Russian

Last weekend a Russian guy asked me in English how to get to the railway station. It was obvious to me that he was Russian, I am not sure whether it was obvious to him that I was, too (I have an accent in English, but my "r"s are so out of the normal range for both English and Russian that a lot of English-speaking people assume that it's Hebrew), but in any case neither of us tried to switch to Russian during the conversation. I usually don't switch to Russian during a non-social conversation with obvious Russians, unless it's either necessary for communication or I am trying to make the encounter more social. I think a lot of other people do the same, and I sometimes wonder why. Maybe exactly because it makes the encounter somewhat more social and more intimate and invites more questions: "how long have you been here?", "where did you live in Russia?", etc.

OTOH I used to go to a cosmetologist named Natalya who was obviously Russian-speaking, and we had a lot of social conversation, but we never spoke Russian. We tried once but it was very awkward. Don't know why. And it had nothing to do with pretending not to be Russian, because we talked about Russia and Russianness (bad, bad word) as well.

In Boston I speak Russian freer than in Helsinki; maybe it has something to do with habit (hang out with Russians a lot there), maybe it has something to do with bad experiences speaking Russian in Finland. I don't normally speak Russian in the streets on account of having nobody to speak it with, but 8-10 years ago there used to be a couple of Russians that would go out with me every once in a while. From Finns we heard a few swear words and a lot of suggestions of money for sex; I think it got better nowadays that Finns are accustommed to seeing more Russians. The real problem, though, were drunk Russian tourists. The nastiest ones we'd seen were screaming at us, calling us whores and threatening to shoot us.