Sarah Paine

I would do, for a meal, I would do talk English for an hour.

And

Yeah, what that family wanted more than anything else was a VCR player.

And they had a diplomatic, you could have hard currency and buy at the diplomatic whatever it was.

So I basically got them a VCR by going to the diplomatic thing with my very limited foreign currency, bought an overpriced VCR for them, and they got all kinds of meals for the rest of the year.

But

But it meant that they could all of a sudden get Western movies.

And there are things like in movies where, oh, like there'll be a picture of, I don't know, a fugitive running by, I don't know, the fruit section of the Berkeley Ball.

And the Russians would be, you know, just, it's unbelievable.

The...

I think that Raisa Gorbachev, Gorbachev's wife, when she came and visited, she must have realized that a welfare mother on food stamps had better buying power than she did by just being able to have access to Walmart.

I think the elites as they're traveling, I have no statistical data on this, but as you travel, it's like I'm comparing me getting sour cream in a...

And, oh, yeah, that was the other thing.

Counting up all the things in a Soviet supermarket.

And the total was something like 77 items total in this supermarket.

I don't think that compares favorably to a candy rack as you leave, I don't know, a 7-Eleven, right?

And, oh, yeah, when you went by the meat section, the smell just about knocked you out of rotten meat.

It was really disgusting.

I got really good at making borscht.

Go to the peasant market, pay hard currency for bones, because I couldn't afford any meat, but I could afford the bones.