

Book Translates American Minutiae for Russians - diego_moita
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/world/europe/book-gives-russians-close-up-of-american-minutiae.html
Coming from a Latino culture it is funny to see that Russians look a lot like Latinos.
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sologoub
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.

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gruseom
Is your user name related to the author of _The Petty Demon_?

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

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huhtenberg
> _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.

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detst
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).

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huhtenberg
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.

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gadders
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."

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theorique
_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?

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rmah
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.

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theorique
In some places (e.g. Central America) they do use cold water to shower. Might
be hard in cold climates though.

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vlokshin
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.

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bcbrown
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
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.

~~~
chrisduesing
I started looking for the same thing myself, so far I have only found an
unavailable Russian language version on Amazon.

[http://www.amazon.com/Amerika-Zhivut-zhe-
liudi/dp/5699558330...](http://www.amazon.com/Amerika-Zhivut-zhe-
liudi/dp/5699558330/)

Would absolutely love an English translation if anyone finds one.

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patrickgzill
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
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.

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gadders
Come to the UK! We have kettles!

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

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redtomorrow
Huh? I'm in the UK and every tap in my house (with the exception of the bath)
is a mixer. Is this unusual?

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robgough
Is your house relatively new? I think the use of mixer taps is on the rise in
the UK.

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JeremyMorgan
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.

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snogglethorpe
Russian culture:

good points: no excuse too small for a vodka party

bad points: no excuse too small for a vodka party

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

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cafard
They walk in the streets now and then within 30 miles of Washington, DC. But
garbage cans are easier to chase down than even fairly sedentary & nutritious
pedestrians, so there's not much danger.

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

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rdtsc
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.

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bambax
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.

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zalew
A traditional picture of a Polish wedding is a huge village party lasting for
two days with huge families, everybody is totally hammered, there's the creepy
drunk uncle, and for sure there must be at least one fight after which nobody
remembers what was it about. Nowadays, especially in big cities, it has
somehow faded away. Probably because weddings are so expensive and people came
to their senses as they have their contemporary problems, also it's not viewed
as cool to trash a wedding, so maybe people tend to control themselves more on
such occasions. People get really hammered on casual home parties among
friends and clubbing in town, not on weddings.

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.

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

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cema
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).

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

