Hygge

A couple of days ago I sent out a plea for Russian music suggestions. Trawling through the Russian pop charts was positively distressing, and the only music I’d been hearing in shops around here was in English. I’ve been inundated with responses. I have a list of suggestions so long that my phone had a tantrum and told me I had to turn it into two separate lists. A friend of a friend from Nizhny Novgorod introduced me to the infectiously upbeat Dima Bilan (along with several hundred other Russian artists). Aygul played me some fun old(ish) hits, like this cute but excruciatingly smug duet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT9d65ss7hE. Is it just me, or is the instrumental at 2:10 a shameless rip-off of Simon and Garfunkel’s El Condor Pasa?

Kira, a friend from English club, made me a whole playlist. It features some bangers by someone called Monetochka, who writes all her own songs, and who, depressingly, is my age. At first glance, the playlist looked a bit angsty, but I can now confidently say that both Psychopath-Lunatic and Nymphomania are incredibly catchy tunes.

And Eldar, also from English club, has sent me some favourites by artists from Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk. Most of them seem to be gentler and more understated than the stuff at the top of the charts, which I like.

I’ve had many more suggestions besides! In fact, I’ve already started making four very different Russian playlists, which should curb my appetite for choonz until at least October. Thank you very much to everyone who’s suggested songs. Please do keep them coming if anything springs to mind!

But music isn’t the only form of Russian media that I sampled this weekend. I also got to experience two excellent Russian films. And by Russian films, I mean American films with voice-overs. And by excellent, I mean bad. It’s a shame, because presumably there’s some great Russian cinema out there which I’m yet to see. Instead, I watched a film about a bride being hunted by her in-laws with crossbows and axes, in which the odd character spontaneously combusts when it becomes too tricky to resolve the hitches in the plot. Yep. It was a shocker. The other film was The Goldfinch, which was not the worst film I have ever seen. Having said that, I expect that review (‘Not the worst film I have ever seen – some guy who watched it in Russia’) to be on the updated film poster… But although the actual films weren’t great, the experience of watching them was. I understood almost everything! I think probably film scripts tend to cater for the dumbest people in the audience, which in this case was definitely me. The dialogue was very easy to follow, and the important lines were delivered slowly and dramatically, often followed by close-ups of the other characters’ reactions, just in case you did somehow miss the line itself. It’s a weird experience watching films in a different language, because it makes you more aware of all the components of a film – the script, the sound effects, the camera angles, the music.

On Sunday evening I had a complete sense of zen. I read an article on the UN’s world happiness report recently. It pointed out that Denmark and Finland, who ranked top this year, also consumed the highest and second highest number of pastries per head. Coincidence? I think not. The article suggested that this was linked to the Danish notion of Hygge, a state of mind which values the smaller things in life, and can consequently reap full enjoyment from something as trivial as a doughnut. Now I treated myself to a wee bit more than a doughnut this weekend: I went bowling, went shopping, went to the cinema twice, had two burgers with cheesy chips, and probably spent about fifteen hours listening to music. I still think it counts though, because as I walked back from town, trying to negotiate a chocolate cinnamon bun the size of my face and listening to Sergey Lazarev, Russia’s answer to Justin Bieber, I was feeling very happy.