Hi, folks. Sorry for the inexcusable gap in posting here. I´ve gotten pretty used to living in Russia now, so I don´t go, ¨Woah, that´s strange!¨ nearly so often. I can´t think of what to say here. So, two things:

1. I am going to start using this to write about my life in general
2. You should ask me questions. What do you want to know about life in Russia?

So... this past weekend was a holiday. I don´t know what holiday; like almost all holidays here, it is referred to only by the date. May First Holiday is useful for knowing when, but not for what. I think it was May Day.

What it meant for me was that my friends had a 3-day weekend. I am doing mostly freelance work now, so if I want to have 3 days off instead of my usual 1, I have the ability to re-arrange my lessons. So I crammed six days worth of students into three, bought a new daypack that might not hurt my shoulder, threw some food and my favorite swiss army knife in it, and set off.

In all, nine of us went. Six girls, including my dear friend Karina, and three boys. The boys were all named - wait for it - Sasha. Yup. We drove something like 200 km out of Peterburg, into the country, into the forest, into the mud. We stopped when the car could go no further at the equivalent of a state park. Then we backpacked about an hour and a half into the forest and set up camp.

The park was gorgeous. Typical Russian forest of pine and white birch, peppered with granite boulders and cliffs, bordering a lake. We climbed up and down and over and around lots of boulders and cliffs and such (all of the Sashas and a couple of the girls went top-rope climbing a couple of times), felt the wind crash around us on the cliffs, and generally had a good time wandering around.

It was very cold at night, so I woke up in the pre-dawn freeziness every day (between 4 and 5 am) so cold my whole body was shaking violently. Of course I did the sensible thing and got up, put on my shoes, took my waterbottle and some trail mix, and went hiking for four hours. (The others all said they were cold, too, but that didn´t keep them from sleeping until 10 or 11 or noon every day. Maybe they have a higher cold tolerance?) It was glorious watching the world wake up, being the only person awake in it.

After I was thoroughly awake and alive, I´d go back to camp. Usually no one would be up yet, so I´d sit and work on a story or two or collect wood and get the fire going. And then everyone else got up and there was much talking and eating and general joking and fun. We went hiking a bit and they did lots of climbing. We saw frogs and cute little black snakes with yellow ears and anoles and tons of birds.

And then it was back to the fire for some sort of meal. One night we sang lots of songs with accompaniment on the guitar and hand drum by a couple of the Sashas. It was grand fun. We also adopted a guy who was camping by himself near us and was quite nice. Plus, his name wasn´t Sasha, so he helped even things out a bit. And he could play guitar, too.

Oddly enough, most of the songs they chose to play were in English - famous rock or pop songs, on the whole. And, of course, I knew none of them. They kept asking if I was sure I was really American. Heh. Yup - I just know almost nothing about pop culture....

It was grand fun. I miss it already. Getting to see trees and rocks instead of asphalt and concrete was quite refreshing. I feel so much more at home and alive in the woods. I love the autonomy of camping, how I can put everything I need to live in a pack on my back. And I love the routines of gathering wood, maintaining the fire, getting up really early and then taking a nap on a sun-soaked rock in the afternoon. Of roasting things over the fire or in the coals. I even loved going to the spring to get water, especially since we always went the fast way - straight down two cliffs - instead of the long, gradual way around. And then went back up those two cliffs, carrying a two-gallon jug of water in each hand. Oh, yes.

But I also like coming Home. I love that everything is an immense luxury: running water! toilets! beds! shampoo! refrigerators! How that first shower feels like a miracle. And the way that my sunburned face and scratched-up hands in my dress clothes for work remind me of the grand weekend I had.

I will complain only about one thing: Russians have never heard of trowels.

I'm working three jobs right now. "Transitioning" from one to another meaning "working both jobs nearly full-time until my replacement is done being trained at the one I'm leaving."

I also decided that it would be clever to start working on my writing and trying to get in one to two hours of writing per day. Which has been fabulous, but smacked on top of a fifteen hour workday, leaves very little time for blogging. Plus I haven't been at all sure what to write about.

Ok, enough excuses.




In the past two weeks, I've had several interesting episodes of people commenting on my Russian. I found three of them particularly amusing, so I'm going to inflict them on you, too!


Incident 1:

Two or three times a week I stop by a certain cafe to have a cup of tea or coffee between classes. I've been doing this for months now, and it's always the same server and barista who try to make the muddled sounds coming from my mouth into something that they can recognize as an order. Sometimes we have to talk for a minute or two before we both know what it is I'm trying to ask for.

About two weeks ago I was in a particular hurry but really wanted something warm to drink, so instead of taking a seat, I went up to the counter and took one of the menus to order something to go. Both the barista and the waitress looked at me with alarm. "That menu's in English! You won't be able to read it!"

I laughed and said, in English, "I'm American." Then, in Russian, "I'm from America. I can read English."

They were very surprised.

(As one of my students commented when I told him this story, perhaps they were sure that someone who spoke Russian so badly would be incapable of mastering a difficult foreign language like English!)



Incident 2:

I was sitting in a cafe writing (cafes show up a lot in my world; a warm place to sit for two or three hours and write between jobs for only $3, which includes coffee or tea - YES!) when a man and his wife came in and sat next to me. They needed to take another chair, so I gave them mine. They were speaking English, so I could tell that the man was East-Coast American and the woman was Russian.

They were there for about an hour, in the middle of my two hours of writing time there. During that period, I ignored them as best I could, but did offer them the chair in English and also gave the man directions to the toilet. I also ordered a refill of my tea (or whatever it was that I was drinking that day), in Russian, of course.

After a long time, the man turned to me and said in terrible, terrible Russian, "What is your name?"

I smiled and replied in English, "Annie. What's yours?"

(We'll pretend he said John.)

"Where are you from, John?"

"New York."

"Oh, what part of New York?"

With a slightly condescending tone, he said, "Long Island. Why? Have you visited the United States? Have you been to New York?"

I couldn't help laughing. "I grew up in Upstate New York."

He was surprised, which was reasonable - it was his first time ever in Russia and of course I speak some Russian and was in a Russian cafe. But his wife, who is Russian, was SURE that I was a Russian who just happened to speak excellent English. She even tried to cover herself by telling me that I "speak English with a Russian accent!" Haha. I don't think I'm THAT far gone yet. But thanks for the compliment on my Russian.



Incident 3:

I was chatting with another teacher before one of my lessons at the State Elementary School where I teach on Friday, and the teacher remarked to me that my Russian was "excellent, almost without accent."

Then, during my lesson (it was with my 5th grade class), another teacher came into my classroom to get her coat, and we had a brief conversation in Russian. When she left, one of my students remarked, "You speak Russian really funny."

I think I'm gonna have to side with the eleven-year-old on this one.

I take public transit all the time in Saint Peterburg. It's the only way I have of getting around, aside from my own two feet (which I use often, as well). But in general I limit my transit time to the metro. It's fast, cheap, and reliable. (Usually.)

Buses, on the other hand, are unpredictable. They rarely run on schedule, they change routes without notice, and one never quite knows where they're going to turn or stop. There aren't tracks or tunnels to contain them. Riding buses makes me quite agitated, and I avoid them as often as possible. Unfortunately, one of my Sunday afternoon students lives in a place that's only accessable by bus.

Two weeks ago the bus I was taking to my student's house re-routed and didn't go past my stop. They don't tell us these things, of course (at least not in a way that I understand), so I ended riding the bus for a full hour all the way down to the bus depot way in the middle of nowhere far outside city limits. The bus people kicked me off into the heavy snow, and I stood and shivered in the dark, hoping another bus would come and take me to a metro station somewhere. After waiting awhile, another bus came and did, indeed, have a metro station on its route. By that point I was so late for my lesson that I just canceled it.

Last Sunday the bus took me to my student's house, as it usually does. Whew. But from there, I was supposed to go meet up with a friend. I had found out the week before that the bus went down to the area where my friend lives, so I got back on that bus when my lesson was finished. Only this bus was re-routed, and did NOT go near where my friend lives. I ended up at another bus depot. Again in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, and it was snowing. This time I got on a marshutka (mini-bus/taxi) and took it to another metro station. It took me an hour and a half to get to the metro. I was so late that I canceled my meeting.

Enter today. I tentatively got on the bus to go to my student's house. It took me there. Yay! I very carefully chose the bus to take me back home. I've taken this exact bus number almost every week for the past 4 months, so I KNOW that it goes to the train station two blocks from my house. But it didn't today.

Today it turned where it's not supposed to turn, and went to a snazzy new shopping center. There the bus people kicked everyone off to stand in the dark, the wind, and, you guessed it - the snow. BUT at this new shopping center was a metro station. Albeit a metro station I've never heard of before. I decided to risk it; metro trains rarely go places that you don't expect them to go, and don't often re-route (although they DO re-route sometimes). Plus it was COLD outside in the snow.

Everything looked very shiny and clean and bright and new. The whole place smelled of new plastic. I rode down to the bottom. LINE 5! The signs said. Line 5?! There are only 4 lines in Saint Peterburg! I looked at the map on the wall, and, indeed, there is now a fifth line, the Purple Line. Interesting.

I had to wait over 10 minutes for the metro train to come by (which is ridiculous; in most stations they come every two minutes or so), and the line is only two stations long right now, so they kicked us all off to transfer at the first stop. But I knew how to get home from there, so it was ok.

I found out when I got home that they only opened that new station yesterday. Wow.

And to think I would have missed it if the bus had run its normal route!

I still hate buses, though.

The Magic Doctor works in the Military Medical Academy. It's a huge campus of generally unlabeled buildings, pavement, and courtyards. Even my friend got lost – and she did her dissertation here! In good Russian fashion, we had to go down an old, poorly lite concrete staircase into a tunnel, twisty and narrow and low, and through this tunnel passage to a small room where we gave our coats to an attendant and put on baheelie – blue plastic bags with elastic at the top to cover our shoes. We chose one of the three nondescript doors, and found ourselves coming up a narrow flight of stairs recessed into a corner of the floor of a grand mansion entryway. I felt like we were sneaking in, or had somehow been classed with the servants.

 

We climbed the grand staircase to a little hall which had a little fountain in it, two doors leading out of it, and a small twisty staircase. It also had lots of crumbling plaster figures and filigree on the walls. The fountain room used to be nice, but the yellow walls now grey, the cracked and permanently stained floor tiles, the light which dared not show its face openly – combined to make the place feel sad and old and lonely.

 

A doctor in white coat briskly walked through the room, motioning for us to follow him. He whisked us through one of the doors and into the first part of the massive medical facility that looked remotely medical to me. The walls were painted coral orange/pink, but the floor was more white, the passages were not so narrow, and the ceiling was dotted with fluorescent lighting. But it wasn't terribly clean, and the exam room was bare and shabby.

 

Still, the Doctor, with his quick, efficient questions and exam and lack of formalities or small talk, was Magic. He immediately gave an excellent diagnosis and explanation of what was going on. He certainly wasn't an American doctor, telling me options and letting me at least pretend to choose, and he didn't explain what the drugs he prescribed would do, other than help. The difference makes tons of sense given the cultural difference, and it really didn't bother me. In this case, he is the expert and I really know nothing about it, and it was actually very reassuring to be given such a sure diagnosis and have no responsibility whatsoever other than following the doctor's instructions.

 

He very carefully hand wrote a long prescription, starting with diagnosis and proceeding to list all the things I should do, medicines to take, etc. This important paper was stamped with a rectangular stamp and a triangular stamp in appropriate places. Stamps are the most important thing on documents here. Russian bureaucrats LOVE stamps. You can't get anything done without the proper stamps in the proper locations. If your stamp is in the wrong place, you have to get a whole new piece of paper (this happened to me with a visa once, causing much trouble).

 

Anyway, someone else needed the exam room while the doctor was writing the prescription, so we we waited outside. There were three small couches – loveseats in any setting other than a hospital hallway – stuffing coming out of their blue-grey arms and cushions. The first one had an old lady sitting on it. The second was occupied by a plastic bag (which people use to transport any and everything to and from work: lunch, documents, shoes...) and a needle from a syringe stuck into a soiled piece of cotton wool. That seemed overly sketchy to me, so we sat on the most decrepit sofa, which had no visible occupants.

 

The doctor emerged, gave us the prescription, and we left to find a pharmacy and argue with the pharmacist over what we needed (they don't fill prescriptions, they try to give you advice on what a better treatment option would be). I was thankful my friend (who's a doctor) was there to deal with the pharmacist. I am VERY glad that she took me to see The Magic Doctor.

It was Thanksgiving in America this week. All my family and many of my friends got 4 days off work, gathered together, and consumed lots of yummy food. They probably also spend some time thinking about what they were thankful for, any may have even donated to charity or volunteered somewhere in honor of the holidays.

Of course, since American holidays don't tend to be celebrated here (although their trappings and commercialism are often imported), we spent "Thanksgiving Day" working. Which was fine, although I would have liked to have had the time off. But one of the other Americans who works in my school decided to host an Expat Thanksgiving Shindig, so tonight a bunch of us are getting together to eat a "traditional" Thanksgiving meal.

I forget if I was asked or if I volunteered, but somehow I ended up assigned to bring pumpkin pie. No sweat. I am a good cook. I've made pumpkin pie before. Got this one.

Except I forgot that there's no Wegmans* around here.

So Thursday afternoon between classes I went to the local market and bought 3.5 kilos of what the vendor assured me was pumpkin. It certainly wasn't orange on the outside, round, or thick-skinned, but as it was some kind of winter squash with an orange inside, I decided it was close enough.

I put it in my backpack and moved on to the spice vendor. I had to use a dictionary for "ground nutmeg," but proudly asked for cinnamon and cloves on my own. I also picked up some "green" curry. (It's the green colored curry used in Thai cooking that I love, but it's called "green" in Russian, as in the sound "green," not the word for green. Which I don't understand at all.)

Next I hit the little "producti" on my block (it's like a staple food neighborhood grocery in a space a little smaller than the inside of a bus) to buy milk, oil, eggs, and brown sugar. I already had a bag of flour at home from the last time I had unsuccessfully tried to make crepes. Nope, they didn't carry brown sugar. So over to the fancy imported crazy expensive food shop to get organic unrefined black cane sugar. Finally, with my backpack weighing close to a ton, I went back to my building, climbed the 5 flights of stairs to my apartment, and started sorting through my treasures. It was then that I realized I didn't have a pie pan.

I decided I could get it on Saturday when I had more time, and went online to fuse several recipes into something I had the ingredients and utensils to make. I was a little worried about getting the pumpkin to the right consistency, since a fork was the closest I could get to a food processor or blender, but other than that I seemed set. I cut up and cooked the pumpkin, realizing during the process that I had bought about twice as much pumpkin as I needed. I decided to make my favorite dish, Thai pumpkin soup (as I had pumpkin AND my favorite curry). It was delicious, even though I don't have the recipe here and I totally improvised.

Saturday morning I got up, went out to the store that sells things like pans, and found out they don't carry pie plates, or pie pans, or even pie tins. Nada (the Spanish word meaning "nothing," not the Russian word meaning "must"). I bought two round cake pans.

Only slightly daunted, I returned home. Making the filling was pretty much a breeze, although opening three tins of condensed milk made me long for a good old turn the handle type can opener. (I've only found the kind of opener that would come on a pocket knife.) Then I started on the crust. I carefully measured out the flour (using my clear glass mug which I marked with lines to show how much a cup is, since I've never seen measuring cups here) and mixed the milk and oil. As I lifted the mug to pour the wet ingredients into the flour, I idly glanced at the flour bag. "Grechnevaya Mookah." Wait a minute, grechnevaya? Doesn't that mean buckwheat? I ran to check my dictionary. Yup. It was buckwheat flour. No wonder those crepes hadn't worked properly.

I put all the buckwheat flour back into the bag and ran back to the producti to buy a bag of normal white wheat flour. I checked the bag three times to make sure it was the right kind.

From there, it was a breeze, except that I couldn't figure out how to get the oven to light and ended up having to go find one of my neighbors to come do it for me. (Turns out you have to turn on the gas, then light a match and throw it down a hole. I wonder if the matches burn up all the way, or if we have lots of little pieces of burnt matches in the bottom of our oven!)

I had bought a can of good old fashioned pressurized whipped cream from the crazy expensive imported food shop (it came from Germany) when I went to get the brown sugar, and so when the "test" pie had baked and cooled, I cut it up, sprayed whipped cream on it, and shared it out with my neighbors. They all loved it. (Maybe we can get Thanksgiving added as a holiday here, after all.)

The oil crust didn't work terribly well - it was far too crunchy and brittle and not light or flaky -  but that didn't make the filling any less wonderful or the pie less of a success. We'll see what the other expats say about the second pie tonight.

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*For those of you unfortunate enough to never have experienced Wegmans, it's a super awesome grocery chain that was started in Rochester, NY, but is slowly rapidly spreading its goodness over the rest of the Northeastern USA.

There have been a lot of things whirling around my mind and life lately, and sometimes it's quite difficult to separate what is Russian from what is just "not me." Turns out that being an expat doesn't make me magically accepting of other cultures or able to understand them. Even though I like learning about culture, it's still an awful lot of work to live in one. And, while there are some things I really like about Russian culture, there are other things that still bug me after 15 months of living here.

One of these things is queing. Even though there is a LOT of waiting here - waiting for the metro, waiting for the bus that will definitely not show up at the time the schedule says, waiting to buy a train ticket, waiting to pay for groceries in the store - there is not a whole lot of what we would call queing. Generally, the system works more like a rugby game: whoever pushes hardest, goes around everyone else to shove to the front, and is most aggressive, gets to be first. This is the system for metro cars and elevators, buses, etc. There aren't actually lines of people; there are shoving roughly circular mobs. Maybe that's why older people who make it into the metro order whomever is sitting nearest to the door to give up their seats to them. They probably feel like they deserve it, plus they have just generated a whole lot of aggression to make it into the train in the first place. (This is one of the reasons that I like to sit/stand as far from the doors as possible during rush hour.)

Metro aside, there are some times when actual lining up occurs. I've pretty much stopped going to the grocery store, because I can buy things much more cheaply and in much more variety at the market (now that I know how to say everything I need to in Russian), but on the rare occasions I do go to the store, the queing really bugs me. People line up in reasonable straight lines. But they stand so close that they touch each other. Seriously. At least half the time that I am in line at the grocery store (or to buy metro tokens), the person behind me is standing so close to me that they are touching me. This really freaks me out. Being the culturally sensitive person that I am, I usually turn around and give the person an angry look. Sometimes they back off. Usually they just look at me like I'm crazy. (Which I am, because standing body to body in a line is what is normal in my area, and it's the person who's different who's labeled crazy. But I still don't like it.)

Also, if I stand not touching the person in front of me in line, other people often try to cut in in front of me because they don't think I'm actually in line. As if I'd stand near the cash registers holding a basket of food for the sheer joy of it. Heh.

Ok. The other queing "problem" is that people will stand in multiple lines at once. Someone will get into a line, wait until someone comes in behind them, and say, "I'm standing here." And then they will go do the same thing in another line. After they've established that "they're standing" in four or five lines, they spend the rest of the time rotating between them so that they really are "standing" in all of them. And they try to be standing in the line that will get to the window or cashier or whatever first.

This makes it terribly hard to figure out how many people are actually in line in front of me when I'm waiting in line somewhere. It's usually reasonable to double the number of people, though of course there is the chance that some of them will end up in one of their other lines when their "spot" gets to the front of the line.

Back to the grocery store for a final complaint: it is not uncommon for someone to get a shopping basket, put one item of food in it, and put it in a line. Then the person leaves the basket there and goes off to actually do their shopping, expecting the next actual person to keep moving their basket forward for them as they wait in line. If a stupid foreigner steps OVER their basket, they get really upset (trust me on this one). This sorely tries my sense of fairness. And my patience.

In a nutshell, I hate standing in lines. Even in my own culture, standing in lines feels useless and counter productive. I endure it best when I can mentally calculate when it will be my turn. Heh. So I decided to move to a culture where that is virtually impossible. Clever. Maybe I'll pick up a bit more patience. Or maybe I'll just go to the market during the middle of the day when no one else is around. ;-)

One thing that I really like about Russian culture is the practice of well-wishing. These usually are centered around a birthday celebration or New Year's party, and often take the form of toasts.

I don't know about you, but I'm not very good at toasting. My prior experience was limited to listening to nervous best men and maids of honor at weddings and the occasional short statement to inaugurate a bout of drinking. I'm not sure I ever made a toast.

In Russia, it's different. The custom is not for one or two people to toast as a beginning to the celebration, but for toasts to form an ongoing and important part of the party itself. They are a way of showing appreciation for others and sharing community. Often each person is expected to make at least one toast, if not multiple toasts, during a party (or even when a special guest – like a visitor from the strange planet of the United States of America – is visiting). And the host or guest is expected to return the favor with a toast or two of his or her own.

This has caused many nervous moments for me, particularly when I didn't know the custom applied to the event I was attending. Birthday party, New Year's party with friends, New Year's party with co-workers, visiting people in a far-away city, opening a bottle of wine on the rocky seashore; all are occasions for toasting. My first toasts were fumbling, useless, and not terribly thoughtful. Plus they were in English and had to be translated. My friends who came to my birthday celebration, on the other hand, wished me things such as:

May your life be a happy journey in the land of wonder and accompanied by good friends and kind fortune!

I wish you to meet a man of your dreams who will help you to travel in a boat of life!

May you travel to many new places and get everything you want!

One of our kindergarteners had a birthday recently, and the other children took turns wishing him well. I was impressed by their ability to do so without the extreme embarrassment I usually feel when expected to toast. Maybe they're just used to it. They wished everything from “lots of money and lots of friends” to “laughing and being happy every day” to “getting lots of bionicles” (bionicles - http://bionicle.lego.com/en-US/default.aspx - are a kind of Lego robot which are all the rage in our primarily male class of 5 and 6 year olds).

I'm trying to learn from this custom. I think my wishes are getting better, and I'm getting a lot more comfortable delivering them. One thing I love about toasting is that it makes me think hard about what would be wonderful for my friend. It's a thoughtful, meaningful expression of friendship. Here's to toasting!

One of you asked me about food in Russia. If you required me (for some strange reason) to sum it up in a single word, I would say, “bland.” See, there aren't a lot of crops that grow well in most of Russia; the climate's harsh, the soil is poor, and the growing season is terribly short. Which means a “traditional” diet has to be mainly stuff that grows during the 3-4 months of summer and keeps during the 8 months of winter. That pretty much means root vegetables.

Potatoes, pretty much all the time. At school we have potatoes at least every-other day, and usually every day. Rice used to be common, but during one of the Soviet food shortages it was pretty much all there was to eat, and most of the cooking population (grandmothers!) is still sick of it, so it's generally off the menu. Cabbage is common, as are carrots, onions, and garlic (yes, younger brother, Carpathian Garlic is cheap here). One of the famous dishes is galuptsi (not sure on the spelling in English, sorry) – basically fried ground beef and onions rolled up in fried cabbage. It's the kids' second favorite meal at school.

Beetroot is also common. We eat beetroot “salad” (a term which is gleefully applied to anything ranging from tomato slices to cooked beetroot to something like a pasta salad, but almost never to lettuce, which is extremely expensive and difficult to find), which is just cooked beets. Borsch (beetroot soup) is common. We get to eat it every week and a half or so at the kindergarten. All the other days we have some kind of soup made with chicken broth and dill. I've never eaten so much dill (or chicken broth) in my life. But I've not yet seen what we would call chicken soup. The soups have meat or peas or fish or just vegetables in them, but not chicken.

What else... lots and lots of dairy. Sour cream is really important here (I guess that's not just a Hungarian thing!). People drink buttermilk reasonably often. Milk comes in small bottles or bags. Yogurt is mostly bottled, thin, and consumed as a beverage. I have yet to find plain yogurt of a “normal” consistency. There are lots of other products which are made of dairy, which I really don't know how to describe, because I'd never heard of them in the states.

Sausages, being the cheapest and most reliable form of meat here, are common. Again, tons of different kinds which I can't readily identify. People eat other forms of beef, pork, mutton, etc., but sausages seem to be the staple meat. Fish is common. Lots of people catch their own small fish, dry them at home, and eat them with beer. I tried some. They're really really salty, and definitely need the beer. The texture is somewhat addicting, though, as is peeling apart the fish. Salmon is popular among those who splurge or can afford it. Caviar, particularly red caviar, is quite cheap and fairly common. I can get blini with caviar for $4 at the little kiosk on the corner of my street.

Blini – usually translated “pancake,” but basically giant crepes – are my favorite Russian food. You can get sweet blini, but they're more often served with potatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, or meat. There are blini kiosks everywhere, rivaling the hot dog and pretzel carts in New York City. Only these are stationary.

Oh, yeah, mushrooms. Mushrooms are very popular here. People spend many autumn weekends going “to the forest” to gather mushrooms. I suspect that people like them so much because they're “free,” and grow by themselves on sort of public (ie not carefully monitored) land.

In the summer, tomatoes and cucumber rule. I know people who eat them for every meal. In the winter, people eat the cucumbers “salted” (pickled). I don't know what they do with the tomatoes; tomato sauce and ketchup are relatively rare here.

Of course, lots of produce is imported from other places, particularly Uzbekistan, which is warm and fertile with a terrifically long growing season (by Russian standards, anyway). But for the most part, imported food is not staple food. People eat it, but not regularly or often, in my experience.

Bread tends to be in two forms: “black” rye bread and “white” wheat bread. Again, there are imports, but they don't get much shelf space. Pasta exists, and the kids at school love it, but it's not a staple food and I've only ever seen it eaten with sour cream or just oil. Almost all other grains take the form of “kasha” - porridge. Oat, millet, buckwheat, rice, or wheat, boiled with milk, sugar, and oil, makes the breakfast of almost every schoolchild I know. Kasha is supplemented with “sandwiches,” which are a single slice of bread with a slab of margarine and a slice of cheese. Not really a sandwich, but that's what they're called. Adults often eat the same sort of thing for breakfast as they do for lunch or dinner.

Russians tend to have huge sweet tooths. They even invented a meal called “tea” which is basically an excuse to eat sweets at any point in time. (It's not the same as British Tea, which has its own time of day and proper foods.) “Tea” does actually involve the consumption of tea – generally straight black loose leaf tea dumped into the bottom of your cup – but it really revolves around the sweet foods. In fact, traditional Russian “tea” is a cup of the black stuff, drunk through a cube of sugar held between the front teeth. Jam, honey, or sweetened condensed milk are eaten from bowls with a spoon. Yes, on their own, without bread or anything like that. Cookies are common, although almost always of the hard crunchy variety. “Cakes” (which range from piles of various types of cremes held together by wafers to something like shortbread) and pies are beloved, though not terribly common. Candy, particularly of the chocolate sort, is the norm. And “tea” is very flexible; it can be eaten at any time for the slightest excuse. There are days when I am offered “tea” 6 or 7 times.

Of course, there is no static “Russian diet.” Traditional meals vary by region, depending on access to bodies of water, land, and shipping lines. I'm told that in Siberia, caviar is as cheap as bread. Of course, vodka and kvass (homemade beer) are popular everywhere; brewing alcoholic beverages used to be about the only thing peasants could do with surplus grain. I had kvass this summer, but I'm still holding out on the vodka. Don't know about other beverages. Of course they have a lot of the same stuff we do in the US, borrowed or imported. Seems to be generally tea or alcohol, though. Makes sense, as the water still is problematic.

Other than dill and parsley (almost always used fresh), herbs and spices are uncommon. Russian food is not terribly flavorful, bold, or exciting. I have to go to a special market for the hot pepper, cinnamon, cloves, curry, and other spices I love. My neighbors think I'm a crazy cook. Then again, most Russians think that Americans eat McDonald's all the time with an occasional hot dog thrown in for variety.

I know this is kinda long, but I hope it was at least somewhat interesting. I imagine that, if it weren't, you wouldn't have read this far. Right?

So... what other questions do you have?

In my experience, Russians tend to be highly superstitious, though generally irreligious. For instance, it is not done to have a birthday celebration or wish someone happy birthday before their birthday. This brings bad luck.

When carving a chicken, it must be doled out very specifically to family members: wings to the girls, who will fly away from the family when they grow up; legs to the boys (not because they run away from the family, as I thought) so they can grow strong; breast to parents because that's where the heart is housed (and also because it's considered to be the tastiest portion); whatever is left to everyone else. I want to know what you do when you have 5 brothers and only two drumsticks.

Women and children are never allowed to sit on the ground, the floor, or other potentially "cold" places. It is believed to be very bad for their health.

And I've already told you a couple of the rules about flowers.

Of course I found out all these things the hard way....

Pictures of

where I live
my birthday dinner
self-portraits
and portraits of my darling Harold

all conveniently captioned here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/AnnieLaurieNichols/MyRoomAndBirthday08#