Thanksgiving in Brighton Beach

Ah, Sunday morning back home after a weekend with friends. Due dates for two papers loom in the near future. A great time to blog!

Wednesday evening I headed up to Brooklyn to join some Peace Corps friends for Thanksgiving festivities. I've been to NY quite a few times now that I'm living in Philly, and I have to admit, I never know what to do with myself there. Here it's a city among cities, the end-all be-all, and I usually find myself doing the same two or three things. This makes New Yorkers cry, I know. But where to begin?! That's the beauty of living in a manageable-sized city like Philly, I have a reasonable mental picture of what's available, I don't get lost, yet I can still find new things to explore. And I live on a beautiful tree-lined street. (Ooh, damn, did I just work in a dig there? Sorry, I guess I left NY on a bit of a concrete overload).

Anyway...this was my first time in Brighton Beach. Too my embarrassment, I actually didn't know it was even part of Brooklyn, or that nearby was Coney Island, or...lots of stuff. Brooklyn is really huge, people. I'm not sure how I failed to realize this before. So anyway, I took the Chinatown bus up to NY, then hopped on a train for the long ride out to Brighton Beach, nothing too eventful, except that I then exited at the last stop and WALKED INTO MOLDOVA! It began the moment I left the train: people speaking Russian around me, the woman in front of me at the turnstile wearing a coat like the one someone loaned me my first winter (see photo), shops with signs in Cyrillic, and men in black leather jackets and black caps. Perhaps more than the language, I was transported by the arrangement and style of things, like shops with clothing hung flat along the walls and selling spike-heel boots and fur hats, and a woman sitting at a window on the street calling out "Pirizhochkiyeh goryachieyeh!" (hot pastries). The feeling only intensified at the site of products in the shop windows, the exact brands I used to buy. I felt suddenly compelled to run in an buy a carton of juice, a type of juice I am fairly certain I hadn't thought of once since returning to the US. Then -- then! -- I came to the corner near my friend's house and there was a small Russian restaurant advertising pelmeni, and inside, two men sat at a table with plates of pelmeni, a bottle of vodka and two glasses. I wanted to immediately go find my friends and drag them in, and hopefully get invited to join these men for a shot.

That night I didn't succeed in dragging them out to the corner cafe, but we did hit up one of the neighborhood grocery stores for beer and dinner ingredients. The products were sold at multiple counters, just like in Moldova, and the saleswomen were all chatting amongst themselves in Russian. Again, I was transported, and cravings struck for things I never think about anymore. Suddenly there was nothing I wanted more than soohariki, tiny flavored croutons in a packet. There was no way to ask for them without speaking Russian, so it served as a way to push me past my strange nervousness. Feeling as if I was about to do something exotic and magical, I asked one of the sales women where I might find them. "Upstairs," she replied. That's it?! Perhaps I was expecting balloons and streamers to fall from the ceiling, or for her to commend my ability to speak, or ask me where I was from. (I guess to be treated like the exotic American again?) Instead her response was utterly matter-of-fact. I was pleased with her response to the extent that it indicated that my accent came out well and she understood me perfectly, but still I found it a bit anticlimactic. I suppose that in this neighborhood, Russian was what I should have been speaking, as far as she was concerned, so it was nothing notable for me to do so. In any case, it turned out that they didn't carry the item I wanted, so Nic and I decided to go with dried fish instead: salty, a bit sweet, oh-so-stinky, and a great beer accompaniment.


I left the store feeling incredibly nostalgic, and even with a certain heart-pounding excitement at speaking Russian for basically the first time in 18 months, and successfully no less. You'd think I had just given a speech in front of an auditorium, as nervous as I was. The funny thing was, somehow the setting made me feel confident in my language abilities, I think because I was suddenly immersed in the setting where I used to customarily speak Russian. It seemed natural. Also, hearing it and seeing the words on food packages and everything else all served to jog my memory. I think my memory of the language is tied to these various stimuli, so the words came easily.


Sigh. So that was that. Nic, Dechen and I had a nice evening of cooking, stuffing ourselves, and catching up, until in the wee hours it was time for Nic to head out to join relatives for Thanksgiving. We, meanwhile, caught a couple hours' rest before heading up to Central Park to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. It seemed like quite the all-American classic thing to do, and now I can check it off whatever mental list such an activity might have been on...and I will never again have to freeze my butt off to watch giant inflatable Dora the Explorer travel down Central Park West.

We then met up with another RPCV friend, Jessica, so it was another evening of cooking, discussing the meaning of life, and talking about boys. Then Friday night we took the train to Sunnyside, Queens, which turns out to be a bit of a Romanian enclave, though not as obviously so as Brighton Beach is a Russian one. We joined another RPCV and his wife for dinner at a Romanian restaurant, and again I was transported. I had no idea I could get my international travel fix as cheaply as a $10 bus ride to New York. Inside the TV played Romanian news and our waitress addressed me in Romanian, which sadly I wasn't able to reply to. We feasted on tocana (stew) over mamaliga (polenta), mamaliga with cheese and sour cream, stuffed red peppers, and smokey eggplant spread, plus a few bottles of Romanian pinot noir. It was SO GOOD. As we exclaimed over the food, we couldn't help but laugh at ourselves--this the very food we used to be so tired of, the food that had us thinking we would give anything for some Pad Thai, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, anything but another dinner of mamaliga! Eating the stuffed peppers, I noticed all the dill in the broth and realized how important it was to the dish and my enjoying its "authentic" taste...dill, the very ingredient that I once thought was so overused. Funny how time can cast things in such a romantic light. I even found myself reminiscing about that first winter in Moldova, where at its worst the temperature got down to -40F and I had to sleep fully clothed inside my sleeping bag under the covers, and woke up with muscles sore from a night of shivering. Maybe I can now better appreciate how my grandpa would wax lyrical about foods and events of his childhood, me all the while thinking It was the called the depression because it sucked! Ah yes...spend enough time away from a place or an era and anything can become good. Plus of course there is a certain beauty in simplicity.

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Sadly, my camera batteries didn't cooperate for long on my trip so I didn't get many representative photos of Brighton Beach and you'll just have to take my word for everything. I can at least provide some musical ambiance, though: here, enjoy "Start wearing purple" by Gogol Bordello:



Then, to kick it up a notch (or if you just liked that last one, and are ready for more high-intensity Gypsy punk), here's "Not a crime". I have to say, these videos make me sad that Gogol Bordello's fan base has expanded so much since I saw them in, what, 2004 at Bumbershoot in Seattle, because now they can charge $40 a ticket for their concerts. Boo.


As a parting word, I encourage any of you with plans to head east to get in touch. I'll be more than happy to go on another international expedition within NY's boroughs.