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This month, RBTH’s Asia Team looked at the most popular internet search requests about Asia-Pacific countries in Russian, and picked the strangest, most humorous, and confusing ones.
We used the two most popular search engines in Russia – Yandex, used by over 50 percent of Russia’s netizens and Google, which is also popular. We typed the beginning of a question (for example, “Why Australia…”) in the search box and picked the most interesting lines among the default endings.
Here are some of the most popular requests.
Yandex directs users to encyclopedia-like pages explaining the origin of the country’s Dutch name. Another popular question among Russian users is “Where is Old Zealand?”.
Google directs users to different pages that mention the geographical location of Australia. These pages explain that in Australia, summer is from December to March and winter is from June to September, because of the tilt of the Earth’s rotation relative to the Sun.
The request leads to an endless list of geopolitical forums that discuss conspiracies, and most of them say that China is “too smart to do it.”
Context: When India decided to retire its fleet of ageing MiG-25s, Russia offered its long-standing defense partner a new set of MiG-31 interceptors. India, however, chose to use Sukhoi Su-30MKIs instead.
At the moment, Russian Google doesn’t have any answers, and suggests surfing over a number of dubious blogs and forums.
According to the most relevant result, the same question is included in the list of examination questions for students of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Obviously, they have been trying to find out the answer thousands of times.
Context: In the summer 2015, Indonesia banned the use of the US dollar and other foreign currencies in domestic transactions to halt the fall of the rupiah.
Thanks to the devaluation of the ruble, Russians can probably empathize with their Indonesian friends.
For unknown reasons, Russians seem to be very interested about this existential problem in Malaysia.
Context: A very famous song from the 1920s by Russian singer Alexander Vertinsky starts with the line “In Singapore which is a banana-lemon…” Why? This is, no doubt, one of the greatest mysteries of the 20thcentury.
Context: Until last year, many Russians spent their winter holidays in Thailand. However, due to the dramatic fall in the value of the ruble at the end of 2014, the cost of tours to Thailand rose by over 50 percent.
Context: Although Goa and other parts of India are becoming increasingly popular with Russian tourists, there are far more charter flights from Russia to Thailand, making it cheaper to fly to the kingdom.
Russian farmers are very confused. Vietnamese pigs do not seem to grow as large as their Russian counterparts despite being fed well. Yandex sends users to forums that discuss causes and symptoms of pig depression!
Many Russian tourists speculate as to why Vietnamese people stick to the shallow part of a swimming pool.
To find out the answer via Yandex, you need to read a lot of history blogs, which mention the options Japan had in 1941. Such blogs also have thousands of scenarios of alternative history. The real answer is boring: The countries signed a neutrality pact.
