Kazan — summer 2010

Before I say anything else, just remember I'm a product of my times. The first time I was in Russia was 1986, it was the tail end of the Evil Empire. I spent two months in Russia, and so it is that Russia that seems like the real Russia to me, and the contrasts I mentally make are usually to that time period. Even though I've been to Russia six times since then (this is the seventh time), I'm continuously flabbergasted by things that are in contrast to what it was like back then, not to what is the more recent reality of Russian life. The last time I was here was 1997, so sometimes I'll contrast with that.

So my first impressions:

• 1997: no one had cell phones. Now: everybody has cell phones, and everyone under 30 texts like crazy.
• I'm in an apartment in downtown Kazan. By myself. That's crazy luxurious. My normally slovenly housekeeping won't work here. I'll have to be a clean-nik.
• Like many Russian apartments, this one has has wooden parquet floors. I have zero excuse for not practicing yoga here.
• Some Tatar loan words into Russian look very Russian indeed. For instance paramach, which is like a meat-filled doughnut, gets taken into Russian as перемяч, which looks completely Russian in terms of stem and prefix. I felt like an idiot yesterday when at the little fast-food kiosk I had no idea what it was. Now that I know it is a Tatar borrowing, I feel less idiotic. BTW, when Ivan Ruslanovich spotted one at the apartment, he called it a пирожок. Nice to see I don't have to be anal-retentive about that word choice. (Discussion of differences between беляши and перемячи)
• Beautifully white tennis shoes used to be a dead give away that you were a foreigner. Now youngsters wear 'em.
• Lots of colorful clothing, though more on women than men.
• Per IR most Tatars in Kazan speak Russian without an accent and with good grammar, unless they have just recently moved to the city from the countryside. Those newcomers are sometimes disparagingly called колхозники "collective farm workers," which is a Soviet era word.
• Apparently my choice of clothing has been sufficiently local. People keep walking up and asking me for directions.

Since I'm a foreigner, and since I haven't been here for so long, I'll doubtless be ignorant of all sorts of things. For instance:

• Yesterday while I shopping, I didn't know that you had to have the loose produce weighed before you took it to the register.
• The cashier didn't want to make change for a 1000 ruble bill, which is worth about $35. It was too large a sum. This will be problematic since the ATMs tend to give out thousand ruble notes.

One last rant. Since I bought a new laptop, I had to finally get Windows 7, which meant I had to get a copy of MS Office 2007 since my license for the old version is only good on one computer. I hate MS Office 2007. They call it the "Microsoft Office Fluent user interface" more like MS effluent, if you ask me. This new ribbon interface, which they style "tools that simplify" is frankly confusing. A nice clean menu system where everything is labelled sensibly would be much easier to use and much easier to figure out when you are trying to look for a function. This constant change of interface from version to version is no improvement. It's just confusing. It leaves me strongly tempted to just move to GoogleDocs.