Back in the Ehs Ehs Ehs Ehr

Everytime I hear "Back in the USSR", I can't help but think of one particularly horrific day during my "Russian Language Journey".

In college, I took Russian as my foreign language requirement and embarked upon three of the most awful years of my life. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, and I wouldn't have met Amanda otherwise, but it was pretty grueling. Note: if you're not good at languages, Russian probably isn't where you want to head first. Start with something nice, like Spanish.

The part of the whole experience that had the greatest impact on me, is that I studied Russian in the mid-1980s, at the time of Glasnost and Peristroika. Our Soviet-era textbooks (with such profound statements as "Good workers do not steal pencils") were quickly outdated, and every single day was a new lesson in geo-politics and the changing Soviet empire. That was absolutely fascinating.

Plus, we drank a lot of vodka. For some reason, my classmates and I took to celebrating the end of every exam and semester at The Little Russian Cafe, which was conveniently located spitting distance from our campus. We also did a fair amount of our studying there, which actually, could explain a lot...

Anyway, about halfway through my second year, we had an exam. I never did well on exams, much to the dismay of Yevgeni, our professor. Yevgeni was sort of new to the teaching scene and he took us all under his wing as his pet project, so he took it all quite personally when we struggled. And we struggled. I really struggled.

Our tests were a lot of fill-in-the-blank statements and questions, along with an oral section, one-on-one with Yevgeni, and then a series of translations, both from English to Russian and Russian to English. On this particular exam, there was a translation statement that was something like, "Vladimir and Pasha enjoying playing music together in Leningrad. Vladimir has a balalaika and Pasha does not. Vladimir is a large man. Pasha resembles Bronson Pinchot."

Pretty basic stuff except, as it turned out, NO ONE in the entire class could translate "balalaika". Well, actually, the problem was more that we were all trying to translate it. Twenty-five of us and not a single correct translation in the room.

So when Yevgeni returned our tests the next day, he flew into a Polish-accented-English-and-Russian rage. He couldn't believe that none of us knew the Beatles' song and when we explained that we did know the song we just didn't think of it, he got even more upset. Looking back, it was such a simple thing and now it's hysterically funny, but at the time we all just cowered in our seats while he sputtered and yelled at us what a balalaika was and that even the Beatles knew and why didn't we? (You know, if he'd only posted the picture, we would have gotten it... I blame Yevgeni.)

I guess you had to be there, but hearing that darn song on the radio always makes me think of that day, good ol' Yevgeni, and his failed project of making us all perfect Russian speakers. I did, however, retain one very important thing and now Я должен очистить рыб. (I must clean the fish.)