"Working for wide sections of the population"

The evening program was the social event of the season for Tiraspolers.  Stas called his friends, no less than the young, intellectual elite of the country.  Biznezmen (a Russification of the English word, but with a decidedly post-Soviet bend on the definition), doctors, dentists, minister’s children, and bankers.  Naturally I was expecting as such, and felt right at home in Tiraspol society.  Our venue of choice was Shinok Kumanyok, a traditional Ukrainian restaurant.  The first page of the menu, painstakingly transcribed word-for-word, deserves its own paragraph:

Shinok Kumanyok
If you are reading this information it means that you’ve come to our restaurant.  Thanks for your choice.

Main principles and distinctions:

• Working for wide sections of the population
• Invariably delicious cuisine
• Democracy in atmosphere and prices
• Regular novelties in our menu
• Respecting atmosphere, interior (many nice particulars, creating agreeable atmosphere) and music (including viola and accordion)
• Our splendid Ukrainian cuisine would help to forget about all daily problems even to blacksmith Vacula
• It is forbidden to use vulgarisms and unquotable words regarding the guests and employees to bring with you food and drinks
• We don’t allow a discount if you don’t have a discount card
• We regularly organise drawing of lotter “Fortune” (prize is given to discretion of administration)
• Form of payments in cash in PMR roubles

We ordered (or they ordered, rather.  I sat quietly) black bread, cheese platters, salad, salo (bacon fat/lard), whipped salo with garlic, pickled vegetable platters, pork-vegetable-cheese things dipped in egg and flour and fried with potatoes and mushrooms, blinchky (pancakes) filled with ground liver, beer and wine.  Those were the appetizers.  Then we had vareniki, pelmeni, more beer, more wine, and other main courses for everyone.  Then dessert, which was a pear soaked in wine, fried, and stuffed with chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, and on a bed of whipped cream.  It was fairly decadent.  And cheap!  For 8 people, the total bill came to something like $100, and because it’s Transnistria, anything goes and you can pay with whatever currency you see fit.  USD, Russian roubles, Transnistrian roubles, Moldovan lei, Ukrainian gryvnia and euros flooded the table.  I meekly paid my share in the local currency while and prepared another helping of whipped-lard-and-garlic spread on a bun before the waitress whisked away my plate.

Then we headed to Denis’s apartment.  He lives alone but has two apartments which have been joined together.  These are the perqs of being the son of the former vice minister of finance of Transnistria, as I’m sure you know.  We passed the time sampling fine local beers and cognac (possibly the most famous in the FSU, despite what a recent spread in Aeroflot Inflight Magazine on Armenia that tried to convince me otherwise), watching the Nostalgia Channel (featuring newscasts from the 1970s announcing Uzbek cotton harvest yields), admiring large bearskin rugs, trying on hats that so-and-so's grandfather had worn in the war, and talking about the good old days.  They told me that every Gen-Y in the FSU remembers when the Soviet Union finally collapsed because they interrupted the once-per-week half-hour transmission of Disney, and they never got to find out how that one cartoon ended.  I told them that the Soviet collapse really hit home for me when my parents bought me an updated atlas and told me to get over it.* 

Then we seamlessly flowed into the topic of Russian grammar as well.  RUSSIAN GRAMMAR.  This is a passion of mine.  I was telling them how annoyed I was by all the prefixes to Russian verbs that wholly change the meaning, and they threw me another curve ball: zaletat, which literally means to be flying somewhere and suddenly be rerouted to another destination without warning, is also used to mean “accidental pregnancy.”  The beauty of Russian is in its simplicity. 

*No joke. 1989—1993 were some heady days for Rand McNally, and frankly one paradigm shift too many for me in my tender and formative preschool years.