This article is about the cultural trials and travails of a young 20 year old Russian Girl from a small Siberian Village visiting the US for the first time.

Her name is Anya Fedorova and I know for certain that the culture shock she experienced living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area over the summer time must’ve mirrored my own level of shock when I traveled from the SF Bay Area to her part of the world in Siberia.  :)

It’s funny when I realize that crossed over and went in opposite directions..

Anya to my old home and me to hers.

I’m also sure that if some journalist had followed me around when I first arrived into Russia they would have a gold mine of comedic material.    But hey that’s just me.  I can have a good laugh at myself especially since I had to learn the hard way how to handle a serious drinking session with a local who demands “respect” in the form of 500 ml’s of the locally distilled potato medicine.

From their perspective I’m sure I demonstrated myself to be seriously FOB (Fresh off the boat) but with a little time… I adjusted and came to love what this new world had to offer me.

Keep this in mind when you ready Anna’s story.   And make it a point to read the extra commentary I put down below it too.

From Russia with love: Young woman new to western ways

By Carina Woudenberg

For the San Mateo County Times

When Anya Fedorova, 20, arrived at the Menlo Park restaurant — the one a Russian employment agency sent her to — she was worn from four days of travel and ready for a shower.

More than $3,000 poorer for the experience, the young traveler held a passport, a work-travel visa and enough belongings to get her through a four-month stay. Coming from Shadrinsk, a small town in Russia north of Kazakhstan, Fedorova had never seen a real, full-service restaurant before, but she was ready to work in one.

There was only one problem. The restaurant owners seemed to have no idea who she was and why she was there. So Fedorova was left with no job and no place to stay.

On a recent morning roughly three months later, Fedorova sat on a couch in a tidy, sun-drenched San Mateo living room. The house belongs to Kate Talbot, a wedding officiant with her own business.

Fedorova has been staying with Talbot since her second night in the Bay Area and does about two hours of housework for Talbot each day in exchange for room and board.

The pair giggles about the young Russian’s first impressions and her anticipation of coming to live with an older woman. Would she have to change diapers? Or deal with an uneven temper?

“I thought you would be this horrible character,” Fedorova said to Talbot, 69.

“With a scarf on my head and black socks up to here,” Talbot said, playing along.

“Did you see old women in my country?”

Fedorova asked, pulling out a borrowed library book and opening to a page featuring a wizened woman wearing a babushka. “Everybody in this country is so young; everybody care about their self.”

In Fedorova’s hometown, she said, travel is rare. Her parents and close friends have scarcely ventured outside their region. But for five years, it was her dream to come to the United States, and over time she managed to talk her skeptical parents into it.

“They didn’t want to let me go,” she said. “But for five years everyday, like everyday, I talked to them (about) what I want. And now my mom thought it a great chance.”

Fedorova was able to save up some money for the trip through a part-time job she held with a German company. Fedorova is a student in her hometown, studying psychology at a university. Fedorova also studied English for three years in preparation for her time here.

The Menlo Park restaurant initially had no work for Fedorova. But the wife of the owner speaks Russian, and she helped Fedorova find a hotel room that first night and put the word out in the Russian community that a young traveler was looking for a place to stay. Talbot heard about Fedorova from a former Russian au pair who offered to introduce them.

The managers of the Menlo Park restaurant ultimately decided they could use Fedorova’s help after all. In the beginning, she worked eight- to 10-hour days doing odd jobs such as placing fliers under windshield wipers and busing tables.

Fedorova tried to make herself useful but felt she wasn’t getting much direction. Things like computer screens with maps of the table layouts were entirely foreign to her.

Bikes with handlebar brakes were another new concept. Fedorova has a lengthy walk to the Caltrain station to get to her restaurant job, and when she saw a bicycle in Talbot’s garage, she asked if she could borrow it. When she started down the hill and began gaining speed, however, she panicked and couldn’t find the brakes.

“She was bloody,” Talbot said of the inevitable wipeout, which gave Fedorova a concussion and put her out of commission for a week. “Great big bloody lumps all over. It was awful!”

The cultural barrier between rural Russia and the Bay Area has yielded other mishaps and discoveries. During a layover at an airport in New York, Fedorova saw a sign for “restrooms” and thought it referred to a special place of rest. She was surprised to find only toilets.

In her hometown, no one has a bank account, and residents simply stuff their earnings under their mattresses. Talbot set Fedorova up with her first bank account.

Before coming to America, Fedorova had developed an exaggerated notion of this country’s notoriously poor eating habits.

“I thought your food is Coca-Cola (and) Snickers,” she said. “Of course, McDonald’s.”

Her pals back home share this impression.

“My friends wrote me every day about this,” she said. “They expect that I will return very fat.”

Fedorova will go back to her home country in September. She said she has mixed feelings about her time spent here.

“For me, I wanted to travel alone. Now I think maybe it was mistake. I don’t know,” she said. “I wanted to do it alone because I want to understand who I am now.”

The young Russian hopes to visit again next year but doesn’t anticipate settling in America. She wants to be a child psychologist but knows she will not make much money if she works in Siberia.

However, Fedorova doesn’t feel she could practice psychology here either because of the cultural divide. If she’s fortunate, she said, her adventure in the United States will bring her some clarity.

“I just hope that when I return, I’ll be in my home in my country with my parents and I will be thinking about everything and understand what I want,” she said, “what can I do.”

Comment from rw_man on SJ Mercury Site:

I run a blog that discusses Russian Women in detail called Russian Women Truth.

russianwomentruth.com

Anya’s experience in the US is an unfortunate one since she is dealing with major culture shock coming out of a small remote town in Western Siberia.

Russia has suffered through 3 generations of Socialism / Communism and this has left it’s infrastructure between 50 to 100 years behind developed Western Nations. Moscow is an exception to this since it’s the capital but most Russians don’t consider Moscow to represent the “Real Russia”.

Anya’s traditional feminine values however I’m sure are quite rare and precious in our modern world.

And unfortunately this article makes no attempt to address that. Girls like Anya have much to learn about the various components of a Modern Western Society.

However I’ve always asserted that we in the West have much to learn about the real feminine strength, fortitude and dedication these women have for their loved ones and families.

Too bad the author of this article made this so one-sided.. As if we in the west are somehow superior. If that were truly the case I don’t think we’d see so many western men expressing a desire to start a real relationship with women from this part of the world.

Comment from RacerX on SJ Mercury Site

I will be celebrating the seventh anniversary of my marriage to a woman from Russia. What you say is true. She is devoted, loving, caring and tolerant of some of my silly behaviors.  The relationship is that which I had dreamed of for nearly 30 years. Sadly what I feel is that whatever is happening in the development of women here has caused so many to not obtain that feminine strength or lose sight of its importance. Men and women both here in our culture have gotten so misguided on what the core of true happiness is. I truly found my sole mate and had to travel over 7,000 miles to find her. No she wasn’t from a catalog, and I am not a wealthy person. Far from it.

This entry was posted on 07/27/2010 at 2:09 am and is filed under Highlights, Russian Women, Why Russian Women?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.