Current mood:

thoughtful

A little validity question.
Last night a massive joint effort between me, my mom, and my sister (well, mostly my mom) produced a delicious Russian meal for us, one of our neighbors and three of Chelsea's friends. My mom cooked up two huge batches of borscht, standard and vegetarian, and Chelsea and I made hochipuri. It wasn't nearly as complicated as you might think, since we used pre-made puff pastry, so it was mostly mixing up a bunch of cheese (mozzarella, feta, and cottage, for the curious) and baking. I contributed a cucumber/tomato salad that my second host mom and I ate for dinner pretty much every night in the spring. My mom spread some caviar on dark bread and busted out the pickles for appetizers, and we had ourselves a scrumptious dinner.

Two of Chelsea's friends studied Russian in college, and one of them lived in St. Petersburg, so they're both well-versed in the language and culture. At the beginning of dinner we reminisced together about the horrors of verbs of motion and the travesty of rampant alcoholism. But as dinner turned into tea and cookies, they started talking about Soviet films and I quickly got left behind. My Russian simply wasn't good enough most of the year for me to watch movies, so I'm limited to the one or two movies we watched in my lessons. And as they moved from films to music, and from music to geography, I started to feel really ignorant, and honestly, more than a little fake. Here I've been mooning around all nostalgic for Mother Russia, and all the time I haven't begun to tap the vast cultural wealth of the country.

And that makes me wonder about the validity of cultural experiences. Clearly I didn't get as deep into Russian traditions and society as I would have if I had spoken Russian at all when I arrived. We talked about this a lot at the American Home. We used to make fun of the older Americans who showed up at the AH complaining about the impossibility of finding "a decent cup of coffee", by which they meant the exact kind they drank at home, and turned up their noses at all the wonderful black teas. But do you have to go completely native to have a "valid" experience? My year in Russia didn't turn me into an expert or change my life completely, but an awful lot of interesting things happened to me. What's the yardstick for experience?