seeking out the little things

“It’s the little things that make a difference.”

How many times have you heard that clichéd little phrase?

I’m asking rhetorically of course. Please don’t send me an email that goes “Hi Anthony, hope you’re keeping well. In response to your question regarding the ‘little things’ cliché: at last count it was 327”.

Actually, no ... on second thoughts do send me that email. It’d be marvellous to know there’s someone out there who makes more notes on their own life and keeps more lists than I do.

Anyway, I’m quoting the cliché because "little things" is a theme that has so far run through my experience of life as a foreigner, like the stripe through certain kinds of toothpaste when that suddenly became fashionable in the 90s for no apparent reason. I’ll give you an example:

You all heard about how, after the Cold War ended, the bread queues in Russia disappeared and the shops began stocking up for a new era of delirious consumption, right? Well, it seems to be true. The scale of retail here is quite staggering; there don’t appear to be as many mega-malls as there are in Australia (and what a pity), but instead there are mega-markets, backed up by clusters of little shops and stalls that radiate out from every metro station. And they’re huge. The size of my local market in Prazhskaya, for example, is measurable in PadMarks*, a unit of retail space equivalent to the area occupied by Paddy’s Market in Sydney (much as a ‘SydHarb’** is equivalent to the volume of water in Sydney Harbour). One circuit of Prazhskaya market provides almost half of your daily exercise requirements.

In these markets you regularly come across things that make you go “hmmm”, and the little shops that line each aisle are packed to the ceilings with stuff. Some of them specialise to a remarkable degree – like the yoghurt stall at Prazhskaya, which stocks a dizzying variety of cultured milk products – while others seem to sell just about anything they can lay their hands on, from designer passport wallets to little packages of kalimar (a local snack that bears roughly the same relationship to squid as beef jerky does to cows, except that it’s kinda stringy). So it’s fair to say you can get just about anything in Moscow.

However, there do seem to be some fairly basic items that have slipped between the cracks in this retail renaissance.

The Lonely Planet recommended that I bring a bottle opener with me to Russia. My reaction when reading this: “Er, sorry guys, but why would I need a bottle opener in a country that reportedly has an enormous problem with alcoholism?” But I brought one anyway. Haven’t used it ... they're everywhere.

However, the other thing they recommended I bring was a universal sink plug. Here again, my reaction would probably be pictured in cartoon form as a speech bubble with just a question mark inside it. In this case I didn’t follow Lonely Planet’s advice and, sure as eggs (which are apparently pretty sure), when I moved in to my flat I found the kitchen sink was lacking one fairly important feature.

"No problem", I thought. "I’ll just go and buy a sink plug."

A week later, I was becoming quite accustomed to keeping one eye on whatever else was happening around me while the other eye scanned for sink plugs. They were nowhere. I learned the Russian word – rakaveena shtyepsil – and tried it out on a few market stall owners, who stared at me blankly or directed me to other stalls that sold hardcore kitchen plumbing equipment. No shtyepsil. Nyeto*.

Then finally the day came when, between piles of biros and napkins and key chains and steel wool, I saw one on display at a market stall. The price struck me as somewhat outrageous, but it really didn’t matter. I had a sink plug. It was a good day!

The obvious down side here is that if you need something urgently, as often as not it’s going to be the one thing you can’t find among the welter of household minutiae – a fact which I've definitely recorded in the “grrr” column. But there’s a corresponding up side, which is this: when you do find whatever it is you’ve been looking for, you feel a wild sense of accomplishment. You want to go out into the street and wave around your sink plug (or your blue tac, your ground cinnamon, your stiff white cardboard, etc. etc.) and just tell anyone who passes by how incredibly pleased you are. It’s a silly feeling, but a good one. It really does bring you back to an appreciation of the little things.

And yet, while that’s happening, there’s an opposite effect at work too. You can become quite enjoyably pre-occupied with the small items you’re searching for, but at the same time you actually have to get by without them for as long as your search continues. That gives you time to recognise that they are just little things. It tends to clarify the distinction between what you’d rather like to have and what you actually need in order to live, or to ‘be the person you are’. I know that doesn’t seem especially profound – probably because it isn’t. But then again, haven’t you ever marvelled at how many of the people you know have immense difficulty making that distinction? I have.

I’ve talked to a few other teachers about this hunt for little things, and they’ve had their extensive searches too, along with their moments of triumph. Interestingly, they all reflect that it’s something they hadn’t often experienced in their own countries, where things are sane and sensible and you can easily acquire any basic item you want. And perhaps that might even be one tiny part of the reason why a Moscow-born I.T. specialist who I met at the market last Saturday, and who had been working in Atlanta Georgia for the last ten years, finally concluded that “The U.S. is a bit boring” and returned to Moscow. He remarked that, in the West, “every day is the same”, whereas “here you don’t know what can happen one day to the next”.

True. You might wake up one morning, wander down to the market and come home with your very own sink plug. Who knows?



* One PadMark = approximately 1.5 standard metric bargain bonanzas.

** Unlikely as it may seem, this is a real unit of measurement.


*** Nyeto = "We don't have any".