I didn’t actually do much at the turbaza. My attempt to learn the favorite Russian pastime of mushroom picking was thwarted by the lack of mushrooms; my Russian friends and I only managed to find a small number of the poisonous kind. However, I gained a healthy respect for the rural skills Muscovites still retain. One of my friends, an elegant language student, seemed to leap at the opportunity to catch newts in her hand and thought nothing of poking around anthills. Both of my friends could easily identify at least 15 varieties of mushrooms though they had lived their whole lives in the city.
The clientele at the turbaza were mainly manual laborers and were staying at the turbaza to fish. The place was full of nostalgia. The men wore the large Soviet plastic frame glasses and the women donned shapeless flower print dresses no longer in vogue in Moscow. The summer-camp atmosphere made me appreciate the best in the socialist ideology. The turbaza is simple, pleasurable relaxation that everyone, no matter their wealth, can enjoy.
Almost everyone seemed to know each other, and the atmosphere was pleasant. Though the beds were olds and soft, the cabins were clean and rustically cozy and pleasant to look at like unlike the pre-fab housing in Moscow. The food was also simple Russian fare. Everyone ate together in a camp-style dining hall, and the lights were turned out after half and hour, so there was now lingering.
This type of vacation as been replaced for the capitalist all-inclusive Turkish holiday. 500 dollars for a week at a five star hotel just isn’t the same, and I hope that at least a few these turbaza remain open. If they could just improve the toilets at the turbaze a little bit, I think they could eventually thrive.
I am happy I put reading Burgess off because, having learned some Russian, it was with a strange sense of displacement that I encountered Burgess's slang. Some of the words like korova (cow) immediately popped out at me as being Russian while others, because of Burgess's strange transliteration and my own lack of knowledge seemed nonsensical at first. Yet, on a deeper level, the word play was excellent or should I say horrorshow.
The strangest sense of displacenment came today when I was having a cup of tea with my friend in a trendy cafe with lots of books on shelves (you know the type). I picked up a copy of the Russian translation of Clockwork, whose Russian title doesn't fully translate the Cockney slang of the title and sounds rather like Factory Orange, or to put it another way an orange from a factory.
"How might one deal with the problem of translating Burgess's slang of "Slavic orgin" back into Russian?" I asked myself. As I started reading the Russian copy, I realized to my amazement that the words had been left in their English language original so that after a series of Cyrillic words you would get Burgess's slang written with Latin characters. So you would get a sentence like "у него выло nozh." Crazy!
In my pursuit to learn Russian, the taciturn nature of Russian drivers has always been a bit off-putting. Recently, however a friend of mine set me right. Russians, he said, are merely being polite and are maintaining your right to privacy. It is uneducated for a Russian to be nosy about where you are from and where you are going.
This right to personal privacy is one that I think is laudable will perhaps aid Russia in its pursuit of a democratic society (though on the other hand it could just reinforce opaque government), so now don't mind whizzing around Moscow in silece. Nevertheless, I also like chilling with the Caucausians sometimes.