Katya Has Two Mommies

This post is brought to you by the phrase мамочка, meaning, “little mother.”

On August 27, I learned where I would live for the semester and I moved into my new home. My host family turned out just to be a middle-aged woman named Nina Anatolievna, who immediately gave me a hug and a kiss upon first sight. I was rather concerned about my host mom – I had heard horror stories of extremely hands-off families who only chose to host exchange students for the money. Nina is very much welcoming and involved, and it’s obvious that she cares about me and wants to take care of me while I’m here. Today, she dropped me off at Kazansky Cathedral for a tour of the city with my classmates, but before she left, she gave me a kiss and blessed me! She’s really sweet (and she loved the gifts I brought her), but she also isn’t insanely overprotective. (Though, this morning before we got on the metro, she fixed my scarf and buttoned on my jacket as if I were a six-year-old going out to play in the snow. lol) She speaks a little English, but she tries to explain as much as she can in Russian so that I can improve my comprehension. So far, the only real communication snag was at dinner when I was struggling to say the food smelled good and it took her a while to understand the terribly broken and circumlocutory Russian fumbling out of my mouth.

So, it seems Nina and I are off to a good start and she is determined to act as my surrogate mother for the semester, which is welcome. In other news, the food here is good, as I expected, though something about breakfast did not agree with me. I’ve only been here a few days, but I’ve already learned that Russians like to use a lot of basil and butter in their foods, and they expect you to eat things that don’t really taste like much just because they are “good for your health.” (The first night in Nina’s flat, she asked me what foods I didn’t eat and I told her fish and bananas…she was okay with that, but she questioned me at length about why I didn’t like them and told me they were very good for me. She actually said to me that my not eating fish was sad. lol)

Russian food is definitely more bland than the food Americans are used to, but it’s tasty in a subtle way. In fact, the difference in spice usage between American and Russian food is proportional to the difference between Indian and American food. Most things I’ve tasted so far have been good, but very different from what I expected. For example, the blini (aka blintzes) you get in the U.S. are not the same as the ones in Russia. The typical cheese filling you get in America is NOT the same here. At least, not at Teremok, the locals’ favorite restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt. It was still delicious, in an entirely undiscovered way.

Speaking of the locals, I’ve been told not to smile at them and today I learned why. My friends and I were walking along Nevsky and one girl could not help but smile at people walking by. Well, a 60+ year-old guy stopped walking and made it clear he was interested in her. She kept smiling (awkwardly, now) and edged toward the middle of the group, an action the guy mirrored. After a few seconds or so, he blew her a kiss and walked away. She hung around the boys for the rest of the walk back to the metro. During orientation, the program coordinators said that Russian men are sketchy and very forward unless you make it absolutely clear that you are not interested in them. For them, smiling = “take me, I’m yours.” Therefore, if you want to be left alone, don’t smile, or make one of your guy friends your boyfriend-in-a-pinch. Russian men stay away from other men’s girls. It’s a territory thing.

The whole creepy guy incident with my friend may sound scary or threatening, but it really wasn’t. He looked like he was just messing with her. She learned her lesson. (Well, after this, she said that she failed at not being an American and that she needed to get on the next flight home because she just couldn’t stop smiling. Happy people take note: if you are a ray of sunshine and live to smile, don’t come to Russia.)

In case you start worrying about me (and this is really for the family’s sake), I’ve gotten very good at making it seem like I hate the world. It was strange at first not to smile and acknowledge someone who held the door open for me, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. The only thing I need to work on now is to stop apologizing when I bump into people. In America, when you bump into someone, inadvertently touch their stuff or otherwise invade their personal space, you say you’re sorry. (This probably isn’t always true in bigger cities like NYC, but I’ve never lived there.) Here, you don’t even look twice. In fact, the word “privacy” does not really exist in Russian. So I may not look like a foreigner walking down the street, but I act like one when I smack into Russians coming out of the metro. Oh well.

Perfecting my frown,

Katya