Even though I am living in the biggest country in the world, most of the time it feels like I’m living in the smallest. I have nothing but fondness for Kazan and all of its people, but sometimes at the end of a long day, I start to feel crowded. Buses brimming with students, men with mustaches and tattooed fingers, and old fat ladies wrapped in fur lumber down narrow streets behind masses of Ladas and old Ford models. Everyone is in a rush to get to where they should have been an hour ago, and no one is getting anywhere. In addition to this physical crowdedness, getting used to a social “crowding” that I have never experienced before has been even more exciting, overwhelming, and sometimes frustrating.
In my experience thus far, Russians are much more straightforward than Americans. If a student is unprepared for class, the teacher will call him or her out on it in front of the other students. If you fail to return an acquaintance’s text, don’t be surprised if they ask whether you are really interested in talking to them. Coming from New England where people are notoriously passive aggressive and have trouble expressing their true feelings, this shameless forwardness seemed abrasive at first. Over time though, I have come to appreciate how this cultural difference has helped my language skills. Back in the States, I always enjoyed getting to know exchange students, but I always avoided correcting their English for fear that it would introduce some kind of complication to the budding friendship. Here though, my language skills have reached the point where I learn more about the flow of conversations by having conversations with my host family and friends than I do working through practice drills in class. Where I always shied away from offering linguistic advice to foreign students, my Russian friends and acquaintances aren’t afraid to let out a giggle if I use a construction that sounds funny. Realizing that I don’t harbor some secret hate, but actually am extremely grateful for the Russians who are bold enough to correct my speaking, I find myself wishing that I had offered the same experience to the foreign students I befriended in the past. While the American concept of courtesy seems to be foggy with white lies, honesty and respect are tightly bound together in the Russian psyche.
While I have become accustomed to, and even grown to appreciate, Russian honesty and straightforwardness, I sometimes have a hard time when what qualifies as “personal” in the United States and what qualifies as “personal” in Russia don’t overlap. As far as I know, I am the only person living in my body and I am therefore the only person who knows when I am cold, but since Russians dress for the calendar rather than the thermometer, I can expect to be scolded by a stranger if I am not bundled up enough in January regardless of the actual temperature. God only knows how many lectures I’ve endured from babushka’s I’ve never met regarding the effects of sitting on a bench at the bus stop in the cold on my fertility. If that’s not personal, then I don’t know what is! Even when it’s tempting to use the age old “you’re not my mother” retort when a stranger instructs you to put on a hat, knowing that these pieces of advice, regardless of whether or not you think they are appropriate, come from a place of love (and usually from the heart of a babushka) helps me to slap a smile on my face and just put on the gosh darned hat no matter how much I’m already sweating in my incubator of a coat.
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