Quote Originally Posted by alexB
Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee
Thinking back to the months I lived in Moscow, way back in 1993, I would say that "grudging(ly)" is without question the perfect English word to describe the Soviet-style "Service With a Scowl" one would get from the продавщица at the typical Продукты or Булочная.
Was it really so? I thought at the time a Russian would have given his last shirt to make a foreigner feel comfortable. IMO the above said about the woman acting as though I'd requested that she sell her children into sex-slavery at a Thai brothel (good one btw) was perfectly true in regard to her fellow citizens but not the Americans.
Проблема, вероятно, лежила в том, что я "слишком хорошо" говорил (или, точнее, произносил) по-русски -- т.е., без американского акцента, хотя я не умел говорить свободно.

What I'm trying to say is that I probably had difficulty with the shop-ladies because they didn't immediately realize from my speech that I was a foreigner, and when they realized that Russian wasn't my first language, even then they didn't guess that I was an American who (presumably) had pockets full of lovely green cash. In fact, being a 22-year-old with very little experience teaching ESL and no certification, I didn't earn much money, and that's why I did my grocery shopping at these ex-Soviet shops, and not из "Ирландского Дома" на Старом Арбате. It also felt quite instinctive for me to "live on the local economy" as much as I could, because that's what my parents taught me to do when I was a 9-year-old boy living in Ankara, Turkey. There was a very small American military base there (which mainly served to provide "infrastructure" for the US Embassy), where we could buy things that were unavailable at Turkish shops (such as peanut butter, and our family's very first computer, the Atari 800), but mostly we got our food and other essentials from the local stores.