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May 25, 2005
I'm in russophile heaven
I went to Russian Bookstore No. 21 on Fifth Avenue today. I am so happy that this exists! (I'm also excited that the subway ticket machines come with a Russian interface, is this ridiculously dorky of me?) I was looking through the Erofeevs and the Pelevins when the proprietress asked me some question in Russian and I spun around, startled. "What?" I spat, not used to being spoken to in Russian - though I suppose the lady had assumed quite reasonably that it was safe to do so, what with my quite happily browsing the shelves of a Russian-language establishment.
"When one is spoken to in Russian, one ought to reply in Russian," the male store attendant chipped in.
"Not in America," I said.
For the fifteenth or sixteenth time in the last few days, a remark which had sounded coy and charming in my head fell utterly flat. My well-intentioned dryness is winning me few adherents in the US of A.
I shut up and paid $7 for Erofeev's Entsiklopediya Russkoj Dushi. To show that there were no hard feelings, the nice lady gave me a little magazine to take home. I went off for a Thai lunch with a boy-into-whose-eyes-I-have-recently-stopped-being-able-to-look, a meal consisting primarily of granulated sugar.
Posted by michele at May 25, 2005 3:03 PM