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.
> 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.
As a Russian American, Ive noticed a definite curiosity remnant from the cold war regarding how the two countries live. The difference is that Western culture is all over russia (from copying tv shows like American Idol to Fabrika Zvezd), movies in theatres, etc whereas in the US, it's the older generation that harbors a curiosity about Russian people.
My father, a doctor who emigrated at 35, started practicing in a small town in the midwest about 20 years ago. He had patients who wouldnt see him as soon as they learned he was Russian...and he had patients that displayed a real curiosity over our food, language etc. I'd say that Russians possess a certain disdain for Americans...they would love to enjoy a similar quality of life, but they find the culture too simple/vapid/devoid of meaning. Russians will say they would NEVER move to america, but many of them would in a heartbeat
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).
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.
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."
Eh, that sounds like good advice to me. I shower whenever I get smelly, which sometimes can be every two days if I haven't been very physically active. In the US/UK, people usually take a morning shower, while I prefer mine in the evening.
Just because a culture is different doesn't mean it makes no sense.
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.
Alternate hypothesis: a high concentration of Americans, who are fascinated with anything to do with themselves. That's what I found interesting about it.
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.
I would love to read the inverse of this book: explaining Russian minutia to Americans like myself. But I agree, if this exists in English translation it might be worth reading for this purpose just by contrast.
Or educated, curious Americans that are merely curious how others portray us.
Even with the short article, I'd never even second guessed interviewing a babysitter would be even remotely strange to other cultures. To be fair, I no longer do so -- my friends' kids are finally old enough to watch mine. Hey, I pay decently -- and it gives my friends a night kids-free, too. Win-win-win!
HN has a lot of international members from all over the world. I can confirm this using Google Analytics from the few times my articles made it to the front page and I got hit with thousands and thousands of visitors. They're from all over the place, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America.
The USA is still the biggest chunk of my traffic. When my last article got on HN's front page, I got hit with 29,000 unique visitors in 24 hours. 14,000 of them where from the USA, the rest are from all over the world.
There are many who were either born in or immigrated to a large US city who might have never experienced suburban life. One doesn't have to be Russian to be shocked by differences in US suburban/city life.
(американец -- женат на украинке, учится говорить по-русский)
Timezone. European mornings tend to see more Eurocentric posts making HN homepage; as the day progresses, you can really see a shift, ending with more "valleyism" overnight. I don't really see many "australasian" posts though.
I think that just comes down to numbers. There are only about 40 million people in Australasia compared to 740 million people in Europe and 312 million in USA.
By saying "australasia" I'd also include Japan (130mn), South Korea (50mn) and India (1.3bn) -- not China, which is notoriously insular on most levels. They sum up to a sizeable contingent that doesn't seem to be represented in HN posts (note: i'm not saying they should, this is not about political correctness).
I noticed the occasional post about Indian matters, but it looks like the other Asian communities are just not interested in HN at the moment.
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.
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.
Homeless people may have jobs. But there's insufficient numbers of legal, decent jobs (which would keep them from being homeless); and they may be affected by other issues which keep them from actually obtaining/keeping a job. Whatever outward persona you may see in a brief moment of observation, may not be much indication of the person within.
Also, there's different beggar culture. In some countries, beggars may rely on eliciting sympathy for their miserable state. Whereas the US may have such an unsympathetic culture that this may repel the audience.
> In Russia, it's the police who ask you for an id all the time
Police rarely ask anyone with slavic appearance for an id. That mostly happens to people who look like gypsies or those from Caucasus (for some reason "caucasian" means "generic white race" in English and "people of the Caucasus" in Russian).
The idea of the "Caucasian race" comes from a German philosopher in the 18th century. It has to do with him considering the Georgian people (from the Caucasus) to be the most glorious looking white people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race#Origin_of_the_co...
Their showers frustrate me to no end. It's really hard to reach everywhere with them, I wonder why handheld ones haven't caught on.
Tipping is another major pain point for me. I never know when to tip (Do you tip cab drivers? If so, why? Their whole job is to take you to the place you asked for, that's why you pay them). This leads to me overspending a lot, since I didn't factor a 20% increase on the order prices (which usually are pre-tax anyway, so the increase comes to 30-40%).
Frustrating. In Greece, we only tip waiters and delivery people, and that's 1, 2, or maybe 3 euros if you're very generous. On orders of more than 100-150 euros, you might tip 5. It's not a percentage because the waiter didn't do proportionally more work in bringing me a 100 euro steak than in bringing me a 10 euro side.
I'm guessing you mean handheld showers like the ones on a bracket on the wall, and then you can remove them. I think it's mostly in newer construction. I've seen a few hotels with them. It's really not a big deal for the affixed one, so long as the shower head is above your head. In my current apartment, the shower head is about where my face is, so you have to squat down under the shower to wash your hair. I'm average height too, not NBA player height.
I agree tipping is a strange practice. If you tip too little you're stingy, if you tip nothing you're making a point. I've stopped tipping for some things that are just kind of ridiculous (I went and picked up a call ahead order the other day, no I'm not tipping you). The percentage makes sense in this context: In a nicer restaurant, you expect better service as a baseline. So at the $100 steak restaurant, the waiter is pulling your chair out for you, etc. But at the $10 steak place, it's not quite the same level of service. You're tipping off the total experience rather than the individual dishes if that makes sense.
I'm not sure. I know the wages are compensated like this: if your server wage + tips doesn't equal the standard minimum wage, then the employer has to make up the difference to get you to minimum wage.
Since the tips are higher in nicer restaurants, you'd net much more at the same server wage + tips than at a chain restaurant. I'm not sure they pay more, or if the promise of more tips is sufficient. There's probably is an increase as you go from $10 pp to $100pp meals, but I don't know if at the top end you're making the normal minimum wage yet.
For chefs, almost certainly. For waiters (i.e. the ones relying on tips), well, not so much. The expectation appears to be that nicer restaurants will be frequented by relatively wealthy patrons who are perhaps more willing to tip gratuitously for exceptional service. This keeps waiters on their best behavior without having to pay them a higher wage up-front.
Source: friend who works as a waiter at the most decadent restaurant in town.
Good head chefs are scarce. In a high-class restaurant, their pay should be comfortable with or without tips. The rest of the kitchen staff might rely on tips (though I'm not sure if it's legal to pay them less than minimum wage like waiters), but relative to the waiter they each have little interaction with the customer and hence comparatively little ability to influence the tip.
> (Do you tip cab drivers? If so, why? Their whole job is to take you to the place you asked for, that's why you pay them).
I tend to tip cab drivers here in NYC very high, anywhere from 25% to 50% depending on the fare. (I tend to tip high generally simply to avoid the embarrassment and accidental cruelty of tipping low)
NYC has crufty licensing rules for taxis, and the actual driver may be leasing the right to drive (the medallion) from a fleet owner or some corporate entity, which cuts into their profits a lot. Among my peers there seems to be a bit of disdain for cab drivers generally. A lot of people seem indignant about being able to pay with a credit card which results in less profit for the driver. I've seen people who are rude to drivers just as a matter of course.
So I tip high, and I pay in cash. I don't claim to be making the most perfectly rational economic decision here, but I hope that by doing so, I show a little appreciation and gratitude to someone who is performing a service for me.
It might be mostly cultural. I show appreciation and gratitude by using the service, reasoning that all the compensation necessary is included in the price. I don't see the US way as paying extra, it's more like "pay what you want in a specific range", whereas the European way is more "this is the price we've all decided is mutually fair".
The former way would be more efficient, if it weren't for the social stigma of underpaying. I'd love to overpay for good service and underpay for bad service, but nobody underpays, in practice. Still, I guess overpaying for good service is a good way.
The practice of tipping or not and how much is in a large part cultural, of course. I was just answering your question regarding the case of taxis specifically, since (in NYC, at least) I think the circumstances of "taxi economics" put most drivers at a disadvantage, and I try to acknowledge that by tipping.
As an Aussie who has to occasionally suffer without mixer taps, I must ask:
What do you do when it's cold and you want to wash your hands with warm water? Your choice is freezing-cold from one tap, or boiling hot from the other. Why separate them?
> 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.
This is actually a theft deterrent. Bus drivers can't get at the money to give change, so they can't be held up either.
> Probably that's why people look at you very suspiciously when you approach them on the street to ask for a direction.
That's part of it, but Americans are deeply distrustful of strangers. It probably plays along the same lines as our finding suburbs safer than inner cities.
> Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.
It's strictly a cultural thing. I'm given to understand that in Hawai'i tipping used to be considered insulting, and perhaps that's still the case in places (I've never been). Also, in different parts of the country tips are compulsory for different occupations. In the Southwest, restaurant service is about the only thing you tip for. In New England it's a different story.
Urban Americans are the most distrustful of strangers though. Also, (white) Americans moved to suburbs because of a combination of cheap availability of gasoline and racism ("white flight").
White Flight is what we were taught in school but really. White folks didn't move out of the city to get away from blacks, we moved out to get away from the dirty treeless city, shitty schools, lack of land, and overcrowding.
Also, suburban sprawl has happened everywhere from Africa, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico. Even black folk don't want to live in the city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight
An entire generation grow up in isolated lifeless suburbs where every facet of its life had to be planned and scheduled around traffic. Of course young people are sick of the suburbs and moving back into the city, the suburbs are boring as hell.
Even India, Australia, China, and other countries experience suburban sprawl. Oh did they move away from black folks too? Humans, like many other animals, like having territory, land, peace, and quiet. So people work in the city but live tucked away in the county. And that the fact that in St. Louis, we have Belfontaine (the black county which has nicer areas than many of the white counties) just proves that everyone likes living in peace & quiet.
There are advantages and disadvantages to urban and suburban life, and different people prefer different things. There isn't some universal human urge to live in suburbs. The cheap availability of automobile transport simply adjusts the cost benefit by reducing costs, as does racism.
I suppose another factor is that Americans don't really do cities right, but this is largely an effect of the other two factors, plus the awkward way the American political system gives disproportionate influence to people living in less density.
Yes, there are other countries with suburbs. In some of them, the suburbs are more dense and walkable than most American cities, which much better access to public transportation. In others, suburbs are the poorer and less desirable places to live. In fact, this is starting to happen in some places in the United States! It's not just the American 1950's pattern over and over again.
* Tipping baseline is very high. Although I'm a capitalist, I consider this practice to have nothing to do with capitalism.*
Tipping IS about capitalism. It provides the incentive for the server to do their job well, providing the best service possible to the customer. Especially in situations where the server can materially affect the quality: you might get a beer glass full of foam, or a mixed drink very thin on the alcohol, or a cabbie who takes the wrong route and gets lost, or a bellhop who drops your bag. Tipping provides direct connection between these and the compensation earned by the server, incenting the servers to deliver well.
There are flaws with the above argument. If there's sufficient supervision by the employer as to quality of service (think flight attendants, or fast food where the manager is always nearby), tipping isn't necessary. And the system doesn't work if people tip anyway on bad service, out of habit or perceived social compulsion. But by and large the tipping culture induces good quality of service.
Perhaps it's better said as: "Tipping WAS about capitalism". The problem is that tipping amounts in the US have become standardized as part of social compulsion. It's increasingly rare, and I think increasingly considered rude, to undertip a server unless they are very unusually bad. And overtipping is likewise looked on as decadent, the kind of thing hip hop moguls do.
Even so, having lived in cultures (Italy, etc.) where tipping is frowned upon, I think it is true that tipping cultures have somewhat better service. But it's also a pretty small difference, and the annoyance of tipping is so incredibly high it is simply not a worthwhile institution. It's basically a mechanism to keep most servers in poverty. Plus we don't tip for food or decor. Why just service?
In Boston, if you put too much money into the bus farebox, you get back a coupon that you can use to pay for another bus. The transit authority also sells one-day and one-week passes for the convenience of tourists. I don’t know how other cities do it. (Mass transit is good in Boston, superb in NYC, and mediocre-to-nonexistent everywhere else.)
I think attitudes to being approached by strangers on the street vary by region. People in California and the South are chattier than people here in the frozen Northeast.
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.
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.
That is actually a law mandated by the state. Street-bears population must be kept at a sufficient level to allow for the traditional morning bear-breakfast: In order for a Russian wife to prove to her husband that she's ready to have children, she has to wake up before sunrise, kill a bear with her bare hands and bring it home for breakfast.
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.
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.
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.
Very few people get really drunk on weddings, even thought you can easily drink over half a litre of wódka throught the whole night.
I think that's because people eat fat stuff and soups with oil all the time (it stops alcohol from being absorbed quickly. It's important to eat the first fat meal before drinking), and they dance often (so the metabolism is faster).
EDIT: but yeah, in Russia they drink even more. Also the social protocols around drinking differs a little (tall glasses vs shot glasses for example).
> 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.
Gatherings — yes. Business — not necessarily. At least, anecdotal evidence of my various relatives doing small to medium scale business doesn't seem to confirm that.
> 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.
Unfortunately, younger kids mostly act like their older role models with regard to smoking and drinking. I always feel so lonely in a drunken company :(
___
This raises a question: how realistic are high school parties in US as depicted in various movies? As in: gathering lots of people in someone's house and bringing lots of booze via fake ids?
> This raises a question: how realistic are high school parties in US as depicted in various movies? As in: gathering lots of people in someone's house and bringing lots of booze via fake ids?
I went to high school at a public school in Chicago, and was (am) a nerd, so I never even heard about such things. But my wife, who went to high school in the suburbs of Denver, went to a few such parties - sometimes, if the parents were cool, they'd supply the booze. America!
I don't think there is any absence of it so much as a difference in degree when compared with certain other cultures. That's the thing with the melting pot: You can find a little of everything, including people who don't drink.
I think the prevalence of workaholics may have something to do with it too. Drinking on the job is very seriously looked down upon here, but if you can't drink while you're working and you're always working then you're never drinking.
I think this has changed over time, from the three-martini lunch of Mad Men in the 1950s, to (say) two-martinis in the 1970s to perhaps one-martini in the late 1990s. I remember a working for a software company years ago where the "old guy" on that particular group would have two beers when we went out to lunch mid-week. The young guys chose caffeine.
One of the things I like about France (as an Englishman living here) is that it's still normal for people to have a glass or two of wine at lunch. I think it's remained in the culture because most businesses give their staff two hours for lunch and subsidised meal tickets they can use at any participating restaurant (which is pretty much all of them). Who wouldn't have a glass or two in that setup? :)
Drinking hard alcohol? Really? I'd say drinking beer drops off more after college than hard liquor. I am anecdotal evidence of course, but these days I drink more scotch and less beer.
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).
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.