> One of her good friends was a girl her age from Siberia named Yulia. Yulia's mother was a very good looking woman, in contradiction of the popular image of Soviet women. There were a lot of them in West Rogers Park and they were all good looking.
The lack of culture will do that. The couch potato culture. When survival takes all day, when you have to walk to a dozen places to get supplies (or just to check whether they are available), do a bunch of stuff yourself because there's no paid service to do that for you, or if there is you have to wait for weeks or just don't have the money - you live an active life and don't have the time to gain the second chin or equatorial extension of self.
> You wondered about the process whereby she was granted her exit papers. No father was ever mentioned. Anyway, she liked to go on and on about the paradise of Siberia. One of her pet peeves was how lousy American fruit was compared to the fruit in Siberia. The apricots were this big, she said, holding her hands as though holding a baseball. I asked was this before or after Chernobyl?
One of our russian language lessons was about Michurin (Мичурин), the soviet geneticist who was cross-breeding various types of fruit, in order to get something that would be able to survive in the russian winter and yet bear lots of large fruit. And the article we read boasted of his successes.
Well, just a dozen year later we visited the then USSR, and guess what - the apples were smaller than a regular tangerine. Propaganda gets you where you don't expect it, eh?
OTOH, they may have been right about the taste. When we returned home, several things tasted just so much better, specially the fruit (of course, as we're eating it straight off the tree - it wasn't frozen, transported, exposed to who knows what gases and fumes to conserve or ripen it), and particularly tomatoes. For all those years tomatoes were a desire - I loved them, and remembered them fondly. Because what you can buy in the grocery, or even at the farmers' market, is a kind of a fake. It's been speed-grown in a greenhouse, unknown chemicals applied to get them the right color for the day of sale. Color sells, taste doesn't. Now that we're growing our own, my love of tomatoes is fulfilled.
Note that you can buy the plastic variety here as well - any kind of crap invented abroad finds its way here, even sliced bread (which is just as unlike real bread as its american counterpart).
Even the potatoes taste better here. And it's not just us, playing localpatriotic tunes to our own ears. I've had american visitors over the last few years, and they all agree.
