Russian for a Couple Rounds

I am close friends with a colleague of mine in the Lisbon office named Dmitry. He leads all the engineering teams that you do not want to lead. The teams that everyone expects to just work, like billing. Surprisingly complex and a nightmare when they fail. I am relieved that someone does this kind of thing. And I am grateful that it is Dmitry.

He and I also look alike. Tall, lanky, light brown hair, blue eyes, and skin that is at risk of sunburn under fluorescent lamps. We’ve been mistaken for brothers on two occasions. A couple weeks ago it happened for the third time about two hours east of Brussels in the town of Francorchamps, Belgium.

There, hidden in the dense Ardennes forest, sits a racetrack. Referred to by the mononym Spa, the circuit has been the home of the Belgian Grand Prix for a century (pausing for a few years when the Nazis invaded France by cutting through the area and then again when the Allies pushed the Nazis back the other direction at the Battle of the Bulge).

Dmitry and I went to the 2025 edition. My first time at an F1 race. He’s a fan and planned the whole excursion. I just showed up. As the default trip planner in my family I finally understood how my wife must feel when we travel. It’s nice.

What I did not realize about these races is that they are multiday events packed with racing from F1 through F(n). Makes for a fun weekend but at Spa you have to plan your commute. Nearly half a million people show up to this thing, or about 3% of the population of Belgium. Way more than can stay nearby. So we found lodging in Brussels and took a train and then a shuttle each day, each way.

On Saturday we made a decision to skip out on the last race of the day to catch the first shuttle out, get a real dinner in Brussels, and be ready to show up early for the Sunday event.

The shuttle pickup is about a 30 minute walk from the track. On that walk you pass a half dozen restaurants that convert into outdoor bars for the weekend. We had about 45 minutes to kill so we picked a pop-up bar at random, ordered a couple Heinekens, and sat on one of the picnic tables.

While we sipped beer and looked through Dmitry’s racing photos from his real camera, a loud batch of five or six American race fans arrived. And they decided to start a multinationally inclusive party.

To avoid revealing sources, I’ll give you a general description without specifics.

Their ringleader was a man in his early 60s who owns a German luxury car dealership in SEC football country. I am sure he is a booster at the nearby school. The kind of good ol’ boy that calls people champ and bud, but not in the condescending way that some guys do. He was every bit as gregarious as you’d imagine.

Americans sometimes get a bad rap for being rude amidst foreign cultures, but I think that is unfair. It is the British who are rude when they leave their island. Instead, this guy and his crew were doing what I see Americans do all the time in Europe: being excited, if a bit over-eager, to meet people from other places (as long as those people can speak English with them). This man opened a tab with the bartender and started to solicit anyone walking by with hearty invitations to join them for free drinks. A good number took him up on it.

The man’s wife was a bit of a character, which is what people from the South say to be polite. A tall blonde woman who very quickly said things to me and Dmitry that are too raunchy to republish here. Instead, I’ll skip ahead to my own lies.

The party kept growing while Dmitry and I nursed our beers and observed.The circle expanded and started to encroach on our little island. Eventually, the man’s wife turned to us and shouted “you two must be brothers! Join us! Where are you from?”

To which Dmitry responded, without consulting me, “yes we are brothers! And we are from Russia!”

And this answer was sorta true. Dmitry was born in the Soviet Union and grew up near Siberia. He’s an American citizen who has lived in the US for all of his adult life, where he worked for a series of the best tech companies around, and he has not been home to Russia in a very long time. He still has a slight accent, but he’s more American than I am at this point.

Of course, he’s also more Russian than me.

I held my breath for a beat after he answered. For reasons, talking about Russia with Europeans these days comes with some baggage. Not Dmitry’s fault, of course, but it’s a real thing. He was nearly kicked out of a barbershop in Lisbon when they realized he was from the place. Tensions are high out here.

But, true to their welcoming spirit, our hostess yanked us out of our picnic table and brought us over to the party.

She yelled to the wider group “these are two brothers from Russia!” Dmitry introduced himself as Vlad and I committed to the bit and became Alexei. Her husband walked over and shook our hands firmly and declared himself a big fan of Putin. And he meant it.

We had landed somewhere in that strange wing of the MAGA populist movement that had become fans of Russia in its current form. The branch that deviated from the hawkish Cold War era and borrowed from President Trump’s admiration of the place and its leader, or something like that.

Which makes me so curious. Not in a mean or mocking way, but I like trying to understand what makes people tick. I wanted to ask a thousand questions about this guy’s politics, but I don’t exactly sound like I am from Moscow, so I took a backseat. I became two new things that day: a Russian and a mute. I let my brother Vlad do the talking or at least the responding when the interrogation began.

I’m going to do my best to recount the conversation with my own commentary in italics.

Host: You guys make the best tanks!
This is not true.

Dmitry: Yes, very good tanks. We build them close to my home town.
First half more true. Second half true-ish.

Host: But wait! Are you guys still hacking us?
Again, that weird holdover from Reagan/Bush era republicans who had become more MAGA but still can’t seem to decide if Russia is an enemy.

Me: Not anymore.
This line killed. The host turned to the group and repeated it.

Host: What do you guys really do? Why are you here?
Noticeably not “how are you here?”

Dmitry: We are students and we like race cars.
Sure.

Host: Great! We’re doing limoncello shots but I will find vodka.
Oh boy.

He summoned the bartender to go find Russian vodka. The bartender procured a clear liquor from a bottle that probably had not been displayed on the shelf since 2022. He handed us drinks, not shots, of vodka as well as the limoncello in plastic cups. At this point we passed the test and began to just mill about the party.

The host then introduced his son, a Crossfit instructor looking dude, and added “you’ll like him. He does something with intelligence in DC. He only says that he works with government satellites. I think he is a spy.”

Oh. Good.

We greeted the son but after the limoncello hit my fake accent started to veer into Borat territory which posed a problem when we started to field questions from a very muscly, mildly suspicious, defense contractor patriot. We did our best to demure while planning an escape as our schtick had run its course.

As we began to sneak off, our hosts invited another passing group to join in the party. These guys were from Bulgaria and all four of them were shaped exactly like bulldogs.

We turned around as our host pointed out that we were his new Russian friends and, lemme tell ya, the Bulgarians did not like this. I am pretty sure one growled. Their faces went from sunburned and grouchy to openly hostile. I’m not sure they wanted to start a fight, but I’m also not sure they didn’t.

And with Dmitry and I having builds that resemble slenderman, I did not want to find out what it would be like to catch a right hook to the kidney from a Bulgarian mechanic with the pent up rage of decades of Soviet rule.

So we decided it was time to do svidaniya. We walked the last quarter mile to the bus stop and sat on the grass laughing as we retold the story of what had happened ten minutes earlier.

The longer I have lived away, the more I have forgotten how friendly Americans can be. And how generally open people are to being welcomed into a scene by a charismatic person. Regardless of origin. The place you’re from matters a lot less than how much people just want to be part of a community, whether that community is limoncello-soaked at a bus stop or something more proper.