Our day-to-day adventures as we experience life abroad.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

The Mystery Deepens

You may recall in my Christmas blog that I was whining about not being able to find pecans here. I've since rectified the problem by ordering some from netgrocer.com (thank god for the internet), but I was still curious about their absence.

I work with a young Russian who has been studying English and lately has been learning American history. (Sadly, after a week of class she already knows WAY more about my own country than I do. She was talking about the great American still-life painter William M. Harnett, and I was like, who? Apparently he was even from Philadelphia. I suck.) So on slow days at work (which is pretty much every day), we've been talking about American odds 'n' ends.

On Thursday, we started talking about pecans. I googled an image of a pecan and said, "Hey, have you ever seen one of these?" She took one look and said, naturally, "Sure, that's a walnut." So I said, "No, it only LOOKS like a walnut. It's a pecan." She looked at me like I had worms crawling out of my ears. I explained further.

"It sort of looks like a walnut, but it's less wrinkly and darker. The shell is oblong and smooth. And it's much sweeter than a walnut. It's often used in pie."

Still utter confusion. I looked up "pecan" on www.multitran.ru. It turns out there isn't even a Russian WORD for pecan. It's just called "nut-pecan." I explained to my coworker that I had looked alllll over town and I could NOT find pecans. She reiterated that she'd never heard of them, and she wasn't surprised that no one else had either.

I looked up the history of the pecan on Wikipedia. Apparently they hail from the American south. Which sort of explains why they wouldn't be super-familiar to most Russians... but come on. "McDonalds" and "Tom Cruise" are household words over here. It's not like all things American are completely unfamiliar. They have Macadamia nuts here, and those things are friggin' Australian. I don't get it.

The question now is this: since I have a few big ol' bags of pecans, do I bring some in for my friend to try? Or would that just be cruel? "Here, have a taste of this sweet, mouth-watering nut. Mmm. Roll it around in your mouth for a while. 'Cause you'll NEVER GET ONE AGAIN."

Then again, once I get her and her friends hooked, it could prove to be lucrative. I could be a pecan dealer.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home