YA KAPUSTA

Hello chaps,

Today’s blog is going to consist of some brief anekdoti about cabbage as I seem to have accumulated them of late. More specifically, the pickled, salted kind known as kapusta. I guess it’s the same thing as sauerkraut, which I’ve only had once, so I couldn’t tell you exactly.

Russians like pirozhki (see food blog). They like them filled with kapusta and egg, which, to an anglichanen (English person) sounds completely vile. It is.

Yesterday I tried kapusta for the first time. Anyone who knows me will know that I will eat literally anything, except offal and the fat on meat. And even offal I will eat if it means not offending a babushka – I had to do it in Kazan. I drank a LOT of water.

I do not spit food out, my mother taught me better than that.

I’m ashamed, but relieved to say that I spat out the fragment of kapusta. It is the second most vile thing I have ever put in my mouth. We don’t talk about the first.

 Luckily it was pinched off a friend who has somehow ended up with a kilo of the stuff. I don’t know what I would have done had I been in polite society. It probably would have been a napkin job.

Russia is cold and its language is full of idiomatic phrases. The thing I love about idioms is how much they reflect the culture of the language to which they are connected. My favourite at the moment is “Yolki Polki”, which means “fir trees and sticks!” and is said the same way that people in England may say “Holy Smoke!”. I love it because it’s so rural and Siberian sounding, a juicy cultural gem. It's also a restaurant that has a stuffed boar's head on the walls and fur for wallpaper. As you do.

Anyway, on a note related to cabbages and idioms: our teacher came out with a beauty today about people wearing lots of layers in the winter – “wrapped up like a kapusta!” (Russians eat a lot of cabbage, in case you missed the cultural reference here, I probably should have put more context into that one)

I enjoyed it. It seems a bit weak now out of context. Never mind! 

Also:

WHEN WILL RUSSIAN WOMEN LEARN TO KNOCK?!

When the communal toilet is quite evidently locked, they will always try and break down the door.

I'm not a violent person but the next one to do it will get a right hook. Not kidding.

Alcohol in Russia

Given that I live in the centre of two cities when in the Green and Pleasant land, alcoholics are not really a shocking sight. I shall expand on this further and say that the occasional person drinking beer in the street is not shocking. It’s usually Special Brew and they’ll be sat in the same place or in the same area walking on a daily basis. Fine. A little tragic of course, but it happens, it’s society.  I’m not going to go on about the ills of alcohol here, I’m just going to write about cultural differences as I have experienced them.

What I didn’t expect to see, even having lived in Russia for a month before coming to Piter, was the amount of people drinking beer in the street while going about their daily business. The people who walk around drinking beer during the day are generally accepted to be alcoholics in England. This is not the same in Russia.

People drink beer as if it were coca cola or red bull in Petersburg. They drink it while walking to the shops, they drink it as part of their lunch (a little more acceptable), they drink it while walking around monuments. I saw people in the Peterhof on a day trip drinking beer. If it had been England, it probably would have been orange squash, or pepsi as a treat.

This is because beer has such a low alcohol content, compared to vodka or konjak for example, that until 2010, it was considered a foodstuff. In Russian legislature, until the law changed under Medvedev, any product containing less than 10% alcohol by volume was considered to be a food. Even now, this new legal recognition of beer as being alcoholic largely only impacts the level of tax paid on it – it has nothing to do with the licensing in actual practise. I couldn’t tell you if that is what was meant to happen or not, but anyway, theory and practise are often two very different things.

This brings me to my next point that beer is actually the most popular alcoholic beverage in Russia – despite most people’s preconceptions that it is vodka. Beer here is exceptionally cheap – about £1 a pint. OK, I say that, it is cheap by London prices. I’m sure any students in Liverpool or similar reading this will think that £1 a pint is not that cheap compared to their Tuesday night hangout, but that’s not the point! In Kazan, there was any number of beer shacks every 50 yards up the main street, emblazoned with beer brands. I could recite a list to you right now just based on what I picked up when walking to the Institute every day. I’m not talking about Kronenbourg either – the Russian beer industry is absolutely thriving.

Russia definitely does have a different perception of alcohol from the UK. I saw a group of Russian men ordering a bottle of vodka “for the table” in the Turkish restaurant that was one of our more frequent haunts in Kazan. In England, this would have been a bottle of water; in France, a bottle of wine. There is a comparatively relaxed attitude to what is considered small amounts of alcohol. In the summer, a popular drink is a beer-like beverage made from fermented bread called kvas, which is really popular amongst adults and children alike. This is considered a soft drink, even though it is mildly alcoholic - I think it may be something like 2%. While this isn't a lot, admittedly, it exists nevertheless. Oh and it tastes rather odd, but you have to try it once, right?

I have also been told an interesting point about the culture of money and oligarchs. In England, it is the “done” thing to do to boast about how much money one has saved when buying something. In Russia, it is all about how much one has spent.

 For example:

In England – “I only paid half price for this!”

 In Russia – “I paid double the price for this”

This is reflected in the sale of vodka and the trend for oligarchs and suchlike to buy French vodka such as the “Grey Goose” brand. This is not because it is regarded as the best vodka, but it is supposed to be the most expensive.

Can we therefore consider French vodka to be the new purple?

Mushrooms, magic mushrooms and autumnal mushrooms

My food today has been porridge, mushroom soup and bread and fish. I was actually excited about eating all of these – am I past the point of no return?! I think I’ve been here for too long…

Mushroom soup is the thing I want to talk about today. Or rather, mushrooms.

 Russians LOVE mushrooms.

One of the first things we learnt in our first year of university was about the seasons and “In autumn, I like to go into the forest to collect and marinate mushrooms”. I’m not even kidding. Our teacher thought this was completely normal which I think we should have taken with a pinch of salt. (She was great by the way, driest sense of humour ever, no nonsense – but incredibly nice!)

It is true though – when you come to Russia in autumn, there are mushrooms everywhere in the shops and in restaurant. In our local jacket potato restaurant, mushrooms are being marketed as “the taste of the season”. There is even to be a Mushroom Festival to be held in the park over the road in a couple of weeks’ time. You’ll have to drag me away from it, quite frankly.

Mushrooms are not like you come across in England – they’re not white, for starters, more a chestnut colour. They have an amazing meaty texture to them, rather like cepes/porcini and they are absolutely full of flavour. I would become a vegetarian if it gave me the excuse of eating more mushrooms, they’re so good. The Russian seasonal pastime of mushroom collecting is just as fundamentally a part of autumn as collecting conkers is in the UK.

Oh, and we saw a red mushroom with white spots growing in the Peterhof. Turns out it was actually a magic mushroom. (This is the part where I make my 'incredulous-but-nothing-shocks-me-any-more' face). Oh and I should credit my much beloved room mate for this picture - my camera had died by this point and her photos are on my computer. Cheeky cheeky.

I saw something amazing today – a family making crowns of autumn leaves in the park. All you need is a needle and thread and a huge stack of golden sycamore leaves and you can create the most amazing mane-like headpiece. I hope one day in 20 years’ time I will be able to do that with my kids/friends’ kids. It was a magical piece of childhood that I felt privileged to witness. I really wish I'd been able to get a photo, but being the amazingly clever person I am, I didn't have my camera on me. Doh.

Today I made friends with a Kyrgyz man I could not understand and successfully gave a man directions (in Russian) to the Griboedeva Canal – which I actually knew the location of.

 Success.

Oh and today, I got myself one of these badboys. It was lemon, lime and mint flavour, which sounds disgusting but is so refreshing. It’s like drinking a non-alcoholic mojito. (picture to be added when I get around to it, before you all freak out)

Russian Weather

Hello chaps,

As a stereotypical brit abroad, I am writing today about the weather. On coming to Petersburg with no really knowledge of what to expect, weather wise, I felt completely unprepared. I had this notion that as soon as August 31^st struck, everyone would be donning their shapochkas and bear fur boots and polishing off their snow ploughs in anticipation of the first snows of September 1^st.

I could not have been more wrong.

My mother is going to be dead annoyed when she comes out to visit in the near future and finds she is unable to wear her specially purchased thermals. It is actually quite hot.

I know, I know. I have been eaten alive by mosquitoes, as I mentioned in an earlier post, which shows that the temperature has not yet dipped low enough to polish them off. People have been walking around in only jumpers. *Only* jumpers. Needless to say, I am hugely disappointed by the lack of shapochkas on the street right now - Piter, you’re just not trying hard enough. My friends and I have decided though that we will commemorate the first day of snow by having hot chocolate in the Singer café on Nevsky Prospekt. The Singer café is on the second floor of Dom Knigi – the House of Books – which is the most amazing bookshop in Petersburg. It overlooks the Kazan cathedral and their hot chocolate is apparently incredible. I guess we can compare it to taking tea at Harrods!

One of my favourite things though is the rain in Russia. In Kazan, it absolutely bucketed down on a couple of occasions and the city took on a new Tolstoyan ambience. The pine trees by my babushka’s house made the whole street smell fresh and the light dispersed through the clouds over the top of ulitsa Lenina hill, making the statue of Tukai look particularly dominant. Perhaps this is where my taste in pretentious Russian literature comes out most specifically, but I find the rain in Russia most poetic.

I’m finding these days that Russian comes more quickly to me than French, which is hardly surprising and rather reassuring given that I’m here. I’ve been working on my first French blog for my schools project and I’ve been having real difficulty staying in the correct language. Yes, I know this is completely pretentious and you all hate me now, but it is unfortunately the case. The word for “main course” came almost instantaneously to me in Russian, as the blog is about food in Russia and France, but I had to google translate the French as I simply could not think of it. It’s going to be interesting swapping languages in January!

It is strange though how the brain works in those who speak more than one foreign language. It is as if one has an internal dictionary from which words are taken when they are needed – which can mean that the occasional “ninja” word from the wrong language can escape from your mouth when you least expect it. Put simply: I made a complete prune of myself the other day when “s’il vous plait” somehow found its way out of my mouth without warning, at which point the security man looked at me blankly and responded “chevo?!” (whattt?!). Not cool.

Also the bus that stops outside my room in the hostel sounds like it sneezes as it stops. I’ve also found it rather difficult to contain my sniggering in a particularly intense grammar class at how completely ridiculous emergency sirens sound around here. They sound like toy cars.I cannot possibly hope to replicate this one on a blog – I guess my only advice is to come here and hear them for yourselves!

Russian manners

Hello chaps,

It occurs to me that a lot of English people think that Russia is a nation of rude people who never apologise and who glare at you sternly as soon as they lay eyes on you. The latter two parts of the sentence are correct. The incorrect part is the word “rude”.

Russia is a nation of sincerity, with no false sentiments and no ceremony. People do not give away compliments lightly, nor do they deal in fake apologies. I have immense respect for this – it means that when a Russian says something is excellent, they mean it. When a Russian apologises, it is more profoundly meant than in England. If a Russian person bumps into you, they will often not apologise – not because they don’t care but because it is accepted as a part of life and I guess they assume you will get over it and your day will continue as it otherwise would. If they were to bump into you to the extent that you fell over and injured yourself, they would apologise.

My only response to this is to say “fair enough”. It has made me reconsider whether in England we are a nation that lives off overzealous false apologies, because that is what our culture has come to expect. If you bump into someone on the train in England, the British stereotypical thing to do is to apologise about sixteen different times and flap around making sure the person is not injured or their day has otherwise been ruined by your actions. What is even worse and even more British, is to apologise when someone bumps into you! It’s like saying “Sorry old chap for going about my daily business and occupying the same train carriage as you, how outrageously thoughtless of me, how could I have done such a thing?!”.  If you don’t, people think you’re a rude, soulless blight on society. I really don’t think such an attitude is necessary – the Russian way seems far less stressful, there is a kind of mutual acceptance that neither party will kick up a fuss, provided no lasting harm has been done.

The other thing that took me by surprise about Russian people is how little they smile in the street, or rather, how much they glare at strangers.

I have heard two reasons why they do this. Firstly, that if you smile too much in Russia, there is the assumption that you are actually quite stupid and easily amused. Secondly, it was not so long ago that people were informing on their neighbours to the authorities, so there is a lack of trust between Russians in everyday encounters. Certainly, I think it is quite hard to get a Russian to properly trust you, harder at least than an English person, but when that trust is established, it runs intimately and should therefore be valued more.

My personal opinion is that these reasons in part are to blame for this cultural rift, but it is more because of the sincerity point I covered in my previous comment about apologies. We must also not exclude general snobbery from the equation, Russian people are exceptionally proud of their motherland – but English people are arguably just as bad.

It is definitely a shock for English people to be so scowled at when they arrive here.

Babushkas

Hello chaps,

We’ve been woken up by another brass band and some Russian women chanting religious stuff in the corridor.

Russian people are immensely interesting characters. In the West I think we are somewhat aware of the ‘Babushka’ stereotype – an old woman who may or may not have children and grandchildren (as babushka is the Russian for Grandmother). She wears a headscarf, is widowed, has a strong love of cats and going to church and spends her weekends tending to her cucumbers at her dacha. While this is a complete stereotype, a lot of the elderly Russian ladies I’ve come across fit these criteria.

I will only fleetingly mention a love of Stalin amongst babushkas, as this is less common, but there is the tale of the babushka in Murmansk who tends to the statue of Stalin every day, sweeping away the leaves and muttering “Moy Stalin, moy Stalin”. We must not consider babushkas to be in favour of state repression but the belief exists that under Stalin and communism, everyone had a job and a car and a place to live of some description. To their generation this was a better quality of life than what they perceive was brought by the end of Communism when the labour and manufacturing market underwent significant upheaval and there was less state involvement in private domestic affairs. People were no longer guaranteed a job, so for some, the standard of living was pushed even further below the generally accepted poverty line.

I want to talk now about my experiences with babushkas, because they are such a fundamental part of Russian society and the Western perception of Russia. We have all seen a matryoshka in our lifetimes, which is the most typical visual image of the Russian babushka accessible to the West. Visually it is rather an accurate portrait. For those less familiar, perhaps the image of an old fashioned washer-women in eastern and Germanic fairy tales is a good alternative to this – Disney actually does a rather good interpretation.

Before coming to Kazan, we were told that our host families (whom my Russian class colloquially refer to as babushkas as many of them were), would give us unusual things for breakfast and try to feed us up by forcing second and third and fourth portions of food onto our plates. We were warned that they would fuss over us, be concerned about the state of our clothing, ensure we got back at a sensible hour and worry if we didn’t. From accounts by friends, all of this was the case.

My roommate’s babushka would swirl corn oil into her breakfast, lick the spoon and stir it in saying “Zdoroviya!” (healthy!). At one point she was given pasta mixed with oil for breakfast. Another friend sent a text message to his babushka asking if it would be OK for him to stay out later. She responded with two simple words. “Nyet. Zhdayu”. (No. I am waiting (for you)). Another friend’s babushka had more pictures of vegetables in her kitchen than of her actual family and many of the pictures were of her posing with large basketsful of marrows. Mine was not technically a babushka as she must have been fifty at the oldest, but even she had a collection of cat figurines in her living room. When I left, I bought her two more to add to it.

Perhaps they may have some slightly odd ideas about health and safety, which is to be expected when one goes to a foreign country and experiences the culture. Their tastes are definitely different. One thing is for sure: you can never fool a babushka. These are women who have lived through repression and survived. I read somewhere that if they see you inadequately dressed for the cold weather, they will publically reprimand you. This happens even if you don’t know them. They are on the whole immensely strong characters, outspoken and highly suspicious, but caring and hardworking. The babushka who does our laundry gave us a lecture about not waiting for her before paying for our laundry – yet she did a fantastic job of it, she folded everything up and it was immaculately clean with no shrinkage. This is all despite her eyeing us suspiciously throughout the whole time we were in her shop. 

When I grow up, I want to be a babushka.



Edit: In response to the comment about Murmansk: It was a story I heard a long time ago, I'm pretty sure the statue no longer exists