Read Chapters 5 & 6 (you can skip Chapter 4, unless you really want to read it), and answer 2 of the following questions. Be sure to respond to the blog video beneath this post if you haven't--and not everyone has yet! :)
Q1: Expecting a bleak, depressed wasteland in Russia, what Tony finds is quite different--and much better than he expected. However, he does write that "One thing you get plenty of in Russia, no matter what your economic circumstances, is irony" (89). What does he mean by this? (be sure to look up "irony" if you're not sure what it means--it's a good word to know!).
Q2: At the Russkaya restaurant, Tony learns that the waitress is angry with him. Not for leaving a bad tip or being disruptive, but for not drinking enough vodka! In fact, she demands that they drink much more before he leaves, leaving him incredibly drunk by the end of the chapter. In Russia, it is a faux pas not to drink enough at dinner (look up "faux pas" if you don't know that, too!). How do Russian faux pas differ from Moroccan ones? What would get you kicked out of a restaurant in Morocco? Are they the same basic rules, just expressed through different cultures? Or does each culture truly see food, and hospitality, differently?
Q3: At one point in the "Something Very Special" chapter, Tony gets in a fight with his television producer, who accuses him of "being difficult." Why does he feel that American TV culture is fundamentally at odds with the 'old world' sensibility of Morocco?
Q4: One of the things Tony discovers in Morocco is expressed in the very last sentence of the chapter, which reads: "The universe was large all right, but no larger, it appeared, than the world wide world ahead of me" (127). What do you think he means by this, and what did he find there that made him see the world differently, even if only for a minute? In other words, what was so special about this culture for him?
Q1: This book was written about nine years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the USSR was full of oppression and years of torture for many of it's citizens due to an abuse of power. The Soviet Union was originally established to empower the working class and overthrow the abusive Czar's but it soon turned into oppression by the hands of Stalin. Even after the freedom of the Soviet Union in it's downfall in 1991, another leader came along to abuse his power, that being Putin, and life had not improved much for much of the population.
ReplyDeleteQ2: Russian faux pas are about mostly the vodka while the Moroccan ones are more about the process of eating. Things such as using your left hand to eat or using utensils are seen as bad. Both cultures have a respect for food and hospitality they just present them in different manners, in Morocco it was seen as a sin to waste food but in Russia it was seen as a sin to waste alcohol. Each culture has a respect for food and and hospitality they all just present them in different ways depending on the culture.