. There's a lot of dill-hate on the internet - just Google Dillwatch to find a Facebook group about it (that it turns out my tutor is on - awkward). I imagine if you lived here for a long time it'd get a bit irksome, but I personally found it more pissing off when some cheeky upselling waiter put ground cinnamon on my coffee without asking. Fucking nerve - and it tasted like ground sawdust.
Anyway, I had a point somewhere here. Oh, they like ketchup, too. And mayonnaise, which will be put in everything, along with sour cream. Considering the bitter cold (I caught myself thinking "Ee, it's cold out" on the way to the metro this morning, which given my Yorkshire antifreeze blood is saying summat) it's understandable that they put something fattening in whatever they're making - even the coffee machine at uni defaults to putting about three sugars in unless you use some kind of volume control thing to turn it down. When the heating came on in the flats one of our teachers referred to it as "a national holiday". Being still unused to this personal property thing (fun fact - Russians have no word for "privacy". Have a look at "kommunalka" on Wikipedia or just have a look at this to see why), Russians have no control over the heating in their flats. In Petersburg it's apparently a matter of mayoral policy to decide when the heating goes on, usually around the start of October, but often dependent on the average daily temperature thing in a manner that I eventually gave up trying to grok. The things I put myself through for both readers of this blog, eh?
So anyway, after a few weeks of diligently trying everything (homegrown cucumber seems to be particularly prevalent - not our weedy English type that we cut the crusts off and feed to toffs with weak teeth, but a full-blooded Russian kind that looks like an English pickle's older, nonalcoholic (lol) cousin) my landlady asked my why I ate everything mixed up. "Mixed up?" I asked. "Yes, you eat sweet things and then savoury things and then sweet things. That's not done here."
For fuck's sake, I thought, here I've been having to practically roll away from the table at breakfast and tea trying to fit in and it's all been for nowt. Take it from me, the worst thing you can hear as a foreigner in Russia is "That's not done here" (much shorter in Russian, of course, because they need to say it so often). Whistling in the street? Nope. Apparently you're supposed to be whistling away your money. Christ! There I was assuming that the fact that a grand (in roubles) is about £20 makes you feel a little rich and thus a little freer with your money (or the locals hear our attempts to speak Russian and assume we're a) mentally impaired b) will only go losing our money if they don't take it off us) was why we all seem to be broke by half time, but no, it's the fact that I sometimes whistle the solo from "I Am The Resurrection" when I'm waiting for the metro that means I'm destined never to be rolling in the Vladimirs. Actually, they put monuments in different cities on their notes - a thousand has one in Yaroslavl, for instance. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they start putting their long-serving politicians on there soon.
What's that? The we're-not-the-KGB-anymore are here to take me away for questionable attempts at political commentary? It's a fair cop.
While next time! (I hope)
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| Baked cheese is one of the good things. It's like everything you wanted cheese strings to be when you were eight! |
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