In which I ramble about Russian cuisine for a while

Thursday, 10:35 am. Ergh. Apparently my battery charger has gone kaput, which is really annoying, as I’ve been using the thing for all of a week. I still have plenty of juice left in my camera batteries, so I’m going to wait to go buy a new one until I really need to. Would shipping it back and requesting a new one under the warranty be cheaper than buying a new one over here, do you think?

8:33 pm. I was feeling some major cabin fever this evening (which is rather ridiculous), but it’s been assuaged by a lovely dinner discussion with Lyudmila Afanasyevna and some Russian TV. I really don’t watch much TV at home, but it’s amazing how amusing Russian teen dramas can be when you don’t understand eighty percent of the dialogue and can just watch the actors. Russian-dubbed American TV is pretty entertaining, too, but listening to Angela Lansbury and a Russian actress at the same time is really quite difficult. I’m sure it would be easier if I could tune out one language or the other entirely, but processing both at once is a little much.

I’ve been further exploring Russian food, too, and am happy to say that it’s not at all what the American stereotype (I use that word lightly) had led me to expect. It’s not all cabbage and potatoes, by any means, though I have been eating quite a bit of both. Borshch (no T) sounds very foreign indeed (beet soup?), but at least the version I tried yesterday is quite light, not strongly flavored, and quite pretty, actually. Russians do love their vegetables (Misha Merkushev is actually a vegetarian), though they’re mostly not fresh; usually either pickled, frozen, or canned. While it does make me miss a good American salad, vinaigret (a sort of pickled beet salad) is really quite tasty. Kasha, a ubiquitous porridge, is rather boring by itself, but with some jam on it, it’s lovely! (My host mother made me kasha for breakfast this morning, but she left very early, and it had cooled and mostly solidified by the time I got out of the shower. Two eggs and a huge bowl of kasha are way too much for breakfast, so I cut up the solidified kasha into wedges, put some jam in a little container, and took it with me for lunch.) And the variations on finger food are quite fascinating, too. Pirozhki is the generic term for assorted little pies, dumplings, or similar, mostly any sort of dough with filling inside; I haven’t had any with prunes yet, Mom :), but I’ve had them with cabbage, cottage cheese, assorted meat, and even cherries. Pelmeni, too, are a sort of meat dumpling, bearing a resemblance to ravioli; they’re about half-dollar sized, and you eat a whole bowl of them in a sitting. With some melted butter, they’re absolutely wonderful. I’ve rambled about blini already, but here’s the exciting part: next week, for…Shrovetide? Is that what the week before Lent is called?...we’re supposed to be eating blini EVERY DAY in celebration of the richness of life right before Lent. Now THIS is awesome. :D And I haven’t tried coffee over here yet, but Russia loves its tea. There is nothing the slightest bit unusual about my drinking six cups of tea in a day here. (Oh, and European hot chocolate is sinfully rich. And cheap, too.)

I’ve only been here a week (…nine days, if we count the day I flew in) and I can already sense an improvement in my language skills! The teacher of the conversation class out of which I switched, Irina Vladimirovna (I think), put it best when she described our conversations with our host families: “you speak three languages: pa-angliiski, pa-russki, i pa-gesti (English, Russian, and gestures).” Even now, though, the balance between Russian and English is slowly shifting, to a degree of which I’m actually (possibly irrationally) proud. Several of us American students have expressed to each other our great frustration with the high learning curve, but we’re climbing it slowly, but surely. :)

…also, I think Lyudmila Afanasyevna is trying to play matchmaker for me. Not with her son, thankfully, but with some other boys closer to my age. She keeps hinting about the boys in the program, and about one of the students she invited over Sunday night…“he plays guitar and sings, very nice, you know. –wink-” They’re all very nice boys, but, really? I understand that some people come to another country and meet the love of their life, but that wasn’t really one of my goals for this program, thanks. :)

We don’t have actual homework per se, but I’m reading the first couple of chapters of my history book anyway to have a better grounding for our next Russian History class. Time to get back to St. Vladimir’s role in Kievan Rus.