Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/world/europe/book-gives-russians-close-up-of-american-minutiae.html

by diego_moita • 14 years ago

131 98 14 years ago

Coming from a Latino culture it is funny to see that Russians look a lot like Latinos.

vlokshin2• 14 years ago

As a russian-american on HN, I'd be curious to know how this made the front page. Untested assumption: High concentration of russians/easter-euros.

bcbrown• 14 years ago

Alternate hypothesis: a high concentration of Americans, who are fascinated with anything to do with themselves. That's what I found interesting about it.

RobotCaleb• 14 years ago

Indeed. I found myself eager to get a copy and see how I really behaved. I suspect I'd learn rather a lot about Russian culture by seeing how we stand out via the descriptions in the book.

eclipticplane• 14 years ago

Or educated, curious Americans that are merely curious how others portray us.

Even with the short article, I'd never even second guessed interviewing a babysitter would be even remotely strange to other cultures. To be fair, I no longer do so -- my friends' kids are finally old enough to watch mine. Hey, I pay decently -- and it gives my friends a night kids-free, too. Win-win-win!

ChrisNorstrom3• 14 years ago

HN has a lot of international members from all over the world. I can confirm this using Google Analytics from the few times my articles made it to the front page and I got hit with thousands and thousands of visitors. They're from all over the place, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America.

The USA is still the biggest chunk of my traffic. When my last article got on HN's front page, I got hit with 29,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. 14,000 of them where from the USA, the rest are from all over the world.

So who knew? HN is a very global community.

digitalWestie• 14 years ago

As a Brit, I found this a fascinating read as I got to learn more about two cultures. Also interesting as I'm travelling around the US at the moment.

drrotmos• 14 years ago

As a Swede, I concur.

ddon• 14 years ago

Another Russian on HN here :)

apaprocki• 14 years ago

There are many who were either born in or immigrated to a large US city who might have never experienced suburban life. One doesn't have to be Russian to be shocked by differences in US suburban/city life.

(американец -- женат на украинке, учится говорить по-русский)

vlokshin2• 14 years ago

lots of those :)

toyg2• 14 years ago

Timezone. European mornings tend to see more Eurocentric posts making HN homepage; as the day progresses, you can really see a shift, ending with more "valleyism" overnight. I don't really see many "australasian" posts though.

phpnode• 14 years ago

I think that just comes down to numbers. There are only about 40 million people in Australasia compared to 740 million people in Europe and 312 million in USA.

6ren• 14 years ago

Not because it's about russians, but because it's interesting: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

ptolts• 14 years ago

I'd like to know more about Americans not drinking hard alcohol. Doesn't seem to be the case here in Canada.

gruseom2• 14 years ago

I suspect he means that Americans don't drink hard alcohol by Russian standards.

duaneb• 14 years ago

It seems to be a practice mostly abandoned here after college as a sign of immaturity. Or at least, that's what my New England sensibility says.

untog• 14 years ago

Drinking hard alcohol? Really? I'd say drinking beer drops off more after college than hard liquor. I am anecdotal evidence of course, but these days I drink more scotch and less beer.

AnthonyMouse• 14 years ago

I don't think there is any absence of it so much as a difference in degree when compared with certain other cultures. That's the thing with the melting pot: You can find a little of everything, including people who don't drink.

I think the prevalence of workaholics may have something to do with it too. Drinking on the job is very seriously looked down upon here, but if you can't drink while you're working and you're always working then you're never drinking.

mistermumble• 14 years ago

I think this has changed over time, from the three-martini lunch of Mad Men in the 1950s, to (say) two-martinis in the 1970s to perhaps one-martini in the late 1990s. I remember a working for a software company years ago where the "old guy" on that particular group would have two beers when we went out to lunch mid-week. The young guys chose caffeine.

rdtsc• 14 years ago

Well it is something else in Russia. Unfortunately it is ingrained into the social interaction protocol. You are setting up a business deal, you are expected to have a drink with a person. Family gatherings -- same thing.

Now this is all based what people in their 40 and older do. Not really sure how younger kids act these days anymore.

Alcohol and drunkenness is a national scourge. Imagine drinking vodka in the volumes of that Americans drink beer. You know, nice tall glasses. Polishing off a half liter bottle of Vodka in one sitting between two people is not really seen as a spectacular feat just basic stuff.

xentronium2• 14 years ago

> Well it is something else in Russia. Unfortunately it is ingrained into the social interaction protocol. You are setting up a business deal, you are expected to have a drink with a person. Family gatherings -- same thing.

Gatherings — yes. Business — not necessarily. At least, anecdotal evidence of my various relatives doing small to medium scale business doesn't seem to confirm that.

> Now this is all based what people in their 40 and older do. Not really sure how younger kids act these days anymore.

> Alcohol and drunkenness is a national scourge. Imagine drinking vodka in the volumes of that Americans drink beer. You know, nice tall glasses. Polishing off a half liter bottle of Vodka in one sitting between two people is not really seen as a spectacular feat just basic stuff.

Unfortunately, younger kids mostly act like their older role models with regard to smoking and drinking. I always feel so lonely in a drunken company :(

___

This raises a question: how realistic are high school parties in US as depicted in various movies? As in: gathering lots of people in someone's house and bringing lots of booze via fake ids?

bambax• 14 years ago

I went to a wedding in Poland once. Oh my. They drink vodka like water (or wine), and it's hard to tell if they're drunk or simply happy.

After each course people stand up and dance, and then return to yet another bowl of soup of potatoes and bread, and a large glass of vodka.

My wife was sitting next to a very big guy who told jokes in a language that was a mix of polish/bad German/worse English. He underscored each punchline with a real punch that he would throw into my wife's arm, with his elbow. She weights something like 90 pounds, and he must have been over 200 pounds (of muscle). She would almost fly off her chair every time.

JeremyMorgan• 14 years ago

After living with a Native Russian for the last 2 years I'm sure much of this book wouldn't surprise me.

From what I've seen there are some really good things in Russian culture, and some not so good. Just like America. We can learn from them, and they can learn from us. Maybe this book will help that.

snogglethorpe• 14 years ago

Russian culture:

good points: no excuse too small for a vodka party

bad points: no excuse too small for a vodka party

demetrius• 14 years ago

Don't forget about the dangers of being eaten by bears who walk on the streets...

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

The expression is "And here we are again with no reason to not have a drink".

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

I am trying to learn Russian, and in communicating with people in the USA who are from Ukraine or Russia, they often ask me "why is X done this way"? So that is why this book is interesting to me.

snitko• 14 years ago

I've been on a visit to the US recently and while I do know quite a lot about it, some things I didn't know and it was an interesting puzzle to try to come up with reasons why certain things are done this way and not the other. So, a couple of points to keep this post interesting:

* You're mostly out of luck if you don't have the exact amount of money to ride a bus. Machines don't give change. Probably because everybody has a pre-paid ticket and tourists are expected to take a cab or rent a car.

* Showers are all built into the wall. Impossible to find a shower that you can hold in your hand. Seriously inconvenient if I want to shower my feet, for example.

* In Russia, it's the police who ask you for an id all the time. In US, it's bartenders.

* Lots of homeless people everywhere. They look much healthier than russian homeless and most seem perfectly capable of making money on some job, that requires minimum skills. But they don't work. Also, they're very entrepreneurial: unlike russian homeless, they approach you very actively and ask for a change or something else.

* Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction.

* Flight attendants and airline pilots still speak English I can hardly understand, although it's their native language.

* No kettles (been discussed here and on reddit before)

* Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism. Because if you think about it, it's just business owners redistributing responsibility of paying their employees to me, the customer. Might be a good idea, or might piss me off: I hate calculating how much I should tip after having three beers. It does make the system less centralized, but it also reduces customer convenience. And I was also not sure where should I tip and where it's not very common. For example, no one in Europe tips a person at a bar serving you one beer. It's just beer, for god's sake. Not so in US. Now the problem for me is that when I go to another country where they don't tip, I feel very guilty for not tipping. It's a very hazardous practice for some reason.

cynwoody• 14 years ago

I like your critique of tipping.

xentronium2• 14 years ago

> In Russia, it's the police who ask you for an id all the time

Police rarely ask anyone with slavic appearance for an id. That mostly happens to people who look like gypsies or those from Caucasus (for some reason "caucasian" means "generic white race" in English and "people of the Caucasus" in Russian).

gadders6• 14 years ago

Come to the UK! We have kettles!

We don't have mixer taps so much though, which I believe continental Europe considers strange.

StavrosK4• 14 years ago

Their showers frustrate me to no end. It's really hard to reach everywhere with them, I wonder why handheld ones haven't caught on.

Tipping is another major pain point for me. I never know when to tip (Do you tip cab drivers? If so, why? Their whole job is to take you to the place you asked for, that's why you pay them). This leads to me overspending a lot, since I didn't factor a 20% increase on the order prices (which usually are pre-tax anyway, so the increase comes to 30-40%).

Frustrating. In Greece, we only tip waiters and delivery people, and that's 1, 2, or maybe 3 euros if you're very generous. On orders of more than 100-150 euros, you might tip 5. It's not a percentage because the waiter didn't do proportionally more work in bringing me a 100 euro steak than in bringing me a 10 euro side.

calibraxis• 14 years ago

Homeless people may have jobs. But there's insufficient numbers of legal, decent jobs (which would keep them from being homeless); and they may be affected by other issues which keep them from actually obtaining/keeping a job. Whatever outward persona you may see in a brief moment of observation, may not be much indication of the person within.

Also, there's different beggar culture. In some countries, beggars may rely on eliciting sympathy for their miserable state. Whereas the US may have such an unsympathetic culture that this may repel the audience.

fusiongyro3• 14 years ago

> You're mostly out of luck if you don't have the exact amount of money to ride a bus. Machines don't give change. Probably because everybody has a pre-paid ticket and tourists are expected to take a cab or rent a car.

This is actually a theft deterrent. Bus drivers can't get at the money to give change, so they can't be held up either.

> Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction.

That's part of it, but Americans are deeply distrustful of strangers. It probably plays along the same lines as our finding suburbs safer than inner cities.

> Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.

It's strictly a cultural thing. I'm given to understand that in Hawai'i tipping used to be considered insulting, and perhaps that's still the case in places (I've never been). Also, in different parts of the country tips are compulsory for different occupations. In the Southwest, restaurant service is about the only thing you tip for. In New England it's a different story.

philwelch4• 14 years ago

There are detachable shower heads in homes in the US.

sethg2• 14 years ago

In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week passes for the convenience of tourists. I don’t know how other cities do it. (Mass transit is good in Boston, superb in NYC, and mediocre-to-nonexistent everywhere else.)

I think attitudes to being approached by strangers on the street vary by region. People in California and the South are chattier than people here in the frozen Northeast.

T-hawk• 14 years ago

* Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.*

Tipping IS about capitalism. It provides the incentive for the server to do their job well, providing the best service possible to the customer. Especially in situations where the server can materially affect the quality: you might get a beer glass full of foam, or a mixed drink very thin on the alcohol, or a cabbie who takes the wrong route and gets lost, or a bellhop who drops your bag. Tipping provides direct connection between these and the compensation earned by the server, incenting the servers to deliver well.

There are flaws with the above argument. If there's sufficient supervision by the employer as to quality of service (think flight attendants, or fast food where the manager is always nearby), tipping isn't necessary. And the system doesn't work if people tip anyway on bad service, out of habit or perceived social compulsion. But by and large the tipping culture induces good quality of service.

EugeneOZ• 14 years ago

"Why Americans do not lie, for the most part. " LOL

cema• 14 years ago

Lol indeed, however the way of lying here is different from that in Russia: the scale is different. Small scale lies are not useful and therefore are much less used (perhaps because the pay off is small and the price is larger).

sologoub• 14 years ago

Funny that they note about the tendency to interrogate strangers about personal details. My wife still gets offended by that. I guess after 15 years, I've learned to just play along and ignore unwanted questions.

Though the article says there is no word for privacy, in Russian private and personal are the same word. Any info that is truly personal is off limits to strangers.

gruseom2• 14 years ago

Is your user name related to the author of The Petty Demon?

shiven• 14 years ago

Now, that's personal information... :-P

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

> It seems strange, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, that ordinary Russians would still be hungry for details about how ordinary Americans eat and pay mortgages.

What a lovely innuendo.

They might be "hungry" for these details, but not because they envy the lifestyle or are looking up to it. A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense. There are stand-up comedy acts that center on how you can't get a whole pickled cucumber in McDonalds (even though there's a sliced version in every hamburger), how there exist separate trimmers for a nose and for an ear hair, how Americans drink vodka "on the rocks", etc. Ordinary Russians are no more hungry for the lifestyle details than for UFO encounter stories and Thai transvestite pictures, with "hungry" being way too strong of the word in either case.

startupstella• 14 years ago

As a Russian American, Ive noticed a definite curiosity remnant from the cold war regarding how the two countries live. The difference is that Western culture is all over russia (from copying tv shows like American Idol to Fabrika Zvezd), movies in theatres, etc whereas in the US, it's the older generation that harbors a curiosity about Russian people.

My father, a doctor who emigrated at 35, started practicing in a small town in the midwest about 20 years ago. He had patients who wouldnt see him as soon as they learned he was Russian...and he had patients that displayed a real curiosity over our food, language etc. I'd say that Russians possess a certain disdain for Americans...they would love to enjoy a similar quality of life, but they find the culture too simple/vapid/devoid of meaning. Russians will say they would NEVER move to america, but many of them would in a heartbeat

sethg2• 14 years ago

A lot of Russians still view Americans as self-indulgent, somewhat retarded know-it-alls, bathing in life's luxuries that make no sense.

And they’re right! We are!

detst• 14 years ago

You are reading way too much into a single word and it's a shame that another nit-picking contrarian viewpoint like this gets voted to the top on HN.

I've heard Brits claim that they keep the royal family around for the amusement of Americans. No one attacks that claim because it's obviously just a joke. In this case, it's just a word that you've certainly read way too much in to (why you've done that I won't speculate).

huhtenberg4• 14 years ago

I guess you are right, the comment did come out a bit trollish, didn't it? FWIW, it only got 8 upvotes. The reason is at the top of the comments is because of my karma level.

gadders6• 14 years ago

When I was working for a large global bank, we came across an intranet site created by our new Russian offshore partners about how to work/deal with Brits and Americans.

One gem that stood out was that "It is customary in the UK/USA to shower at least once per day."

StavrosK4• 14 years ago

Eh, that sounds like good advice to me. I shower whenever I get smelly, which sometimes can be every two days if I haven't been very physically active. In the US/UK, people usually take a morning shower, while I prefer mine in the evening.

Just because a culture is different doesn't mean it makes no sense.

gadders6• 14 years ago

Well, barring actual dirt on your face, if you don't smell no-one will be able to tell how often you shower. Or care.

theorique2• 14 years ago

One gem that stood out was that "It is customary in the UK/USA to shower at least once per day."

Isn't this more or less the standard world wide?

gadders6• 14 years ago

The implication was not. I can really only speak for the UK/US, barring anecdotes I hear about the Paris Metro.

rmah• 14 years ago

No, it's not the standard world wide. For the simple reason that consuming that much water and energy (to heat the water) costs a lot of money. And most people in the world don't have that much money.

stuaxo• 14 years ago

This sounds great, I hope they bring it out in English for the UK market.

Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians

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