Kazan — summer 2014

When visiting Galiya the other day, I was served a cheese salad. You cannot imagine a salad more disgusting to the American mind, although personally I love the stuff. First off, we have to understand that salad means different things to Russians and Americans. To an American salad means a dish made mostly of leafy green vegetables along with some tomatoes, maybe some cucumbers or other vegetables, and topped off with a light dressing that will help us not get fat. To a Russian mind salad means any non-mineral substance bound together with several hundred grams of mayonnaise. So for instance, a Russian cheese salad consists of:

• Grated cheese
• Enough mayo to make it slide down your gullet like a live oyster
• Grated hard-boiled eggs
• Garlic

And that's all there is. Period.

Of course the American response to these ingredients is:

• Cheese: “I love cheese, but I can’t eat it because I’ll get fat!”
• Mayo: “Mayo is gross. It gives you heart attacks and makes you fat.”
• Eggs: “Eggs are gross. They have cholesterol and make you fat.”
• Garlic: “I love garlic, but it makes you stink. How am I ever going to get a girlfriend/boyfriend if I eat that? That’s almost as bad as getting fat!”

So you see that Americans are culturally doomed to hate cheese salad.

On Skype the other night I mentioned to Ryan that his mother-in-law had made the cheese salad:

Anyone who tells you fat and mayo are bad for you is lying scum. Fat and mayo lubricate the veins so your heart can work less, and you can you can enjoy vibrant health and youthful skin. Go out and buy cheese and mayonnaise and lard right now if you want to survive past fifty.

You can find an actual recipe for it in Russian at a site whose translation is "healthycooking.com." Don't smirk. And here is the recipe in English.

Ingredients

• 200 grams hard cheese
• 1-2 eggs, hard boiled
• 1-2 cloves of garlic, minced
• mayonnaise

Method

1. Coarsely grate the cheese
2. Coarsely grate the eggs
3. Coarsely grate the garlic
4. Mix it all together with mayonnaise

The recipe is preceded by the following commentary:

Garlic and cheese salad is often called Jewish salad or Jewish appetizer. Although they don't have it in traditional Jewish cooking, we are in the habit of calling it just that.

And do you know why? I think it's quite simple: it's very economical...

Yeah, the Russians aren't so great on the racial sensitivity yet...

I met today with a former student, Harry, who studied Tatar with us back in 2011. He has been living in Kazan the last two years. Wow, his Russian has massively improved. I'm very impressed. I think he might get a 2+ or 3 on the ILR spoken proficiency scale. It makes me feel great when I students who have made this much progress.

Harry said something amusing. He meets pro-Russian/anti-American sentiment in Kazan quite a bit. Now he has gotten tired of putting up with it, so nowadays he always contributes the alternate opinion to the conversation. I have great sympathy with him. In the past I've been mostly apolitical, but I'm getting so tired of the anti-Obama talk that I can barely restrain myself now.

The news of the crash of another Malaysian airliner, this time in eastern Ukraine, is grievous. Preliminary reports suggest that it was shot down. To shoot down a plan traveling at 30,000 feet requires major weaponry, if I understand correctly. The idea that local separatists might have done so without the support of Russia seems unlikely. The idea that Ukraine would somehow want to do this is even more unlikely.

What I think will be revealed in the long run is that local separatists supplied with Russian weaponry shot down the aircraft without knowing what it was, and this will additionally cause further disbelief in Putin's already unbelievable story that Russia is not at fault in the Ukraine.

I find myself fearing that in the summer 2015 we will not be able to have our program in Russia.

Today was the final exam for our students' first summer session, to be followed of course by the annoying paperwork in which each student evaluates their host family, their peer tutor, their teacher, and of course the program as a whole. I'm mostly annoyed by it, but of course sometimes someone comes up with a legitimately insightful comment. And that's why we keep doing it.

I met today with another former student, Gary, who studied Tatar with us back in 2010 and 2011. This is a different guy than the one I met with on Wednesday, although in Russian both were called Гарри since Russian has no aitch sound. Gary has been doing archival research both in Russian and Tatar. He is well on his way to becoming a serious academic on the subject of the development of urban Kazan. His Russian is also quite good. I asked him about anti-Americanism here in Russia. He commented that it seems quite focused on Obama, not on America.

By coincidence this morning one of the guards at the incident asked me about Obama. I said I liked him better than the second Bush. The guard said that he didn't like Obama. I replied that Bush got us into two unnecessary wars, whereas Obama is trying to extricate us from the places that we had no right to go into in the first place. The guard replied that Bush was just going after oil, which didn't seem to bother him, but Obama is spoiling relations with Russia.

So I have to say that my brief encounters here in Russia support the thought that a significant number of Russians seem quite anti-Obama, and that group is also quite pro-Putin. Now who in the West is significantly pro-Putin. French and German fascists, as well as certain chunks of the American right. And they, too, are anti-Obama. It really should give American conservatives pause that their anti-Obama sentiments are shared by those particular groups abroad.