July 04, 2005
Chew on This.
By Erin Marie Daly
I’ve always preferred my pillow firm, but I never thought I’d like it crispy. Russia, however, is full of unexpected things, and crispy pillows are perhaps my favorite. Like a good night’s sleep, they have the power to make entire days of frustration and agony – and the loneliness of being an outsider – dissolve.
Never have I felt more aware of my apparent New Yorker-ness than here. Other places have made me aware of my skin color or my possessions, but never of my personality. In other countries I’ve played the role of alien, because there is no way around the fact that I’m whiter and bigger than everyone else. I’ve accepted the stupidity that comes with not knowing the language – or knowing enough of the simple words to get a laugh and gain peripheral entry into the lives of people who look at me like I’m an aberration that has suddenly, inexplicably, appeared in front of them. Sometimes I wonder if I look at foreigners with the same vague puzzlement when I’m walking the streets of New York.
But in Russia, it’s possible for me to blend in as long as I don’t open my mouth – meaning that my personality, my way of doing things, sets me apart. When I open my mouth, I – laid-back girl from California, well-traveled and adept at being the resident alien – unwittingly become a New Yorker. And I thought living in Brooklyn made me mellow.
In some places, you don’t expect things to work. On a desert island, say, or in a place where things just don’t work the way we like them to work in America. Russia is an in-between place: there is the appearance of a working order, but some things work, some things work sometimes, and sometimes nothing works at all.
Take our shower faucet, for example. Sometimes, it works just fine. A few days ago, it simply sputtered in a sad way, as if it were trying to the best of its ability to squeeze out some water, but just couldn’t, poor thing. Last week, the hot water didn’t work, and it was numbing. Today, the cold water didn’t work, and it was scalding.
Then there are the menus, which typically include lengthy lists of dish after dish, even in small restaurants. But only certain dishes are available on certain days, and even then, only certain portions are available (you can order a whole chicken, sure, but not a half-chicken – and a homemade pizza with toppings is available, but you can’t have it plain) or actually now that you’re pressing the issue and annoying the waitress by butchering the Russian language, not at all.
Or try buying a ticket out of the country, as I attempted to do this afternoon. Five hours of negotiation and cross-negotiation and explanation and cross-explanation and translation after translation after translation, I understood: the travel agent could get me on just the flight I wanted. I breathed a sigh of exhausted relief as she printed out my ticket and swiped my credit card. It’d been a rough day of reporting and phone calls to nonexistent phone numbers and treks to places that someone said existed, but didn’t. I just wanted to relax.
Not so fast. There was a problem – a matter. The matter was that the travel agency was obligated to print certain fares on certain types of paper. The matter was that the agency didn’t happen to have the certain type of paper for the lower fare they had promised me. The matter was that the certain paper they needed was in Moscow. And the matter was that therefore, they would have to charge me the higher fare, because the matter was that they only had the certain type of paper on which they could issue the higher fare, and the entire conversation up until that point had been a farce.
Taking a deep, deep breath, I fought the American venom rising into my throat and, I was sure, reddening my eyes and causing smoke to spiral from my ears with a train-whistle hoot. I was one step away from lurching over the counter and grabbing the “wrong-paper” ticket from the agent’s manicured hands. One step away from launching into a tirade, and asking why for the love of all that is holy the agent would quote me a price that she was unable to offer, and while we’re on the subject, what the hell does paper have to do with anything? One step away from demanding a discount for wasting five hours of my day in this godforsaken travel agency that, quite frankly, smelled like sauerkraut and cigarette smoke.
But just before I took that step, I remembered I wasn’t in New York. And if I ever wanted to leave this country, I’d best shut up and pay up. I left the agency with a polite “spacibo” and a ticket to Sarajevo. My friend touched my arm and said, “it’s okay to scream now.” So I did. And that was that.
Thankfully, there are crispy pillows, and the best thing about them is that they are always available. Crispy pillows – small bran cereal squares filled with flavored cream – are cheap, safe, and conveniently packaged in a nice bag. They come in strawberry, cinnamon apple, and chocolate. This afternoon, I grabbed a bag of crispy pillows and sat on my balcony overlooking the trees, and reveled in my discovery of the one thing that ALWAYS works in Russia.