On this last business trip I decided to travel home by train, the same one as in one of my earlier posts. Each of the last times though I either had a compartment to my own or shared it with a co-worker. This time I had the opportunity to share the compartment with a local Russian.
First impressions weren’t so good because right after a quick introduction this guy dropped trou right in front me to change into some comfortable ‘train clothes’. Unfortunately, when you’re sitting in a 6×4 cabin you can look as far away in the other direction as possible but you see everything in your peripheral vision.
The experience improved after that as he turned out to be like almost every other person i’ve met out here …friendly and eager to speak with a foreigner. The amount of persistance that a Russian person who does not speak english will put into having a conversation with me is astounding. It also helped that he kept buying rounds of beer, and in the end we somehow spoke for 4 hours. Incredibly we discussed a range of topics such as politics, religion, holidays,canada/russia (differences and similarities), our families, our work, travel plans for the year. There were a few points in the conversation where neither of us could get our point across to the other so just would just sit in silence, take a few sips of beer and eat some of the snacks he had brought with him. I was introduced to a product called ‘Beerka’ and it is basically dehydrated calamri (or calamari jerky). I’ve never been a big fan of fish but I’ve enjoyed some calamari in my day so I went for it. The first bite was ok but the intense fishy flavor that followed for next 5 minutes of chewing was so intense that I felt it in my toes. This quickly became my motivation to keep the conversation going as I wouldn’t be able to handle many rounds of calamari jerky. I went to the failsafe topic between Russians and Canadians…
‘like, hockey?’
Instead of the expected approving response I only received a blank stare as he continued to eat beerka like it was candy. I repeated the question with different tones, pitches, stresses about four times until I realized I was either saying it wrong which is hard to believe because the translation of hockey from english to russian is……hockey, or I had found the only Russian that didn’t know what hockey was. great, more calamari please.
I tried explaining ‘hockey’ by including the word ‘sport’ and pretending to take a slapshot. His answer was ‘sport?’ nyet, nyet..sport in Russia is Bania and beer’. Even though it was a joke I guess I won’t be playing any sports in Russia since the last time i played the ‘Bania’ game, i definitely lost. (reference new year’s post re: bania)
The last topic he tried to start a discussion on was…
‘russia ya, no russia’ – how would you respond?
First impressions weren’t so good because right after a quick introduction this guy dropped trou right in front me to change into some comfortable ‘train clothes’. Unfortunately, when you’re sitting in a 6×4 cabin you can look as far away in the other direction as possible but you see everything in your peripheral vision.
The experience improved after that as he turned out to be like almost every other person i’ve met out here …friendly and eager to speak with a foreigner. The amount of persistance that a Russian person who does not speak english will put into having a conversation with me is astounding. It also helped that he kept buying rounds of beer, and in the end we somehow spoke for 4 hours. Incredibly we discussed a range of topics such as politics, religion, holidays,canada/russia (differences and similarities), our families, our work, travel plans for the year. There were a few points in the conversation where neither of us could get our point across to the other so just would just sit in silence, take a few sips of beer and eat some of the snacks he had brought with him. I was introduced to a product called ‘Beerka’ and it is basically dehydrated calamri (or calamari jerky). I’ve never been a big fan of fish but I’ve enjoyed some calamari in my day so I went for it. The first bite was ok but the intense fishy flavor that followed for next 5 minutes of chewing was so intense that I felt it in my toes. This quickly became my motivation to keep the conversation going as I wouldn’t be able to handle many rounds of calamari jerky. I went to the failsafe topic between Russians and Canadians…
‘like, hockey?’
Instead of the expected approving response I only received a blank stare as he continued to eat beerka like it was candy. I repeated the question with different tones, pitches, stresses about four times until I realized I was either saying it wrong which is hard to believe because the translation of hockey from english to russian is……hockey, or I had found the only Russian that didn’t know what hockey was. great, more calamari please.
I tried explaining ‘hockey’ by including the word ‘sport’ and pretending to take a slapshot. His answer was ‘sport?’ nyet, nyet..sport in Russia is Bania and beer’. Even though it was a joke I guess I won’t be playing any sports in Russia since the last time i played the ‘Bania’ game, i definitely lost. (reference new year’s post re: bania)
The last topic he tried to start a discussion on was…
‘russia ya, no russia’ – how would you respond?
No comments:
Post a Comment