>>>> 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.
>>
>>Everyone knows the best potatoes on earth grow in Maine. Totally untrue, but I have to defend my home state.
>>
>>I believe you about fruit grown the old way. My next door neighbors are Polish (been here a long time) and have peach trees. The trees grow so heavy with fruit it's a wonder they don't collapse. They give me some of them, both fresh and jarred. You can't get anything like it at the grocery store.
>>
>>When the house on the other side of them went on the market -- both adopted Chinese Americans with two terrific American girls -- some Polish American friends of theirs bought it and moved in. During the warm months the two husbands play ping pong in the garage. They play with amiable competitiveness, their guts bouncing along with the ping pong balls. To quote John Cheever, this is my beloved country.
>>
>>Another bit of humor: a table tennis competitor in the last Olympics was actually named Ping.
>
>My wife tells me that the best potatoes come from Peru, but I think that she is prejudice as that is where she was born and raised! With Irish and Polish ancestry marring a Peruvian was a great idea! :)

There is a word for that: American ;-)