“Dissolving Coffee”: Reflections on Russia
Noted on November 9, 2010 by IE3 Student in
By Lena Walker: Portland State University students and IE3 intern at the American Studies Center at the Linguistic University (LUNN) in Nizhny, Russia.
The Russian word for granulated coffee is “dissolving coffee”, while the English term is “instant coffee” – a small, but interesting and poignant difference between the two cultures. While the English phrase focuses on the result, the Russian phrase is more concerned with the process. Russians can wait for something with a Buddha-like patience, staring off into space or talking to one another for an hour or more while they wait for an order to be filled or a “customer service” employee to help them out with their broken cell phone. Once in the grocery store the cashier didn’t know the bar code for eggplants and walked off to go find out, and after ten minutes of waiting with still no sign of him I finally gave up and moved to another aisle. Patience doesn’t work both ways, however; it all depends on who is providing the service. If you need to pay for something and have trouble digging out your wallet the cashier will grow impatient very quickly, as well as the people around you. I find this practice frustrating and a little unfair, especially as a foreigner who needs extra time to do just about everything. Still, the emphasis on process rather than result can have some excellent benefits as well.
The pace of work is much slower here and I suspect that people don’t always come home frazzled and burnt out the way many Americans do after a day at work. People aren’t quite so obsessed with being on time, either, an aspect of American culture that we discussed at orientation and proved to be spot-on. It’s still important to respect the time of others but if you end up running late Russians are much better at accepting that there’s nothing you can do about it except be a little behind schedule. Sometimes in the U.S. I feel like everything is a crisis, and there is a huge amount of pressure on me at all times. I never feel like that in Russia, and in a way it makes me feel like I own more of my own life instead of constantly having to rush around or switch up my schedule at the behest of others. I don’t think I can say that I prefer one way of living over the other, but I hope that when I get home I can carry a little of this mentality back with the nesting dolls and Russian tea cookies.
It is already cold here: the average temperature has plummeted from 18 degrees Celsius to a meager 1. The wind is colder now too and although it nips pretty playfully it’s easy to tell that it will soon grow mean, adult, winter teeth. A Russian comedian tells a joke about how strange they are as a people: Russians are the only people that will walk down the street in the dead of winter complaining about how cold they are and then walk into a store, buy an ice cream and eat it on the street. This is 100% accurate. The other evening I went to the theater with some Russian friends and my Austrian roommate. It was very cold out so one of my Russian friends, Irina, suggested that we get something to drink while we wait. Patricia and I assumed this meant sitting down in a café and drinking some hot tea or wine, but instead we went to a corner store, bought a bottle of champagne, and drank it on a park bench while the wind blew and my cheeks turned bright red. We foreign students in the dorm have a little joke of our own about these quirks: whenever Russians do something weird or seemingly senseless (smoking in public bathrooms or drinking something cold outside in order to get warm), we simply shrug our shoulders and say “Russkaya normal’nost’”, or “Russian normalcy”. We found out that the grammar isn’t quite correct for the expression, but somehow that makes it even better and uniquely ours so we still say it.
Work is still pretty aimless but getting a little better. It’s late enough in the internship that I’ve accepted that there’s just nothing really worthwhile for me to do, and they had never intended to really accomplish much. I still don’t feel good about this but I try to do some good where I can. On the bright side Marina Tsylina, the Fulbright scholar who visited PSU for a year, is now teaching at another university in Nizhniy Novgorod and I have started coming to her English classes to talk to the students about various topics: democracy in America, American slang, etc. etc. It’s a lot of fun and the students don’t say much (neither did I during my second year)—and each time they talk a little more. We are also planning to have a big Halloween celebration at the end of the month, so there will be plenty to do in preparation for that.
This weekend I am going to Cheboksari with two friends, one of whom is originally from there. We will be spending the weekend at her parents’ house and hopefully taking some walks in the woods—Russian forests are so beautiful and unique, but it’s hard to find them while living in the city center. I could stare at the Volga River for hours or take walks in the city parks. I am glad that I have made friends here, but there are times when my favorite part of the day is when I can be alone for a while and just think about/take in my surroundings. Having written this, I was reminded of the orientation handbook’s bit about American culture and how much they crave privacy—I guess that holds true for me. It’s not really about privacy though: rather, it’s a welcome chance to actually reflect on my life here. There is a dreamlike quality to living in a foreign country for the first time that I have a lot of trouble explaining. It just seems so unlikely that you are so far from everything you consider to be familiar. I feel as though I am walking around in someone else’s dream, not quite sure of how I got there, and constantly afraid that they will wake up and I will suddenly be back to where I always was. This is all silly of course, but I still feel that way sometimes.
Life has more or less leveled out here into some kind of normalcy, but I feel as though things are steadily improving every day. I am so sad to think of leaving in a month, but I am also comforted by the fact that many of the Russian friends I have made here will be at the university for at least four or five years, so if I come back to visit I will know exactly where to find them.