Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians
nytimes.com
Coming from a Latino culture it is funny to see that Russians look a lot like Latinos.
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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
And they’re right! We are!
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).
One gem that stood out was that "It is customary in the UK/USA to shower at least once per day."
Just because a culture is different doesn't mean it makes no sense.
Isn't this more or less the standard world wide?
http://www.amazon.com/Amerika-Zhivut-zhe-liudi/dp/5699558330...
Would absolutely love an English translation if anyone finds one.
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!
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.
(американец -- женат на украинке, учится говорить по-русский)
I noticed the occasional post about Indian matters, but it looks like the other Asian communities are just not interested in HN at the moment.
* 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.
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).
We don't have mixer taps so much though, which I believe continental Europe considers strange.
What do you do when it's cold and you want to wash your hands with warm water? Your choice is freezing-cold from one tap, or boiling hot from the other. Why separate them?
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.
I agree tipping is a strange practice. If you tip too little you're stingy, if you tip nothing you're making a point. I've stopped tipping for some things that are just kind of ridiculous (I went and picked up a call ahead order the other day, no I'm not tipping you). The percentage makes sense in this context: In a nicer restaurant, you expect better service as a baseline. So at the $100 steak restaurant, the waiter is pulling your chair out for you, etc. But at the $10 steak place, it's not quite the same level of service. You're tipping off the total experience rather than the individual dishes if that makes sense.
Don't nicer restaurants also pay higher wages since they want to attract more qualified people?
Since the tips are higher in nicer restaurants, you'd net much more at the same server wage + tips than at a chain restaurant. I'm not sure they pay more, or if the promise of more tips is sufficient. There's probably is an increase as you go from $10 pp to $100pp meals, but I don't know if at the top end you're making the normal minimum wage yet.
Source: friend who works as a waiter at the most decadent restaurant in town.
Good head chefs are scarce. In a high-class restaurant, their pay should be comfortable with or without tips. The rest of the kitchen staff might rely on tips (though I'm not sure if it's legal to pay them less than minimum wage like waiters), but relative to the waiter they each have little interaction with the customer and hence comparatively little ability to influence the tip.
I tend to tip cab drivers here in NYC very high, anywhere from 25% to 50% depending on the fare. (I tend to tip high generally simply to avoid the embarrassment and accidental cruelty of tipping low)
NYC has crufty licensing rules for taxis, and the actual driver may be leasing the right to drive (the medallion) from a fleet owner or some corporate entity, which cuts into their profits a lot. Among my peers there seems to be a bit of disdain for cab drivers generally. A lot of people seem indignant about being able to pay with a credit card which results in less profit for the driver. I've seen people who are rude to drivers just as a matter of course.
So I tip high, and I pay in cash. I don't claim to be making the most perfectly rational economic decision here, but I hope that by doing so, I show a little appreciation and gratitude to someone who is performing a service for me.
The former way would be more efficient, if it weren't for the social stigma of underpaying. I'd love to overpay for good service and underpay for bad service, but nobody underpays, in practice. Still, I guess overpaying for good service is a good way.
I don't know if in Europe taxi drivers are better paid or have more autonomy, but I wouldn't be surprised. This article has a lot more detail on the issues with the medallion system: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/06/taxi...
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-segregation Humans tend to naturally segregate themselves by group when faced by diversity so they can preserve their language and beliefs.
Also, suburban sprawl has happened everywhere from Africa, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico. Even black folk don't want to live in the city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight
Even India, Australia, China, and other countries experience suburban sprawl. Oh did they move away from black folks too? Humans, like many other animals, like having territory, land, peace, and quiet. So people work in the city but live tucked away in the county. And that the fact that in St. Louis, we have Belfontaine (the black county which has nicer areas than many of the white counties) just proves that everyone likes living in peace & quiet.
I suppose another factor is that Americans don't really do cities right, but this is largely an effect of the other two factors, plus the awkward way the American political system gives disproportionate influence to people living in less density.
Yes, there are other countries with suburbs. In some of them, the suburbs are more dense and walkable than most American cities, which much better access to public transportation. In others, suburbs are the poorer and less desirable places to live. In fact, this is starting to happen in some places in the United States! It's not just the American 1950's pattern over and over again.
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.
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.
Perhaps it's better said as: "Tipping WAS about capitalism". The problem is that tipping amounts in the US have become standardized as part of social compulsion. It's increasingly rare, and I think increasingly considered rude, to undertip a server unless they are very unusually bad. And overtipping is likewise looked on as decadent, the kind of thing hip hop moguls do.
Even so, having lived in cultures (Italy, etc.) where tipping is frowned upon, I think it is true that tipping cultures have somewhat better service. But it's also a pretty small difference, and the annoyance of tipping is so incredibly high it is simply not a worthwhile institution. It's basically a mechanism to keep most servers in poverty. Plus we don't tip for food or decor. Why just service?
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.
good points: no excuse too small for a vodka party
bad points: no excuse too small for a vodka party
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.
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.
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?
I went to high school at a public school in Chicago, and was (am) a nerd, so I never even heard about such things. But my wife, who went to high school in the suburbs of Denver, went to a few such parties - sometimes, if the parents were cool, they'd supply the booze. America!
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.
I think that's because people eat fat stuff and soups with oil all the time (it stops alcohol from being absorbed quickly. It's important to eat the first fat meal before drinking), and they dance often (so the metabolism is faster).
EDIT: but yeah, in Russia they drink even more. Also the social protocols around drinking differs a little (tall glasses vs shot glasses for example).
It's something sometimes hard to explain to Americans, but in Poland, Russia, and most of Eastern Europe in general, vodka is a big deal. People don't care about drinking beer or wine (although they are very popular), but there is a certain culture and ruleset about drinking vodka.