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August 10, 2005
knock-offs, phone annoyances, the countryside
I won't apologize once again for taking so long to get my photos up, even though yet another apology is clearly in order. Well, I guess I just apologized again.
I've just returned to Moscow after my long absence and getting ready to leave "for good" this time. Well, it might not really be "for good" in that I'm sure life will bring me back to Moscow at some point, but this time I have no specific plans to return.
While I work on those Europe photos and stories, two stories about various experiences in Russia that I haven't had a chance to tell about.
Before going to Europe, Nadya and I bought new sunglasses. I had a really awful plastic pair that always made me look silly, so it was time to get some real ones. Near the metro station, where people sell all sorts of stuff on the street, was a little stand with lots of pairs of sunglasses, each for 100 rubles (about $3). Once you started looking at them, you noticed that they had expensive Western brand names on them. Nadya asked why they're so cheap, and the woman explained that they're knock-offs. "But they're high-quality knock-offs," she explained. "They were manufactured in Moscow." Nadya answers, "But how come they're so cheap, even for knock-offs?" The woman explained, "Well, I have a friend who works for the government department that seizes counterfeit goods, so she can get them to me for a good price." So we each took a pair, plus a little carrying case for Nadya's for ¢50.
I also got a snazzy new pair of shoes, but all attempts to find a pair of pants resulted in failure.
I took an overnight train back to Moscow last night but kept getting woken up by a cellphone in our coupé that kept beeping at random times. I decided it belonged to the chatty slightly older woman on the bunk across from me, but didn't wake her up because (a) I'm a little shy, especially in Russian, (b) I couldn't think of how to say "to beep," and (c) I couldn't figure out how to address her. There's this problem in contemporary Russian where there's no good generic term for addressing an unknown person. "Sir" and "ma'am" disappeared in the early Soviet period as bourgeouisisms, and "comrade" is now a sovietism reserved for ironic usage. You could say "citizen", but it also sounds rather Soviet. It's quite normal to address a stranger by who they are: "girl", "grandma" (even if you don't know whether she had kids), "young man". But there's a total lack of words for a middle-aged man or woman.
In the morning it turned out that she thought it was someone else's phone but it turned out to be hers. We never did figure out what was wrong with it -- she was receiving text messages without any content. Seemed like a sort of spam since the senders had names that sounded like companies. One of our other cabin-mates said, "It's a sort of business they have," to which she responded, "What a business!"
Now a few pictures of my second trip to the countryside north of Petersburg. When we took Sarah she wanted to see farm animals but we saw almost none; this time, however, Nadya and I found an assortment:
Sorry for the glare on the above photo. I took it through the window of Nadya's family's summer apartment.
With Nadya by a fairly typical Russian forest:
Posted by kshawkin at August 10, 2005 03:00 PM
Comments
My knock-off sunglasses shattered on a stone when I dropped them, so they clearly aren't made of shatterproof plastic or glass as sunglasses should be. So don't buy knockoffs on the street since you could suffer eye trauma if your sunglasses get struck by something hard and sharp.
Posted by: Kevin at September 14, 2005 11:40 AM