This story takes place in Blinders, a bar in St Petersburg that I wrote an incredibly soppy blog about yesterday.
The month was April; the canals had just thawed and I had swapped my thick winter jacket for my very slightly thinner spring fleece. I was, predictably, in the pub, tasting the newest pint they had on draught. It was called Raskolnikov, and it was the second best beer I’d ever tasted.
“Oof,” I said.
I was keen to make conversation with Lyosha, the barman, and to practise my Russian, so I wasn’t content to leave it at that. “That’s really nice.” I realised I could stretch my Russian a little further, so I added, “That’s very tasty.”
“Yeah,” he said. He and I were the only people in the bar. I fiddled with my receipt and started folding a crane. Lyosha rearranged some glasses.
“It really is very… nice,” I said, failing to think of a third synonym. I decided to draw on this native Russian’s experience: “Lyosha,” I said, “what do you call it when something is, really, just very, very tasty?”
“Oh,” he said, “we can say it’s ахуенно [akh-oo-yen-a]. If it’s really good.”
“Cool!” I said. “Well, this beer is ахуенно!”
Lyosha laughed heartily; I was thrilled: making Russians laugh was a personal goal of mine, and not one that I achieved that often – with the exception of at my expense, when my accent crossed the line from bad to egregious. Another customer came in; they spoke in Russian too quickly for me to understand, but soon after a friend joined me and we got to talking.
“How’s the beer?” he asked.
“Ахуенно!”
I kept describing my pint as such, and my enthusiasm was met by smiles every time. This is a great word, I thought to myself. People love it.
I went to university in high spirits the next day: yesterday had been so unexpectedly full of smiles and people asking how much I liked my beer that my spirits were soaring. My teacher, seeing my uncharacteristically bright expression, asked me how my evening was. I was keen to use this fabulous word, to replicate the great reception it’d received the night before.
I replied cheerily, “Well, it was simply ахуенно!”
My teacher’s face dropped. “…Rosie,” she said, “where did you hear that word?”
“In a bar,” I replied, bemused. This wasn’t the response I was used to.
“Rosie, please, don’t talk that way,” she said.
Later, in Blinders, I told Lyosha what had happened, tone full of confusion and wide-eyed with innocence. He burst out laughing, called his friend over and had me repeat the story.
“You told me it meant good!!” I said, watching both men wipe tears from their eyes.
“It does,” he said, “but it’s not the kind of thing you say to your teacher.”
[After careful etymological study, my friends and I have concluded that the closest English translation to ахуенно is the rather charming cuntastic. Remembering saying that to my seventy year old Russian teacher will stay with me to my death bed.]
From that moment until the day I left Russia in June, Lyosha introduced me to friends, and, indeed, strangers, as the girl who said ахуенно to her teacher. The story was met with singular hilarity and disbelief.
Anyway, this is a cautionary tale to anyone who, like me, is stupid enough not to attach context to the words you learn in bars.
Have an ахуенный day, dear readers!
