“Your assignment is to stop a random stranger on the street and talk to them???”

Our grammar professor was shocked and horrified to learn of Diane’s “cruel and unusual” assignment for us: travel to a neighborhood in Moscow, spend an hour or more walking around, and, most importantly, interview a resident about their experience living there.

   “Why don’t you just go to a museum and ask one of the docents about Moscow instead,” she hopefully suggested the next day in class, “you could go the Bulgakov museum! They’re very friendly there…”

   Apparently, she and her husband had been in a frenzy of concern the night before over the thought of us carrying out this task, and now she was attempting to find a technicality to save us from the apparent great danger of talking to strangers.

   But this was not the spirit of the assignment. Of course, we were nervous to approach a stranger–check out Alexis’s blog on the subject here. But to us clueless Americans, the task at hand seemed quite sane: in Minnesota, where the routine of being “nice” is zealously practiced, I wouldn’t expect a passerby to bat an eye at a question like, “so, do you live around here? What do you think about the neighborhood?”

   However, two out of our three Russian professors expressed concern to us when we mentioned the assignment in class. As Nick described in his blog post (read it here!) about our little journey, this concern threw us into a state of nervousness before our excursion: maybe it really was a bad idea to talk to a stranger. Nick’s google search of “most dangerous neighborhoods in Moscow” didn’t help to calm our nerves as we read about various murders, and we eventually settled on an area listed in one article I read as “the best place to stay in Moscow with your family,” hoping that this would be a safe place for our social experiment. This was Baumansky neighborhood, named for controversial revolutionary Nikolai Bauman. We planned to walk from the Kurskaya metro station to Baumanskaya station on the dark blue line, a route we barely researched beforehand except to note that there was some sort of park along the way where we might be able to find an unfortunate passer-by to interview.

   Stepping out into the sun at Kurskaya station, I was greeted with a strange sight: a giant, modern, street-art style mural—I felt like I was in downtown Portland! Thus, I felt a little more at home as we crossed some train tracks and wandered into Bauman Garden, which, as Nick describes, is an incredibly nice park full of bright colored play structures, public art displays, and mini coffee shacks.

It took Nick and I half an hour at least to work up the courage to talk to someone. I saw an opportunity: an older lady with a little dog who didn’t look like she was going anywhere in particular. She was well dressed, looking down her nose at the children frolicking at the playground. After a long moment of self-doubt (what if Russians think it’s really weird to pet other people’s dogs?) I approached her and asked if I could pet her dog.

        “Of course,” the lady said, “but he has really dirty feet!”

   “What’s his name?” I asked, throwing myself into generous petting of this Very Good Boy, not caring in the least about how dirty his paws were.

   “Tai-son.”

I stopped for a moment. Taison… Tyson?

   “As in… Mike Tyson?”

   “Yes,” she answered, in total seriousness.  

   I laughed, surprised. This dog was a very small, soft, fluffy, thing, a Maltese weighing less than 10 pounds–probably the least similar dog to Mike Tyson you could come up with (see photos below). I looked at the woman again, with new respect for this Russian babushka who for some reason was a fan of American heavyweight boxing. Understanding the sense of humor which must be required to give this particular fluffball such a name, I felt at ease with her, and was able to successfully gain some information about the neighborhood. She described to me how she was born and lived all her life here, and was now watching her grandchildren grow up in the same neighborhood. She told me the park wasn’t as new as it looked, just very well kept, and we continued with a short, pleasant conversation which should never have elicited as much nervousness on our parts as it did.

   “Don’t speak with strangers,” warns Mikhail Bulgakov in the opening chapter of his famous novel The Master and Margarita. Luckily for a foreigner hoping to learn more about the residents and culture of this magical city, (like us Carls or Bulgakov’s Woland) not all Muskovites heed their beloved poet’s ominous warning. Walking through the streets of Baumansky for a second time with Alyona, our praktikant, I considered how my comfort level conversing with both strangers and friends has improved since this first anxious meeting weeks ago. Around the same time that Nick and I made our first visit and the praktikanty themselves were still strangers, we met Alyona and the others for the first time when they gave us a tour of Moscow State University. I remember being ashamed of my not-always-perfect comprehension and conversation skills as the girls described student and academic life, occasionally just falling silent rather than risk embarrassing myself. Now, weeks later, here I was, doing my best to describe the plot and cultural significance of the musical Hamilton, while Alyona waxed poetic about the personal significance of her favorite holiday, Victory Day. I realized that although my Russian is still filled with mistakes and gaps, I have become more willing to commit these errors in front of native Russian speakers over the past ten weeks, and when I don’t want to talk to a random person, it’s usually out of a good old-fashioned fear of strangers than a sense of shame about my communication skills in this language. And after my encounter with Mike Tyson and his friendly owner, my fear of random Moscow neighborhoods and their inhabitants has also lessened. I think Bulgakov would approve.