Tag #147035 - Interview #92478 (Rebecca Levina)

In 1991 we found ourselves in America. I went to visit my cousins, whom I’d never seen before. I mean that we stayed at my husband’s relatives – his cousin hosted us very well, and I didn’t want to bother somebody else, so we stayed with him all the time. I saw quite a few of my own relatives, not all of them, since there are so many of them over there. I visited one of my cousins in New York, and the children of one of my fathers’ brothers live in California, we didn’t reach this American state. I don’t remember my cousin’s name. We met for the first and last time in our lives. She died later. My husband’s cousin Mark lives in America, he knows many languages and manages the work of translators in the United Nations, and we had a dinner at their canteen. And I was impressed by how much those Americans eat. I ordered some beef and French fries, and they put such a roast beef on my plate, that I was shocked. It was almost as big as a cow itself, I couldn’t eat it all.

In America we’ve been to Washington, some friend of Mark’s, who understood Russian, organized excursions for us. We went to the cemetery and saw Kennedy graves; we went to the Memorial of American soldiers, killed in Vietnam. We’ve been to the planetarium and experienced what it’s like to fly on fast speed planes and space shuttles. In New York we’ve been to the Museum of Fine Arts, walked to the Statue of Liberty, we’ve been to Manhattan, Harlem, the Bronx and Brighton Beach, of course. We even tried the elevators of the Empire State Building.

Also, we visited our relatives, went shopping. For example we bought a sweater for 5 dollars on sale. My husband loved this sweater and wore it for years. We paid for the airplane tickets only, and there our relatives gave us money and presents, they hosted and fed us. In Washington we noticed that there were quite many Russians around. We’ve also been to a casino. We played some machines and lost those few dollars, which we had. We even went to McDonalds for the first time in our entire life! I must say that real America differed very much from that country, which I had read about in books.

However, once I saw that old America, when some guy in a wide coat and big hat was speaking to the crowd in the very center of New York. But that was the only time. Generally, we saw happy smiling faces, unusual trees with big violet flowers, high speed roads, tunnels, and all this impressed us so much! We even bought gorgeous Russian food – sausages and sweets from my childhood – in Russian food stores. You can never find such splendid products in Russia. Even today. So we came back from America, feeling happy, rich and shocked.