More on bliny - and change

I can't leave the Teremok website alone. It is strangely fascinating to me, perhaps because I am hungry, although this is helped by looking at some of the photos on the menu page. I am sure the people paying good money to have this website set up think this looks like Gourmet-magazine-quality food porn, but I have to say that the bliny are actually more appetizing in real life than in these rather unnatural-looking pictures. Plus, you don't actually want all of the ingredients bursting out of the blin like that - makes it tough to eat standing there on the street. And (on a more personal note) the photo of the ham-and-cheese crepe shows that management does not understand that customers want the cheese melted. Or at least I do. But often it isn't, so I guess the photo reflects reality, although it's usually slightly more melty than in the photo on the website. Am I really blogging about this?

Anyway, physical hunger aside, the "forum" section of the site gives customers hungering for a good service experience the chance to sound off, and they receive surprisingly candid responses from Teremok's management. Visitors to the site can start their own threads and, if sufficiently disgruntled, engage in debates with the company's management about, for example, their commitment to quality. My favorite thread is called СДАЧА (yes, it's in all caps on the site, meaning someone set it up that way), or CHANGE, not the kind Putin is trying to effect, but the kind you get when you've overpaid for something.

Anyone who has tried to buy just about anything in this country using cash has a story about a surprisingly surly cashier who expected you to have exact change. Sometimes if your bill is REALLY big (500 or 1000 rubles, about 18 or 36 dollars, respectively) the cashier will just tell you that you can't make the purchase, see ya later. This is always a fun survival game. The ways to win it are 1) look sufficiently apologetic and say very sad things about how you're really, really sorry you don't have change; or 2) start yelling about how you don't understand why they don't want to take your money. Since it's never clear until too late which of these methods will work in a given situation (it depends on that specific cashier's personal life, self-esteem at that moment in time, etc.), the only foolproof method is 3) try to go change your "big" bill somewhere else, usually by purchasing a pack of gum or something, since appealing to people's desire to help you out generally gets you nowhere in Moscow. It's interesting that the posts on the Teremok forum about this issue show that this irritates average Russians (OK, make that average internet-access-having Russians) also, not just spoiled, whiny expats.

I am on a roll now - I think I'll post to the Teremok forum about making the cheese more melty.