Cracking the Code

Are you a puzzler? 

Do you pick at Sudoku on the train or noodle your way through the Sunday paper’s crossword?

If yes, then Russian is the language for you! Living in Vladivostok this past week has been like living in a developing version of San Francisco—expansive bridges shrouded in fog and stretching across numerous inlets of the Pacific, foot and vehicle traffic winding up and down steep, rolling hills, a palette of people with various ancestral origins—but this version is one in which all the words everywhere have been mischievously obscured by code.

In the Cyrillic alphabet, B is “V,” C is “S,” N —backwards— is “I,” R —backwards— is “ya,” the shape that looks like a bent staple makes “L”, and the staple on top of a platform is “D.” We are walking around in a giant puzzle! There is triumphant satisfaction every time our slow sounding out of these remarkably long Russian words nets us a correct answer. I just read “hot dog!” Look, that says, “Mini-market!”

Can you make out the word below?

Of course, there are other aspects of living here that need decoding, as well. 

For instance, how does one walk around the city without being blasted by the noise and exhaust of toxically old Russian tanker trucks? Slip up the secret stairways to footpaths and alleyways that Google maps doesn’t recognize! 

How to taxi three sleepy children back across the bridge late at night after attending a Tchaikovsky ballet? Best to get the app “Maxim” (and be prepared to hide the third child’s head if a policeman is in sight). 

How to feed a family nutritiously on a dime? Bags of grain and loaves of bread only cost a handful of rubles at the supermarket! Each little victory of cracking the code gives us confidence.

I confess, though, to waking the past few mornings feeling disheartened, downright depressed. 

Why, I wondered? Nothing had changed—same drizzly clouds that usually genuflect to the sun by afternoon, the same siren song of the trains pulling in to the nearby station, the same promise of gaining confidence in the world outside, one puzzle at a time.

It took a few days to solve this one.

One of the joys of traveling with our boys is interacting—even in small ways—with the locals. In Cuba, we couldn’t pass an open door without hearing “Ay, nino precioso!” Last weekend, in Shanghai, several people stopped our children to take pictures with them, touch their hair, or to comment on how they could carry their own luggage. We like this attention. It brightens our day, their day, and it helps to create connections with the people around us. 

In Russia? Nyet! Not a single glance.

Now, we realized along the way that our boys look a whole lot like the children here. So, maybe we needed to do a little more legwork in order to commune with walkers-by on the street. We learned how to say “hello” (“pri-vyet”) and started saying it to everyone we passed, and I flashed big smiles at lots of faces, hoping to cause a spark.

Wow! What a lot of cold stares in return!

Obviously, we were missing something. Chris shared with me that he’d read somewhere about smiling in this country. Looking up “Why Russians don’t smile,” I found an article that spoke to my concerns and made me grimace, to say the least (look it up, yikes!) it basically indicated that I’d been acting like a shyster and a fool in Russian eyes. Oops. I listened to another language lesson on basic greetings, which instructed us to use “good morning” and save “hello” for when you really know someone. Oh.

So, while I may not be able to get Russia to crack a smile, (which pains me, because smiling is my go-to for feeling confident and happy in my skin), I think we can confidently say that we have cracked this part of the code. This experience also helped up better appreciate something that it is important to us—being somewhere strangers smile and greet each other!