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RUSSIA FROM Tip TO Tip * by Howard I. Ross I went on an eight-day trip to Russia with a hundred fellow citizens, described as "prominent Canadian business men," in connection with the inauguration of Air Canada's new service from Montreal to Moscow via Copenhagen. We had a marvellous time. Everyone asks for "impressions," but it is not easy to sort out impressions from the confusion and excitement of travelling 13,000 miles, in eight days, through totally unfamiliar country without knowing the language. It would even help to understand the alphabet, so that one could read signs. How shocking it is that we know and understand so little about onu of the most powerful nations in the world, with a population of a couple of hundred million and competence in nuclear explosion. It would be ludicrous to attempt to compare the Russian way of life with ours, or assess our relative economic potentials, after such a brief exposure to the country. But surely we should start to demolish the terrible barriers to communication between us; and one way to do this is to encourage more Canadians to visit Russia. Our group's experience can hardly have developed many Russian experts, but it certainly proved that a trip to Russia can be a stimulating experience. Travel conditions, while not as comfortable as those we have become accustomed to on this continent, are quite satisfactory to anyone except the types (why on earth do they travel anyway?] who complain if they do not find everything abroad exactly the same as it is at home. Travel to Russia is still not so common, but you soon find out, in preparing for your trip, that enough Canadians have been there for a certain mystique or know-how to have developed, and you find yourself getting quite a bit of free advice. An intriguing subject is tipping. Everyone seemed to give this a high priority. It caused me more trouble than any other aspect of the trip, and I propose to deal with it at some length, although I hesitate to raise doubts about advice so consistently given by the experts. What everyone said was that tipping was not done; that Russians would be offended if tipped. The thing to do was to bring a supply of small gifts, as these were "acceptable and appreciated" for little services rendered. There was marked agreement on what to select as gifts—a curious list, it seemed to me, but so 4
Object Description
Title |
Russia tip to tip |
Author |
Ross, Howard I. |
Subject |
Soviet Union -- Economic conditions -- 1945- |
Geographic Location |
Soviet Union |
Citation |
Tempo, Vol. 14, no. 1 (1968, March), p. 04-09 |
Date-Issued | 1968 |
Source | Originally published by: Touche, Ross, Bailey & Smart |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte |
Type | Text |
Format | PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi |
Collection | Deloitte Digital Collection |
Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection |
Date-Digitally Created | 2010 |
Language | eng |
Identifier | Tempo_1968_March-p4-9 |