Russian Frogger

Some days you just can't win. In other words, public transportation is a punk. Since Ryazan is not a large enough city to employ a metro system, it's citizens rely heavily on a routed taxicab system. These sketchy child abducting vans are called marshrutki and I hate them. To me they are one of the most bizarre things and I don't understand how or why they seem to work. Clearly.

Today, a day just like any other, involved me waking up, eating a breakfast of bony fish and mashed potatoes, being questioned about American contraceptive use and the names of different types of beans (real conversations, guys, really), and hopping on a marshrutka to meet my boss in our fifth attempt to register our visas. I knew this marshrutka ride was too good to be true: for once I had exact change, I got first choice of seating, and instead of blasting sappy Russian soft rock which literally makes my brain feel like it's melting, the driver chose a news station, which somehow got away with calling Putin an "enemy of the people" and a tyrant. It seemed like the day was off to a good start.

Then it came time to call out my stop. Though these taxicabs are technically routed, they only stop when people are outside very clearly waiting for it, or someone inside calls out a varied form of "остановите на следующей остановке, пожалуйста" or, logically "please stop at the next stop." Most people just shorten it to a calm "на следующей" ("at the next") and hop on off. This has always been the biggest stress of my daily commute since pronouncing words correctly and trying not to stick out as a foreigner are definitely what I consider my greatest demons when in Russia. 

So today, since we were meeting to do visa work, I had to get off at the stop, one past the usual place, at Lenin's Square. This is a popular meeting place so I was a bit surprised when no one immediately yelled out the magic words. Still with enough time, however, I mumbled them out only for the lady next to me to say "He definitely didn't hear you (ya dumbass)." Granted, she was polite about it, and I'm just embellishing it to show what it felt like with the addition of Russian's confusing patterns of intonation, which, to an American with an intermediate-high level of Russian understanding, can turn a sweet phrase into something evil if you're already panicking enough. 

So I shouted it out a second time, just to make sure everyone on the dang thing new I was a foreigner, and the driver asks "at ploshad' lenina?" "DA POJALISTA" but it was too late. Russian traffic, as you may be aware, is terrible. As a combination of the most poorly maintained streets and seemingly untrained drivers, this should come as no surprise. Thus, the driver had already moved into the middle lane and had no ability to get me to the stop. Nevertheless, he shouted something angrily at me, slammed on the brakes, and dumped me out into the middle of the road, which I barely froggered myself out of in avoidance of sudden death. This wasn't even the worst part for me though. If living in Moscow last summer taught me anything, it was how to sprint across 9+ lanes of Russian traffic unscarred. For me, a very serious language learner who admittedly tends to take her failures very hard, the worst part was the woman's response to the rude bus driver: "That's just how they speak." THEY. Ugh. 

This one broke down only 10km from our destination

Let me just try to explain why this irked me so much. In Russia, Americans are seen as loud and insincere (you know, because we smile and laugh all the time). Russians, on the other hand, never make a sound. Yeah, ok. This isn't actually true, but I will say their voices don't seem to carry as much. At least on the metro last year I often noticed that almost everyone would be having conversation, yet I couldn't hear a word that was said. Maybe this has something to do with the whole past gulag torture thing for those who dared raise their voices loud enough, I don't know, but the same thing tends to happen on marshrutki. I can barely hear people call out their stops, yet there's never been a problem like today. So why, when I speak at a volume a little louder than the average Russian, is it so impossible to understand and stop the bus?!  Xenophobia? Deafness? I don't know.

And since i cant explain it I guess I'll just add it to my list of confusing things. Like why we don't have bacon flavored Pringles in America, why toilet paper here is so stretchy, or why, when getting into a taxi our boss commented, "ah, a female driver. you're lucky." I just don't get it.