Changing the country of residence, work is a common thing. Consular services are simplified, it is easy to find housing, buy a ticket, arrange a job, find a school or kindergarten for children.
Therefore, people migrate, looking for comfortable conditions for themselves, wanting to immerse themselves in a different environment. When we live in a new place for a long time – not two or three weeks of vacation, but a year or two – we involuntarily improve the language, adopt habits, change taste preferences, style of clothing.
It is all the more surprising that after many years of living in another country, we still “give out” ourselves, remaining aliens in the eyes of the natives!
Russians who have been working in United States, they tell by what habits and manners American acquaintances accurately determine who is in front of them.
Tell me what you have for breakfast
In Russian stores in America, various cereals, sour-milk products, tea, jams, honey are in abundance on the shelves. This is in demand, because the traditional breakfast in Russia – porridge, cottage cheese, cheesecakes with sour cream, lazy dumplings, casseroles.
The choice of cereals is large: you can cook semolina, oatmeal, buckwheat, millet. Russians are accustomed to washing down breakfast with tea or freshly brewed coffee.
It is difficult for an American, habitually falling asleep in a bowl of cereal and pouring milk or juice over it, to understand us. He spreads a layer of peanut butter on the bread that does not spoil for months – we boil a soft-boiled egg.
And our preparations for the future, borscht for three days, jelly, aspic, pies – they remain on our tables even in a foreign land. A resident of America would prefer to take a ready-made soup or roast in the supermarket, heat up a semi-finished product in the microwave, and have a burger for lunch.
We rush to the shelves for vegetables and eggs, the locals for soda and beer. So it is not difficult to calculate a resident of Russia by a grocery basket or breakfast.
Smile!
Serious, concentrated, sometimes gloomy – these are the epithets of our faces that the average American will characterize. He will smile at us, asking how we are doing, smiling at everyone around him, from a close friend to a random street vendor.
Indeed, it is in their blood, at the level of the genetic code. Many Americans are sure that the absence of a “smiley” on their face is a sign of an aggressive disposition. For us, a smile is a sign of a special relationship, emotional closeness with a specific person, so we single out loved ones.
Smile more often and for no reason if you want to pass for your own in the United States!
Accent and accents
With a high probability, the accent will give us away: compatriots speak English softer, slower, otherwise building the sound of the phrase. The native Yankee will highlight other words with his voice, omit some of the endings – we speak correctly, as taught.
Young people quickly grasp the nuances of speech: after a short time in the United States, they are accepted as their own. The older generation is more difficult. You can live in the USA for 30-40 years, have a house, a job, but a casual American interlocutor will probably ask where we came from.
This phenomenon sometimes prevents our actors from participating in the filming of Hollywood films without dubbing, often for them the ceiling is Russian-speaking characters.
Wrong style
Style, manner of dressing, attitude towards appearance – these signs can be easily determined: this is not an American in front of you. Most people in the United States wear comfortable, non-restrictive clothing on a day-to-day basis.
Shorts, leggings, wide shirts, T-shirts with inscriptions or large patterns are popular. And it doesn’t matter if the T-shirt is wrinkled or not, whether there was such a style at the last show in Milan — comfort and mood are important.
Therefore, if a woman in a dress, with a neat hairstyle, make-up, in heels, walks along the street of an American city, you can take bets – she is from Russia or the Commonwealth countries.
Slavic face type
Indeed, we do not notice our “similarity”, but for Americans, Slavic features immediately catch the eye, stand out from the crowd.
Perhaps an ordinary resident of New York or Kansas will not determine whether a Ukrainian, Belarusian, Pole or Russian is in front of him. But he will know for sure: this is not his compatriot.