In which I get yelled at

Prologue: Normally to get into or leave the dorm, you're required to swipe a card with your name and picture on it. When we moved in in August, the lady who makes the cards was sick. She was out sick for a while and no one else seemed capable of making the cards, so we would just flash our plain white cards at the person sitting at the desk. Occasionally they would ask for some actual form of identification, like our student IDs, but that was the rare exception.

Yesterday I went with my roommates to finally get our dorm cards. We walked across the second floor, which connects all three buildings of 20 ulitsa Korablestroiteley, in order to get to the first building, where the card maker lady is. Ashley and Leah just flashed their white cards as usual, and were allowed to pass through. But when I showed them my card, I suddenly became the focus of intense scrutiny. "Where's your propusk [document certifying that you live here]?" the woman and man hovering around the front counter kept asking me. I tried everything -- student ID, deposit slips, simply asking what they wanted from me. But instead the woman started yelling at me, "Why are you laughing?! This isn't funny! This is serious!"  They wouldn't relent and let me out, so I had to walk back to my building, leave, and walk around and enter the first building from the outside. And now I'm the proud holder of a cheap white plastic card with a horrible picture of me on it that lets me in and out of the dorm without having to interact with any of the desk people. Yay.

What I found to be interesting in this episode was how 1) smiling of any sort was taken as a complete lack of seriousness, 2) here people yell at you for very minor infractions, and 3) meaningless rules are annoying. This isn't the first time I've been yelled at, but just the most ridiculous. On one of my first days here, I accidentally sat on a conductor's seat on the bus, and she asked me, "Do you know how to read?" In my summer program we discussed how people in Russia don't smile and I thought it might be a bit of an exaggeration. But it's absolutely true. On the street, in shops, even when talking to people you don't know so well, smiling is basically forbidden. It's a bit strange coming from America, where smiling is a form of politeness. Since no one smiles here, maybe yelling at strangers is just another way of maintaining distance and showing authority. And then if they find out you're a foreigner, it's just a matter of the superiority of Russians over everyone else...