A young American student asked my friend, a Russian language teacher, “Why do they show on the news that a German married a dog?”

Another friend’s coworker told her about a recent outing with former university classmates. One of them, a woman, had told him that Russia was the last bastion of Christianity in the world; according to her, the rest of the world was drowning in vice. When he objected to this assertion, the woman replied, “What, aren’t you a patriot?” Later in the evening, after the champagne and cognac were flowing freely and the woman was in her cups, she confessed to him that, in fact, she “loved” Europe.