Vokda and matryoshkas! Your first visit to Russia explained by Tamara Sheward.

So you’ve booked the Bolshoi, dipped into the Dostoevsky and have started drinking Moscow Mules as a nod to your upcoming trip. But do you know your devushkas from your babushkas? Your salo from your smetana? And why are those drunk people screaming? Take a sneak peek inside the quirks  and perks of the largest – and possibly most bewildering – country on earth…

The People

To the outsider, Russians make no sense. That rude bitch sending you death-vibes in the tickets queue? In five minutes she’s going to invite you home for an eight-course meal and her boyfriend will write a poem commemorating your visit. That apple-faced babushka selling flowers? She’s in the mafia. And that group of ragged, reeling drunkards screaming down the marketplace? They’re quoting Pushkin.

Churchill famously called the Russians a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Kipling reckoned the “Russian is a delightful person until he tucks his shirt in”. And FDR threw in the towel with “No human being can say what the Russians will do next.”

In a baffling land where paradox is paramount, it seems there is nothing a Russian loves more than suffering and hardship. Except joy and good fortune. Gleefully pessimistic and given to all things epic, the chaste folk who spawned a million XXX websites love what they hate, defer and dominate, and are poets and pragmatists.

Is it their sweeping, tragi-glorious history that lends the Russian his romantik intensity? Is it the bleak, unyielding climate that turns him profoundly inward? Or is the exalted Russian Soul simply the bibulous by-product of too much Russian spirit? Advice? Trust everyone and nobody. Now that’s thinking like a Russian.

Getting Around

Do you think warm, happy thoughts of comfort and safety when you hear the word “Aeroflot”? How about “Lada”?

I didn’t think so. Take the train.

Language

Unless you’re linguistically gifted or your tongue has been doing yoga, Russian can be a challenging language to master. Take, for example, this: Zdravstvuite. Sadly, this high-scoring Scrabble word is Russian for “Hello”, which you will have to learn before you can even dream of progressing to beauties like puteshestvavat (to travel) and the ironic “kak eta praiznositsa” (“How do you pronounce this?”).

To slightly ease this consonantal chaos, Russian also uses many familiar words, such as “sex”, “poker” and “narcotic”, which makes one wonder what locals did for fun in the days before English infiltrated the vocab.

Surprisingly, learning the Cyrillic alphabet is easy. It’s also imperative: without cracking the code, you’ll be lost, hungry and will never realise the joys of smugly laughing at other foreigners gormlessly asking for the nearest “pecktopah” (pecTopaH = restauran). Most Russian words are pronounced phonetically, which means even if you don’t know their definitions, you can blurt them out and sound somewhat knowledgeable. Somewhat.

Food

Lactose intolerant? Anti-dairy? Stomach churns at the sight of white globs on your plate? Well, good luck with all that.

Sour cream is the tomato sauce of Russia, or rather, it would be, if we put ketchup in our soups, our desserts and our beer. The ubiquitous smetana is even mixed with its eggy counterpart – mayonnaise – to form a common salad dressing. The ten trillion calories found in such an ensemble pretty much negates the point of a salad in the first place, but 142 million Russians can’t be wrong.

“Wrong” may indeed be the word that springs to mind when faced with many other Russian “delicacies”. Pig lard (salo) smeared on fried bread. Boiled pumpernickel juice (kvas). Pickled watermelon (salyony arbus). But for every serve of pig’s feet in aspic, there is a beautiful borscht, a droolworthy shashlyk (grilled meat stick), a comforting bowl of pelmeni (the “Russian ravioli”) or an orgasmic blini (caviar pancake with – surprise! – sour cream).

In a country so lacto-obsessed, it may come as a surprise to discover that it’s impossible to get any milk in your coffee. And if you think that’s weird, just wait until they spoon jam into your tea.

Shopping

There’s no surer sign of a nation on the rise than really skinny women, and Russia is currently home to thousands of beauties thinner than a gulag gruel. Amid a major economic boom, thousands of Svetas, Irinas and Elenas suddenly have enough money to starve themselves twig-thin. So what’s a devushka to do with all those left-over roubles? As if you needed to ask…

Shopping in the major Russian cities is not always cheap, but it is extensive. Red Square’s GUM department store, once a basic-goods queue-fest and erstwhile Stalin HQ, now boasts more than 200 luxury shops such as Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. Locals call such outlets “exhibitions of prices”, as nobody can afford to actually shop there, but it’s worth visiting just to salivate on the shop windows. More variety (and affordability) can be found at Okhotny Riad, an underground doppelganger of the quintessential Western mall.

St Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt is rapidly morphing into a much colder Rodeo Drive, with boutiques springing up on every slushy corner. For eye-boggling Russian glam, try Tatyana Parfionova, the massive Bolshoy Gostiny Dvor or the nearby Defile Boutique, which sells clothes designed exclusively by Russians and those from ex-Soviet states.

As for matryoshkas (nesting dolls) and gorgeous handicrafts, skip the chain stores and scour the maze of marketplaces found in every town from Moscow to Murmansk.

Top tip: Stock up on CDs and DVDs on any sidewalk, Metro tunnel or ominous alleyway. They’re all pirate copies, and sure, it’s wrong and deprives the artists etc etc. But they’re all so irresistibly cheap and usually of great quality. Just steer clear of the computer software, unless you want a Russian porn-themed virus devouring your hard drive.

Vodka

Learn to drink it straight. For breakfast.