Dividing My Time

The "F" Words: More from the Expat Lexicon

 

That’s the thing about blogging, isn’t it?  You get on the roll with something….

Here are some “F” words for the expat’s guide to Russia:

Fools:  

Nikolai Gogol said it best:  “The problem with Russia is fools and roads,” This sounds a lot better in Russian “Duraki ee Dorogee.”  (Дураки и дороги).  Playing the fool works well in Russia, because you can operate under the radar screen.  Good examples of this include arch-conservative/nutcase head of the LDPR Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who just keeps on ticking, no matter how many insulting things he says about Russia’s near neighbors, and Grigory Rasputin, the Holy Fool, though of course with him, things ended rather badly.

Fandorin:  

Russia often tries to come up with its own version of something that other countries already have, which by rights, have no place in Russia.  For example:  Medvedev is building a Silicon Valley, the Scary Crowd who run Moscow are attempting to build a Financial Center.  Fandorin is Russia’s attempt to have a Top of the Line Fictitious Detective like Hercule Poirot.  He’s the detective hero of best-selling novelist Boris Akunin’s series.  Fandorin:  I’ve known Poirot a long time, and you are no Poirot.

Flowers:

Do not underestimate the importance of flowers in Russia.  Flowers are always always always a good idea.  The larger the better.  Half of the GDP of the Netherlands comes from International Women’s Day in Russia.   They come swathed in ugly colored plastic wrap, strangled by chicken wire.  Hell to de-construct.  The problem is that you get deluged with them on your birthday or International Women’s Day/23rd of February and then you don’t see them for the rest of the year.   

Football:

One of Russia’s national pastimes.  Particularly since they (somehow, for reasons which still baffle the rest of the civilized world) managed to swing hosting the world cup in 2018 in three or four cities, which no one had ever, heard of (admit it – you could sooner find Fanghorn Forest or King’s Landing on a map than you could Saransk.)

Frustrating:

Not a word that is possible to translate into Russian, though anyone who wants to give it a go is welcome to hit the comment button below and weigh in.  I always find this interesting; since frustrating is exactly what Russia is most of the time.  For example, when you finally get your act together to go and register your visa, and you battle through the snow or the pukh or whatever and get to the post office and discover that the warped individuals who run the Federal Migration Service have changed the rules again.  Or, when you are trying to sleep off the previous night’s excesses and your landlady arrives.  At 8 am.  That’s frustrating.

Female:

Opposite of male, and therefore incapable of a.) Playing football, b.) Making more money than the male, c.) Taking out the garbage, and d.) Running the country.  Pity.

Face Control:

What mandatory military service qualifies every male Russian to do.

Foreign:

A synonym for “strange” or “no longer welcome at this particular time in our nation’s history,” or just plain “wrong.”  Is the etymological root of the word “German” which doesn’t come as a surprise given recent history?   If you are reading this blog, chances are, you are a foreigner, despite the fact, as one visitor to Russia once told me, “I’m not foreign…I’m American.”  Think again.

Fruit:

Still considered a luxury although it is available year round.    Source of “vitaminiy” together with intense sunlight.  Which is good, since I have yet to be able to find where they sell the actual supplements.  

Forest Fires:

The highlight of last summer.   Mixed with the peat bogs fumes, they gave us an exact sense of what fire and brimstone will be like when we get to hell.   Tough cookie Medvedev told the Cabinet Ministers that if things this summer were as bad as last summer, he’d send them out to fight the fires.  Problem is, he tweeted it.  And, as every devotee of Vladimir Putin knows, Real Men Don’t Tweet.

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Hey There Readers!

Can you think of some “F” words to describe Russia or help shed light on Life In Russia?  Mindful, that is, that this is sort of a Family Type blog, so you have to refrain from outright obscenities.  That should keep you busy!

Coming up next…. the “B” words!  Stay tuned!

 

 

Day of the Russian Postal Service/День российской почты: Room For Improvement

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

~ Herodotus (I know… I was surprised too)

Today we celebrate Russia’s postal system…or shall we say the potential that it represents?

A lawyer-type classmate of my sister’s (who I suspect is firing on a few too many cylinders) was recently posted to Russia and sent in some impressions of the country to his friends and colleagues.  Among these, he confessed to being really taken aback that a letter posted to him from Western Europe took almost 21 days to reach him in Moscow.

Myself, I was astonished that no one at his fancy-schmansy legal outfit had seen fit to warn him that, along with trolleybuses and the 10 pm evening news on TV, foreigners (and quite a few Russians) just ignore the postal system here. Not in any kind of morally outraged, angst-fueled boycott or anything, but rather as something we’ve given up long ago as antiquated, inefficient, and irrelevant.   As a recent article in The Moscow Times pointed out, if you want something in Russia, you need to hand-carry it in. An example:  I forgot my battery charger for my digital camera in the US when I came over a few weeks ago.  The first thing I did was to send out a note on Facebook to figure out which of my friends was next coming over from the US to Russia, and then asked a neighbor to send her the battery.  I’ll have it next week.  It did not occur to me to ask my neighbor to post it to Russia, and, as I’m on an austerity budget, there is no way I could afford the cost (four figures) of having it shipped via DHL, FedEx or UPS.   

“I can always tell when you are coming home,” says my mother, “when the UPS man comes three times a day.” And so he does, along with Chet the Mailman, and the tough cookie FedEx woman, bringing clothing, and books, and sheets, and towels and obscure pieces of kitchen equipment, and label maker tape and all kinds of things you can’t easily or cheaply access in Russia.  Then, I pack them in my TUMI bags and head over to Russia.   

Such as it is, then, Russia’s postal service was founded more than 300 years ago by…guess whom?  Peter The Great, of course!  In 1693, Peter ordered the first regular postal service to support (of course) the naval shipyard at Archangelsk, and the State Duma inaugurated the Day of the Postal Service in 1994.

About three years ago, I began to get a whiff of what seemed to me to be a concerted effort by the Russian Government to beef up the post office service.  It was almost as if someone at the top had seen that cheesy film with Kevin Costner “The Postman” (because they don’t strike me as the types to curl up with Il Postino) and said “First tier nations have a decent postal service… do something about it!” 

Here were the hints:  Andrei Kazmin, (who looks more like a rodent than any of the other oligarchs) the former head of Sberbank (the National Savings Bank) was put in charge of the Post Office, suggesting that either he had really screwed up or reform might be in the wind.  Next, you started to see commercials on television for the Russian Postal Service: wildly improbable, slightly unfocused scenes of sun-drenched (so likely) kitchens and fit and happy families overjoyed to be receiving newspapers, letters, cards, parcels from a jolly Slavic version of Chet The Mailman who they just let in their back door, which, needless to say, is the kind of thing that happens every day in Russia.  It was clearly a PR campaign, because, of course, the Russian Postal Service doesn’t compete directly with anyone.   About this time, I got into it, and wrote a column about how easy it was to walk in and buy post cards and stamps, encouraging a very skeptical HRH and his parents to send Velvet some mail at boarding school.   I’m afraid that they’ve been proven right:  Mr. Kazmin has stepped down and the Gorgans who run the post office have gone back to snapping your head off when you ask for international post card stamps. 

 

If you ask me (and no one ever ever ever does) if Dmitry Medvedev is really serious about beefing up Russia’s economy, he ought to put Skolkovo on the back burner and beef up the catalog mail order business:  I know for a fact that Russians are wild for LL Bean, Lands End, Eddie Bauer, Hannah Andersson, Eileen Fisher and that ilk.  I know because I’ve spent the last 17 years lugging that kind of stuff over here, which I would love to stop doing someday.  

Compare Russia and the US on post office statistics:

In 2009, the USPS handled 177 billion pieces of mail, compared to Russia’s 1.01 billion.  The Russian Postal Service employs 390,000 people, and the USPS 596,000.  Russia uses 450 postal vans, 17,000 vehicles and more than 360 flights, whereas the USPS deploys 218, 684 vehicles.

And, as Barack Obama will tell you, USPS is hurting.

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This post is part of The Stunt.

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Hello there Readers!

What do you think about the postal service where you live?  Is it efficient, or are you outraged by it?  Have you had any experience with Russia’s postal system, or did you sensibly just give that one a miss?  Thank you, as ever, for joining me on this romp through Russia’s professional holidays.  If you found the state Russia’s postal system depressing, perhaps some more upbeat posts are in order.  Try these:

Post Cards from the Edge

Day of the Canine Units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia/День кинологических подразделений МВД России: It’s a Dog’s Life

Day of the Pacific Fleet /День Тихоокеанского флота: Keeping the World Safe From Right Hand Steering Wheels

Day of the Inventors and Rationalizers (Management Consultants)/День изобретателя и рационализатора: Love To Hear Medvedev Go “Tweet Tweet Tweet!”

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

~ Plato (The Republic)

  Today is the Day of the Inventors and the Rationalizers!  I crossed checked “rationalizer” in a number of online dictionaries and it seems that it can to refer to someone who re-organizes or brings modern, efficient methods to an industry i.e. Management Consultants.   Management Consultants, as I learned during my happy time at Russia’s National Carrier are creepy expat parasites, who, as HRH would say, are “You-zzz-eh-less” so I thought we might focus on the inventors.   

We have, of course, talked before about Russia’s past contributions to world technology…that Periodic Table of Elements thing, so I thought what we might do is focus more on Russia’s future inventors and innovators.

And what a great week to do so!  As all Russia-watchers, and many techno-geeks know, President Dmitry Medvedev, clearly off on good behavior, visited Silicon Valley on fact and fund finding missions for Russia’s  “City of Innovation,” Skolkovo.  Skolkovo, which is 20 kilometers from Moscow, was recently designated the site for Russia’s new innovation and technology center, where the focus will be on energy, information technologies, communication, biomedical research and nuclear technology.

Russia’s president is a real gadget geek and so this was like having lunch with all of the Disney Princesses for a 6-year old girl from Alabama.  He visited Apple, where he got a new 4G iPhone from Saint Steve himself (to add to the pirated and “cracked” 3G one he already had), he met with the Russian programmer Diaspora, about whom he expressed the (wildly unrealistic) hope that they would all return home and work at Skolkovo, and then, he visited Twitter, where he set up an account, and sent his first tweet, with an adorable typo.  He then proceeded to tweet the entire rest of the day, sending Twitpicks of the view from his hotel room, some random thoughts on Skolkovo, the good news that Belarus was going to repay it’s gas bill, and his latest tweet says he just met with David Cameron, and they agreed to stay in touch, and not just on line.

Having just worked my way through “Twitter for Dummies,” I was able to instantly “follow” the President. He isn’t following me.  Yet, but I am sure that will be put to right as soon as he gets home and synchs his contacts on the new phone with his iPad and his Kremlin hotmail account.  I sent him (unanswered as of yet) a tweet expressing my hope (in 140 characters) that he had enjoyed his cheeseburger with President Obama, and congratulating him on the cool press conference.   And you can send both President Medvedev and me tweets if you like as well.    We’re up to speed.

The President’s visit got a lot of coverage, most of it positive, some not, but the visit put Skolkovo firmly back on the top-five dinner party topics, from whence, frankly, it had slipped slightly, what with the initial rollout being not super duper PR, and the oppressive heat, and the BP oil spill and everything.  But, with companies like Nokia and CISCO pledging billion dollar investments into Skolkovo, we all wonder: is this the new hot place to look for a job?  Is the Innovation Technology racket the new Management Consultant racket?   Or do you have to, like, know something for this gig?

I’ll send you a hashtagged tweet if I find out!

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This post is part of The Stunt

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Dear Reader:

Had you heard about Skolkovo before you saw the charming footage of Medvedev at the Twitter office?   What do you think the Skolkovo crowd should focus on apart from how to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which a lot of us believe they already know, but what else?  Better ice machines and more powerful a/c are on the top of my list, since it is 93.2 degrees today (which is 34 degrees Celsius for the Metric geeks among you.).  Thank you, as ever, for stopping by.  Stick around, and read some other posts like this one:

Day of the Chemists / День химика: Russia’s Unquestioned Contribution to Civilization

Day of the Freelancers / День фрилансера: The Pajama-Clad Workforce

Day of the Ameliorators/День мелиоратора: Professionals From Fiction with Tough Rows to Hoe