A “Washout” of a Summer

I hear the notorious spam filter has gone haywire again, but some of you still manage to get your messages published. Thank you all for your patience and determination; your comments have now become twice as precious to me.

I have been keeping a record of all the questions you ask, so none of them will be left unanswered. Today I will be telling you about my UK experience, a few things that impressed me the most about the UK and in what ways Russia is similar to and different from the UK.

Misled by extremely nice and hot weather in England in April, I packed my suitcase tightly with all the summer clothes I had and headed southwest to the wonderful city of Bristol in early May 2007. I was to discover later that it had never been the summer’s plan to stay in the UK for the three month I had been going to spend there. Sad,.. but true. However, every cloud has a silver lining and now I feel absolutely fine when it’s miserable outside and I no longer need an umbrella for a drizzling type of rain (and all other types of rain in fact, excluding only total showers). You’ve guessed correctly, I had left my umbrella behind in my flat in Izhevsk.

Wildlife in Britain is amazing, amazing, amazing. That’s the first thing that springs to mind when I hear about the UK. In Russia you would have to try very hard to see in the wild something more exciting than a hedgehog. Even though I did see an owl (once), a fox (dead), a moose (big and scary) in Udmurtia, I think animals here, in Russia, are much more subtle and they hide from people deep in the forest. Just to name, in the UK I saw hairs, squirrels (in abundance), foxes, bats, reindeer, seals and rabbits. There was even a slightly embarrassing occasion when yours truly broke into a chase after a rabbit family when she spotted it in the front yard of a B&B in Fort William in Scotland.

In the UK everything is about the safety of British citizens and visitors to the country. In Russia a manhole might stay open for a week or two with no warning sign on it.

I also learnt that the famous British politeness is not at all exaggerated. The word “sorry” is probably the most often used word there. If in a shop somebody comes 20 cm close to you when passing you, they will say sorry. In Russia, if somebody pushes you in a shop, they won’t even notice it; and the thing is you learn not to notice it either. As a result, when I was back home in August I was overly polite to people around me and expected to be greeted by cashiers in shops, which they never did. It was a bit of a culture shock with the difference that I was in my mother country.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget to mention how I wasn’t able to speak proper English for the first couple of weeks - so extremely self-conscious I felt! As soon as I convinced myself that I was not the only foreigner in the country and that my English was much better than that of some people actually living in the UK, I started to relax and my English kind of did the same :) On my plane back to Moscow I found with a start that to say something in Russian I needed to translate it from English first. My Russian remained very strange for a few days after I had flown from Heathrow.

There were quite a few amusing episodes too. One of them included me riding two full rounds in a bus around Bristol in an attempt to get to Bristol Temple Meads train station. It was all going really well until I realized that I was coming back to where I got on the bus. It wouldn’t have happened if the stops had been announced by the driver, as they do it here. Because how was I to know that that beautiful red-brick building with pretty hanging baskets on it the bus had just passed was the train station?

So where in the UK did I go? Bristol, Cornwall, London, Scotland. This photo was taken on the Hebridean Isle of North Uist of the western group of Scottish islands, if I am not confusing anything.

I have realized that I can’t think of anything Russia has in common with the UK. Can you? While I was there the only thing that reminded me of my country was a night club in Bristol that was called “Mumu’s”. Mumu was the name of the deaf-and-mute peasant Gerasim’s dog in the book of the same name by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The placard on the night club said that the entry cost three rubles and beer – two pounds.

More about Izhevsk and Udmurtia next blog.

I hope you all have a good week,

With best wishes,

Anastasia

P.S. One of the men in the photo below is my fiancé, guess which one.

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