Baltic Plus: Our Style
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This is an excerpt from Julia and Alex's appearance on the Kaliningrad weekly radio show "Our Style," which airs on the station we visited there, Baltic Plus. In this bit, host Tatiana Ponomarenko asks Julia to confirm or deny certain Russian stereotypes about American women: one, that they don't wear make-up, and two, that they don't "torture themselves" with diets. Other topics covered: what kind of shoes we wear, who cooks breakfast, and how we juggle children and careers.

AvtoRadio:
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This is part of a newscast from Avtoradio in Novosibirsk. The Avtoradio format is aimed at car drivers--not as common a class of person as in the United States. Each newscast item is preceded by a male voice who swoops in to say what the story will be about, as in, "About money!" "About people!" and Julia's personal favorite, "About that!" which is a euphemism for "about sex." These buttons come pre-recorded from the Avtoradio network in Moscow, and the Novosibirsk engineers keep them in alphabetized sound files for sprinkling in during the hourly newscasts. Kind of a headache, but Avtoradio staff think they add excitement.

Alex on The World's Geo Quiz
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As for weird stories to emerge from Ukraine of late, Alex laid one to rest on The World's Geo-Quiz segment a couple of years ago. But he did bring up another mystery, a mayonnaise-drenched salad that people there love to eat.

Creative Radio from Russia
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This is the first half of a 12-minute documentary called "Our People" produced by Elena Uporova of the Foundation for Independent Radio. The series is about national minorities in Russia, focusing on native tribes in the Far East. The first 25 seconds is a series intro, then we hear an old Nanai tribesman sing and explain (in Russian) a song he made up about the Amur River. Then Elena introduces him, and he remembers his Russian teachers. Although his grandson doesn't speak Nanai, he's philosophical about it. Elena then talks about how Russian names for the tribal peoples and their own names for themselves differ. The tribal names come up as "errors" on the Russian Microsoft spell-check program. In the last part, she goes out on the street with a list of the tribal names to see if any Russians know what they mean. In a great montage, they make wild guesses--maybe they're words from English, or Japanese, or some kind of anagrams--before someone dismissively guesses that perhaps they're names of small nationalities.

Learning by Imitation
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One of our students, Stas Berm at AvtoRadio Novosibirsk, got so inspired by hearing "Our People" that he immediately applied Elena Uporova's keyboard sound effects to a little story of his own, about looking up the Guinness Book of World Records online to find Russian world records.