http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/russia-what-you-didnt-know.html

And the funniest example, which happened no fewer than five times, was me on the street needing navigation help, trying to ask a stranger for help, and having the stranger completely ignore my existence, as if I weren’t there at all (this shocked me at first and then became my new favorite thing in the world when I realized it was an actual cultural thing).

Sometimes people would continue to talk to me at full speed in Russian even after I made it clear that all I know how to say is hi, bye, thank you, and thank you very much. This happened a lot, and I still don’t get why.

When the day was over, they invited me to come hang out at their house, which was a great idea except it was a bad idea. The main issue was that we couldn’t talk to each other whatsoever, but the mainer issue was that their queen size bed took up nearly all of the square footage of the apartment, and I found myself having nowhere to sit but the bed, and so now we’re all just sitting there on the bed without being able to talk and that was kind of the extent of it. For three hours. I don’t really have more to say about this situation, and I’m sure they don’t either.

He’s a Siberian psychic and someone I clearly needed to meet once I learned of his existence, and after a one-hour interview with him about his work (expertly interpreted by a local WBW reader) and a one-hour psychic assessment of me, the key takeaway was that I have a dark side that lives in my left testicle. Now I have to go on with my life with that information.