{"id":1473,"date":"2016-10-06T10:26:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T14:26:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/?p=1473"},"modified":"2016-10-11T10:08:22","modified_gmt":"2016-10-11T14:08:22","slug":"life-in-moscow-fiona-burke-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/2016\/10\/06\/life-in-moscow-fiona-burke-18\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in Moscow: Fiona Burke \u201818"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fiona Burke, a double major in Russian and Philosophy, reflects after a month in Moscow.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Moscow metro is a great place to people watch. Through my incessant staring at people, I can confirm: Russians don\u2019t smile – on the metro, on the street, in stores. I\u2019ve been told that if you smile at strangers, they\u2019ll think you\u2019re either stupid or are maybe a friend whose face they\u2019ve forgotten, or else just immediately recognize you as a foreigner. However, this isn\u2019t because they’re cold. It\u2019s because smiling or asking someone how they are aren\u2019t just casual formalities as they are in America; they really mean something. When you ask a Russian how they are, they assume you really want to know the real answer, so you may get a long-winded reply about the repairs going on at their dacha, etc. If you speak even incredibly basic Russian you can tell that they\u2019re very warm people, and it\u2019s maybe because of this and their strong social networks and instinct to look out for one another that through all of their historical struggles they\u2019ve stuck together and made it through. You can see this in small ways everyday.<\/p>\n

The other day I got a blister in some new shoes and was limping pathetically with my foot halfway out of my shoe, when a babushka (grandma) saw me struggling on the metro and offered me a band-aid. This past weekend I lost my phone in St. Petersburg and a stranger has gone to incredible lengths to hunt me down and get it back to me. One student from the university here heard me speaking English at a caf\u00e9 and came up, introduced herself, and offered to help me practice Russian. And everyday in restaurants and stores, when I have to struggle my way through even basic transactions, almost everyone I encounter immediately realizes I\u2019m a foreigner and speaks slowly to help me understand and pulls out one of their lovely, genuine Russian smiles to show that they appreciate my effort in spite of me butchering their language.
\n\"Fiona<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fiona Burke, a double major in Russian and Philosophy, reflects after a month in Moscow. The Moscow metro is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3148,"featured_media":1488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85041],"tags":[7044,115597,22768],"class_list":["post-1473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abroad-experiences","tag-abroad","tag-burke","tag-russia","first-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/russian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}