Masha, what did you do last weekend?
I walked with friends.
What did Dmitri do yesterday?
He walked with friends.
What do your friends like to do?
We like to walk with friends.
You might get the impression that Russians spend all their time walking places. Further leading questions (Where did you walk? Did you walk to the theater? Did you walk to school?) doesn’t help clarify anything. To be fair, Russia is a much more pedestrian-inclined country (for social and economic reasons) than the comparatively car-dependent America. But my beginning EFL students weren’t going anywhere- they were really just trying to express the fact that they like гулять (gulyatz). Translated most literally, it does mean to walk, stroll, promenade, but the emphasis here is on really the process, not the destination. This was most obvious when I noticed that I’d left my group of gulyatz-ing friends behind in my American tendency to rush, walking briskly to a specific end. Too often we get caught up in getting somewhere, going there for a reason; going for a stroll seems quaint, if antiquated. Even on a chilly winter night, Russians (though fewer of them) will be out, walking casually along snowy streets. Others may join and leave a group at will. Of course, it’s much more pleasant to gulyatz during the early summer, when daylight stretches into the early hours of the morning in the northern part of the country.
Гулять can also be used more loosely to mean “to hang out”. While gulyatz-ing, I’ve gone bowling, played billiards, and sat in a park with playing cards, drinking some boxed wine. Simply put, гулять is not attached to a place or a reason, it’s a (pretty enjoyable) state of being.
