A few weeks ago I tried tvorog, which is a dry white cheese I had never heard of before (it is not widely sold in the US). Here is some tvorog on sale under the popular Prostokvashino label:
I really did not like the tvorog I tried. Both kvass and tvorog are extremely popular in Russia, so I imagine if someone manufactured them together and slapped the label "kvorog" on it, the sales would go through the roof. I would stay away from it, except I'd appreciate an acknowledgment for proposing the name.
Much to my surprise I learned later that I had been eating tvorog regularly at the cafeteria in IUM, where it is the topping on one of the rotating dessert rolls:
I now have sympathy for the strange people who can't eat raw tomatoes, but will gladly eat tomato sauce.
Another very popular item in Russia is the persimmon (хурма). I had heard of persimmons a long time ago but had never one before:
A persimmon has the approximate shape of a tomato, but the texture and the taste are different and I don't think they are made into a sauce. Unlike tvorog, raw persimmons actually taste fine.
In the alcoholic category, would you believe they sell a lot of vodka here? Check out the shelves below.
Some Smirnoff, in pre-Revolutionary writing:
The beer section had no American beers (no surprise), except for some Budweiser
which is not the US Budweiser brand, but is from Budweis in the Czech Republic. One person I know here thought that was an American beer. Much later on in Moscow I found a discarded box of the American brand of Budweiser:
I was surprised to find the Mr. Clean product from the US sold in Russia under the name Mr. Proper:
At first I thought, because of the different name, that this was an illegal use of the image of the bald guy with the earring, and perhaps a better name would be Mr. Improper or Mr. Copyright Violation. But in fact it's the same product as Mr. Clean (on the back is the company name Проктэр энд Гэмбл = Proctor and Gamble) but it's just sold under a different name in Germany and Eastern Europe.
In the candy display below, prominent in the center are two bars of the ubiquitous Alyonka chocolate bar (the girl with the scarf), one of the few commercial products from the USSR to survive the transition to capitalism relatively unscathed. The bottom half of the display looks just like a selection of chocolate candy found in the US: Snickers, Twix, Kit Kat, Mars, Skittles, Milky Way, M & M's, Bounty,... wait, what's Bounty?
Anyone from Europe or Canada will not be puzzled, but in the US there is no such thing as Bounty, even though it is manufactured by a US company (Mars, Inc.). When you open a Bounty wrapper you see that it is basically the same thing as Mounds, which is sold in the US (by a different company: Hershey's). I am surprised the makers of Bounty voluntarily avoid selling their product in the US, where there are enough fat people that they could surely make a bounty of money.
Some folks may be wondering why the candy bar names on the wrappers, as well as Mr. Proper, are all in Latin letters instead of Cyrillic. It is absolutely standard to keep foreign product names in their original form, but other words on the packaging will be in Russian. (Foreign cars usually have all the control buttons in English.) Until only a few months ago, all Russian domain names on the internet were in Latin characters, and moreover domain names in Russia are often in English instead of Russian transliteration. For example the Pushkin museum's Russian website is http://www.pushkinmuseum.ru/ but the Russian word for museum is not "museum". A few months ago the Cyrillic domain .рф (taken from the first initials of Rossiiskaya Federatsiya = Russian Federation) was approved, so purely Cyrillic internet addresses do exist. There is a lot of room for mischief here, since the ASCII code for a similar Latin and Cyrillic letter is not the same. Thus the URLs bankofamerica.com and bankofаmerica.com look the same, but I typed the first one only with Latin letters and in the second one I used one Cyrillic letter. Therefore the ASCII code for the two URLs is not the same even though the URLs appear identical, so you can imagine thieves could try to take advantage of that. (A spellchecker might flag those URLs differently.)
Here's an unusual food item: rocks.
When the sunflower seeds in the cup were poured out of their container, the small rock on the table came out. One person told me that some less than honest business people will add tiny rocks to get their seed or rice packages to reach the contracted weight. I also heard another explanation: seed companies which use less modern technology simply have a harder time removing any non-product items before packages are filled. In any case, when you buy seeds or rice look carefully at what comes out before you eat it.
March 8th is International Women's Day, and is one of the main holidays in Russia. It's a big day for flowers, naturally. But can you figure out why March 8th (8 Марта) would get put on a box of matches? "Here's how much I think about you -- some matches!"
Here's a diary called "365 days in the life of a woman..."
Every page in it has March 8th written at the top!
"The Big Book about Books", which reminded me of Kramer's coffee table book about coffee tables:
When I saw the tissues below, the name looked to me like it was "Weird"; a weird name indeed. But it is not.
The store below is called "Lady X". An algebra store for women? As you can see from the size of the lady in the sign, it's actually for women who need some extra room in their clothes.
If you ever wondered what someone could do with a degree in philosophy, I found an answer: they can open a cosmetic store or beauty salon in Russia (философи and философия both basically mean "philosophy").
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