If you read the agency type hype, Russian/Ukrainian women are the strongest in the world. That perception is kept alive on various Russian humour sites as well, you know, the ones with doctored photos of RW carrying timber out of the forest or lifting tractors out of the mud.
In general I've have disagreed with those extreme stereotypes yet while admitting that few things cause grown men to tremble like an angry babuskha (grandmother/old lady). I've been on the receiving end of such wrath and later wondered what had allowed an arthritic and overweight old lady to turn a healthy grown man into blubbering jelly.
But those are grandmothers and in every culture, including Western societies, we cower at the idea of crossing Granny. It isn't really about her strength or our weakness as much as it is about
shame. We slink away with our tails between our legs and our heads lowered because we've been shamed.
However, as this video will illustrate, there may just be something to this idea of "
strong" Russian women. Take Aunts for example. Mrs. M and I are arriving at the age where even our Aunts are elderly, babushki in their own rights, but observing other families, I see where certain Aunts are strong willed as well.
Take the Aunt in the video below. One of the comments is that bears can get into the cellar. Growing up in a rural setting I remember how cellars were filled with cured meats, vegetables such as potatoes, fruits like apples wrapped in newspaper, milk/cheese and eggs. Many a Russian village house has a supply of vodka or some homemade concoction stored in a cellar. All in all, quite a party place for a hungy bear.
The Russian term for "aunt" is
Тётя (TYO-tya), a tongue twister at first and seemingly the
Тётя in our video is raising her voice to protect her cellar. It worked.
As to bear encounters the supposed experts claim that the best strategy is to make a lot of noise: shout, beat the bushes, bang on tin cans, honk a car horn if available, etc. Unless the animal is unusually aggressive, the prevailing theory is that it will scurry off to bug someone else. That seems to work for most folks in rare instances of bear sighting with the bears scurrying off in one direction and humans in the opposite.
These bears however were out a bit early for spring, obviously hungry so I guess that it took an older Russian woman to scare them off!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=6ODCC2zlPzkSo, have you encountered the so-called
strong Russian woman? Or her aunts?
Trivia:The word for bear is
медвед, (myed-vyed) as in the name of Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev.
