января 31, 2007
Winter
1/31 12:41, Pushkin time
It's holding steady at -10/-15 and looks to stay that way for the next week or so (though they're calling for nights at -23/-25 Friday and Sunday). No new snow, though. But yesterday, Z was sufficiently sick that I ended up taking him home from the preschool a bit early -- with a stop on the way to at least meet the teacher he'll be having at the school when he starts (next week, of course). But he is starting to at least acknowledge the possibility that dressing properly and being healthy have some sort of correlation. Which is a start.
Provided he is better (and he woke up bright and early this morning and ready to go) and that neither his brother nor I have picked anything up along the way, we've been advised to go to the "best place for sledding" this weekend -- Pavlovsk Park. There are apparently a whole slew of good sledding hills, all the ponds are frozen to the bottom, and it's not terribly far from us. So that's the plan for sure. Pictures will be taken.
And yesterday afternoon, the realtor called me with the news that our paperwork had been completed and issued by the Gatchina [County] office-for-those-things. And since we were stuck at home, they drove by to drop off with у the title to our land in Pokrovskaya, along with the "house book" -- the paperwork that accompanied the building that used to stand on the land. Granted, it's not there anymore, but it is much easier and quicker to just rebuild on existing paperwork than to build in a fresh area and get new paperwork, or to have an old set of papers retired and a new set issued. The house book goes back to the seventies, and is almost entirely filled-in with handwriting; much of which is a bit tough for me to make out. But I have deciphered, in addition to the bureaucratic permissions and whatnot, the history of ownership and residence stretching all the way back to either when the original building was built or when the book was issued (that part I can't figure out yet). It makes for an entertaining use of spare time.
But for now, the goodies for my money-making projects have started to arrive at the dealership. And what with the unloading (in the freezing cold) and unpacking (in the driving wind) and whatnot, there's a lot to do. And, nice as it is inside in the warm, I really should get back to doing them.
It's holding steady at -10/-15 and looks to stay that way for the next week or so (though they're calling for nights at -23/-25 Friday and Sunday). No new snow, though. But yesterday, Z was sufficiently sick that I ended up taking him home from the preschool a bit early -- with a stop on the way to at least meet the teacher he'll be having at the school when he starts (next week, of course). But he is starting to at least acknowledge the possibility that dressing properly and being healthy have some sort of correlation. Which is a start.
Provided he is better (and he woke up bright and early this morning and ready to go) and that neither his brother nor I have picked anything up along the way, we've been advised to go to the "best place for sledding" this weekend -- Pavlovsk Park. There are apparently a whole slew of good sledding hills, all the ponds are frozen to the bottom, and it's not terribly far from us. So that's the plan for sure. Pictures will be taken.
And yesterday afternoon, the realtor called me with the news that our paperwork had been completed and issued by the Gatchina [County] office-for-those-things. And since we were stuck at home, they drove by to drop off with у the title to our land in Pokrovskaya, along with the "house book" -- the paperwork that accompanied the building that used to stand on the land. Granted, it's not there anymore, but it is much easier and quicker to just rebuild on existing paperwork than to build in a fresh area and get new paperwork, or to have an old set of papers retired and a new set issued. The house book goes back to the seventies, and is almost entirely filled-in with handwriting; much of which is a bit tough for me to make out. But I have deciphered, in addition to the bureaucratic permissions and whatnot, the history of ownership and residence stretching all the way back to either when the original building was built or when the book was issued (that part I can't figure out yet). It makes for an entertaining use of spare time.
But for now, the goodies for my money-making projects have started to arrive at the dealership. And what with the unloading (in the freezing cold) and unpacking (in the driving wind) and whatnot, there's a lot to do. And, nice as it is inside in the warm, I really should get back to doing them.
января 29, 2007
Rounding Out the Weekend
1/29 19:52, Pushkin time
Sunday we all slept in, and then the boys played outside a bit in the driving snow. Once lunch and naps were over, we needed still to go to the store to pick up a bit in the way of provisions, and as the snow had stopped falling, I gave the boys a choice of driving or walking (it's no more than a mile to the store from here; probably closer to 1/2 mile by the back path through the fields). And the picked walking. So we geared up and took a bit of a hike in the freshly-fallen six inches of snow. Not quite on the way was another on our list of meaning-to-dos, so we took the detour and crossed into the center of the traffic circle to give the boys a close up look at the Egyptian Gate; a feature built back during an Egyptology-mania period maybe 250 years ago. G was of the firm opinion -- not dispelled by his inspection in person -- that there must be at least one mummy in there.
And then we turned our faces to the wind and walked the half-mile from there, cutting through the dormitory-complex of the agricultural university to get to the store. By the time we arrived, G had started complaining about the cold and everyone's nose was dripping. But inside, nice and warm. And really, the walk back wasn't so bad at all (the wind had quit, and without wind, minus ten, properly-dressed isn't so bad).
But nonetheless, this morning, Z had a cough and a stuffed nose. dammit.
He had no fever (still doesn't) but was crummy getting ready this morning. At his preschool, he right away told his teacher that he had been coughing and had a runny nose -- words I couldn't come up with myself, but at least recognize... And his doctor checked him out and gave me a list of directions for him when I picked them up tonight. Main among them is to make sure that he wears his hat and scarf -- they apparently had a talk with him today, as he has been in the habit of ditching those inside as soon as he gets to school, and even though they've all been telling him he'll get sick, not putting them on to go outside to play. So, they kept telling him, what did he think would happen? Now that the subject had been brought up, I asked G's teacher if he is good about hat and scarfing when he goes out. She says that (and this is classic G) he puts them on with no problem, but half the time, to get him to allow his ear flaps to be tied together, he insists on being bribed. With candy, of course, but I never figured on that part of the Russian environment being assimilated by the kids so quickly...
And finally (though out of order, since I've already talked about the end of the day...), I went by the alternate place today to find someone to talk to about Z and school this coming year. And got sent back to the first place we went on Saturday. Where, now that there were people there, I was able to meet with the main director and get his set up for the 'prep' course (Tuesday or Monday evenings, five to seven) and at least broach the discussion of 'alternatives' for getting him enrolled into the school. I still find it a bit awkward getting right to the point in such discussions, even when the other party is so frank as to point out that the general sign-up on the first of April usually fills up the school in the course of two hours, and that people will spend the night waiting in line to get into the school -- but that there are 'sponsored' spots available[...]. I just can't seem to come right out and ask what it will take; instead I'm like, "well.. being here for a while, I understand that there are other paths...". It cracks both of the И's up when I tell them the roundabout way I get to things. Of course, with the progress I'm making, I should be a lot better by the time the house is finished being built. Lots of practice in that, to be sure...
Sunday we all slept in, and then the boys played outside a bit in the driving snow. Once lunch and naps were over, we needed still to go to the store to pick up a bit in the way of provisions, and as the snow had stopped falling, I gave the boys a choice of driving or walking (it's no more than a mile to the store from here; probably closer to 1/2 mile by the back path through the fields). And the picked walking. So we geared up and took a bit of a hike in the freshly-fallen six inches of snow. Not quite on the way was another on our list of meaning-to-dos, so we took the detour and crossed into the center of the traffic circle to give the boys a close up look at the Egyptian Gate; a feature built back during an Egyptology-mania period maybe 250 years ago. G was of the firm opinion -- not dispelled by his inspection in person -- that there must be at least one mummy in there.
And then we turned our faces to the wind and walked the half-mile from there, cutting through the dormitory-complex of the agricultural university to get to the store. By the time we arrived, G had started complaining about the cold and everyone's nose was dripping. But inside, nice and warm. And really, the walk back wasn't so bad at all (the wind had quit, and without wind, minus ten, properly-dressed isn't so bad).But nonetheless, this morning, Z had a cough and a stuffed nose. dammit.
He had no fever (still doesn't) but was crummy getting ready this morning. At his preschool, he right away told his teacher that he had been coughing and had a runny nose -- words I couldn't come up with myself, but at least recognize... And his doctor checked him out and gave me a list of directions for him when I picked them up tonight. Main among them is to make sure that he wears his hat and scarf -- they apparently had a talk with him today, as he has been in the habit of ditching those inside as soon as he gets to school, and even though they've all been telling him he'll get sick, not putting them on to go outside to play. So, they kept telling him, what did he think would happen? Now that the subject had been brought up, I asked G's teacher if he is good about hat and scarfing when he goes out. She says that (and this is classic G) he puts them on with no problem, but half the time, to get him to allow his ear flaps to be tied together, he insists on being bribed. With candy, of course, but I never figured on that part of the Russian environment being assimilated by the kids so quickly...And finally (though out of order, since I've already talked about the end of the day...), I went by the alternate place today to find someone to talk to about Z and school this coming year. And got sent back to the first place we went on Saturday. Where, now that there were people there, I was able to meet with the main director and get his set up for the 'prep' course (Tuesday or Monday evenings, five to seven) and at least broach the discussion of 'alternatives' for getting him enrolled into the school. I still find it a bit awkward getting right to the point in such discussions, even when the other party is so frank as to point out that the general sign-up on the first of April usually fills up the school in the course of two hours, and that people will spend the night waiting in line to get into the school -- but that there are 'sponsored' spots available[...]. I just can't seem to come right out and ask what it will take; instead I'm like, "well.. being here for a while, I understand that there are other paths...". It cracks both of the И's up when I tell them the roundabout way I get to things. Of course, with the progress I'm making, I should be a lot better by the time the house is finished being built. Lots of practice in that, to be sure...
января 27, 2007
Snow! COLD! WIND!! AARGHH!!!
1/27 12:35, Pushkin time
Snow is falling outside the window as I write, and has been at since at least 9:30 this morning when we headed out (more on that later). They say it is no more than ten below right now, but since yesterday, I've come to know and appreciate the effect the fresh-off-the-bay winds have on how you feel at any particular temperature. When you're dressed for it, at temps down to around minus 20-22, the cold itself is pretty reasonable. With wind, even dressed for it, more than minus 5-8 can hit unbearable pretty quickly. Granted, I'm still a wimp who has yet to even pass through his first whole Russian winter -- and I bet there will be a few people who will call this last one not a real winter on account of the mildness of December and most of January.
But yesterday, I discovered what it is like to be in minus 12, heavy wind, not properly dressed. It makes me wonder, of the seventeen words the eskimo languages have for snow, how many might be obscenities. Because in Russian, you can come up with a whole lot of them...
Neither of my winter coats fits particularly at all over my suit coat, so I dragged it and my tie along on a hanger to work yesterday morning, and wore the warm upper-body stuff. But my suit pants, woolen though they may be, are absolutely no defense whatosever against the wind. And my dress shoes might be marginally better than bare feet in near-zero snow, since they'd keep me dry. But in that kind of cold, mere body heat contact won't melt the stuff, so I'd have been just as warm without as with them. Fortunately, I was only for a couple minutes waiting until И pulled up and he and I and И В headed in his car into the city. Driving in, I mentioned the concern I recently developed regarding our van. For the past couple weeks, going over rough roads, I kept thinking I was hearing a clunking noise coming from the vicinity of the front axle. Now that I had been driving the van without passengers, I got more sure of it, and when I asked one of the guys from Africa, he confirmed that the sound was actually there. Of course, I was afraid that I had broken a suspension tie rod or wrecked my steering linkage or something equally dire (the roads are pretty bad in lots of places here, and I have no personal experience in the long-term effects of that on cars). Both Иs assured me, no need to worry at all based on the effects I described. Shock absorbers are about the only things that break on foreign-model cars around here, and they do go pretty quickly. It's even not unsafe to continue driving on it (И's Lexus, in which we were riding, is just now starting to show signs of needing a third shock replacement, no big drama). And once we check it out this coming week to confirm that's the problem, we can just buy the part and swap it out at work some day. What a weight off my mind..
So into the city we went; parked, and I got out of the car (now in my slightly-warmer-than-the-pants-but-not-by-a-whole-heck-of-a-lot suit coat). The moment the wind hit, I pulled on my hat. И took one look and said, "you're not going anywhere in a suit with that hat. Lose it." (this is the orange one that I have sworn by since my first hunting season in it). So, hatless, gloveless, in not very warm clothes, I dashed with them to the nearest shelter. And then, inside, we had our meeting with the criminal (organized by the guys from Africa). Everyone had brought their own translator -- assuming that's what you wanted to call me -- and hilariously, I was the only one with an even halfways-decent mechanical, trucking, or finance vocabulary in both languages. It led to situations where both other translator-ladies would look to me to bring something across to Russian, I would get out in Russian something like "the buying preferences of the different market segments, since the customer base is so dependent on not only the technical characteristics of the various pieces of equipment they need, but on the availability of leasing and/or financing programs, and particularly the coincidence of favorable rates to the turnover periods in their buying cycles, may or may not consistently ... um... start from littler to .. uh... more bigger ... um ...." and then one of the other ladies would jump in with the Russian word, "increase" (which I can never seem to remember). The fact that I had to do all of this without cursing was probably a good thing.
It was also an interesting cultural experience. I observed that I picked up on several unstated and half-stated communications that the African and the American missed -- though I didn't by any means pick up on as many as did the Russians in the room. I did catch two of the times that the criminal guy threatened to make things difficult for us. Which was kind of neat; I've never been even indirectly threatened before by a guy who I know has personally murdered several people. И says not to worry. Even were this guy so inclined to continue doing business that way, such is simply not done in the small-scale areas in which we are doing business. We'd have to be in banking or timber or oil or gas to be in any kind of actual danger.
-note to self: stay out of banking, timber, oil, and gas businesses-
So that was Friday.
Today as soon as we saw the snow out the window, the boys and I decided to go do a couple of things we had been meaning to do while A was out. I even got some pictures. We started out finding the park in town that has the most "Pushkinish" of the Pushkin statues in it -- particularly in a place where all of the statues are or were of guys in strong, heroic poses, the ones of Pushkin have him always looking kicked-back and artisty. This one is my favorite.
Then we did something I had been promising/threatening the boys with since pretty much their arrival. We headed out to one of the series of ponds that sort of run along the edge of the Pushkin suburb of Tyarlevo. And took a walk across it (the ice is easily five inches thick). I'm not positive that the Neva is quite ready for walking yet; we'll check it out tomorrow and if not be sure to hit it next weekend; it's not supposed to get even close to zero all week, which should build up enough ice thickness to make the difference, at least as far as supporting the weight of a person is concerned. There's pretty much no chance of the ice being thick enough this winter to support a car -- not that I have any intention of trying that with one of my own...
Snow is falling outside the window as I write, and has been at since at least 9:30 this morning when we headed out (more on that later). They say it is no more than ten below right now, but since yesterday, I've come to know and appreciate the effect the fresh-off-the-bay winds have on how you feel at any particular temperature. When you're dressed for it, at temps down to around minus 20-22, the cold itself is pretty reasonable. With wind, even dressed for it, more than minus 5-8 can hit unbearable pretty quickly. Granted, I'm still a wimp who has yet to even pass through his first whole Russian winter -- and I bet there will be a few people who will call this last one not a real winter on account of the mildness of December and most of January.
But yesterday, I discovered what it is like to be in minus 12, heavy wind, not properly dressed. It makes me wonder, of the seventeen words the eskimo languages have for snow, how many might be obscenities. Because in Russian, you can come up with a whole lot of them...
Neither of my winter coats fits particularly at all over my suit coat, so I dragged it and my tie along on a hanger to work yesterday morning, and wore the warm upper-body stuff. But my suit pants, woolen though they may be, are absolutely no defense whatosever against the wind. And my dress shoes might be marginally better than bare feet in near-zero snow, since they'd keep me dry. But in that kind of cold, mere body heat contact won't melt the stuff, so I'd have been just as warm without as with them. Fortunately, I was only for a couple minutes waiting until И pulled up and he and I and И В headed in his car into the city. Driving in, I mentioned the concern I recently developed regarding our van. For the past couple weeks, going over rough roads, I kept thinking I was hearing a clunking noise coming from the vicinity of the front axle. Now that I had been driving the van without passengers, I got more sure of it, and when I asked one of the guys from Africa, he confirmed that the sound was actually there. Of course, I was afraid that I had broken a suspension tie rod or wrecked my steering linkage or something equally dire (the roads are pretty bad in lots of places here, and I have no personal experience in the long-term effects of that on cars). Both Иs assured me, no need to worry at all based on the effects I described. Shock absorbers are about the only things that break on foreign-model cars around here, and they do go pretty quickly. It's even not unsafe to continue driving on it (И's Lexus, in which we were riding, is just now starting to show signs of needing a third shock replacement, no big drama). And once we check it out this coming week to confirm that's the problem, we can just buy the part and swap it out at work some day. What a weight off my mind..
So into the city we went; parked, and I got out of the car (now in my slightly-warmer-than-the-pants-but-not-by-a-whole-heck-of-a-lot suit coat). The moment the wind hit, I pulled on my hat. И took one look and said, "you're not going anywhere in a suit with that hat. Lose it." (this is the orange one that I have sworn by since my first hunting season in it). So, hatless, gloveless, in not very warm clothes, I dashed with them to the nearest shelter. And then, inside, we had our meeting with the criminal (organized by the guys from Africa). Everyone had brought their own translator -- assuming that's what you wanted to call me -- and hilariously, I was the only one with an even halfways-decent mechanical, trucking, or finance vocabulary in both languages. It led to situations where both other translator-ladies would look to me to bring something across to Russian, I would get out in Russian something like "the buying preferences of the different market segments, since the customer base is so dependent on not only the technical characteristics of the various pieces of equipment they need, but on the availability of leasing and/or financing programs, and particularly the coincidence of favorable rates to the turnover periods in their buying cycles, may or may not consistently ... um... start from littler to .. uh... more bigger ... um ...." and then one of the other ladies would jump in with the Russian word, "increase" (which I can never seem to remember). The fact that I had to do all of this without cursing was probably a good thing.
It was also an interesting cultural experience. I observed that I picked up on several unstated and half-stated communications that the African and the American missed -- though I didn't by any means pick up on as many as did the Russians in the room. I did catch two of the times that the criminal guy threatened to make things difficult for us. Which was kind of neat; I've never been even indirectly threatened before by a guy who I know has personally murdered several people. И says not to worry. Even were this guy so inclined to continue doing business that way, such is simply not done in the small-scale areas in which we are doing business. We'd have to be in banking or timber or oil or gas to be in any kind of actual danger.
-note to self: stay out of banking, timber, oil, and gas businesses-
So that was Friday.
Today as soon as we saw the snow out the window, the boys and I decided to go do a couple of things we had been meaning to do while A was out. I even got some pictures. We started out finding the park in town that has the most "Pushkinish" of the Pushkin statues in it -- particularly in a place where all of the statues are or were of guys in strong, heroic poses, the ones of Pushkin have him always looking kicked-back and artisty. This one is my favorite.
Then we did something I had been promising/threatening the boys with since pretty much their arrival. We headed out to one of the series of ponds that sort of run along the edge of the Pushkin suburb of Tyarlevo. And took a walk across it (the ice is easily five inches thick). I'm not positive that the Neva is quite ready for walking yet; we'll check it out tomorrow and if not be sure to hit it next weekend; it's not supposed to get even close to zero all week, which should build up enough ice thickness to make the difference, at least as far as supporting the weight of a person is concerned. There's pretty much no chance of the ice being thick enough this winter to support a car -- not that I have any intention of trying that with one of my own...
января 25, 2007
uuummmm...
1/25 21:08, Pushkin time
Where did I leave off?...
Oh yeah, ...and I know that I do a better job representing the interests of the guys here than they are able to do for themselves -- even though И speaks okay english, there's quite a bit to be gained from being able to use nuance and idiom.
And then (we're talking about Wednesday, remember...) at the end of the day came the not-unexpected invitation to lunch. К offered to pick up and keep an eye on the boys for me, so off we went to И's favorite place for a relatively long evening. So long, in fact, that I got to learn a new grammar usage; К sent И a text message that meant, "did you forget about us" at about 9:30. And I realized that I didn't know how to say 'about' in the sense other than 'the subject of...' The process never ends.
And when I got to И and К's place to pick up the boys, they had been superb. Of course, no sooner had I walked through the door then they started speaking english. К asked me why I don't speak to them in Russian, since they speak excellently. But not to me, they don't. Grrr. Even G has a good accent, particularly when you consider that lots of kids his age (including him) don't have the cleanest pronunciation of their native tongues even. And as fortune had it -- since the kids didn't get to sleep until almost 11 -- we got to make a late start of it this morning; the guys from Africa didn't want to be picked up until ten. So, all good.
And today we had a nice leisurely wake-and-ready. The boys to their school, then I got to spend pretty much the entire day doing translation-and-negotiation. By the end of it (and the guys left to go meet with the criminal boss I mentioned earlier at 3:30), I had the whole 'which language am I going to' question fairly well in hand. And as a final happiness before leaving the office, over coffee with И and А Ш I was in the middle of making some point when the company's lawyer walked in to the room. And after maybe thirty seconds started laughing. As he explained after calming down, my vocabulary might not be perfect, but I swear as naturally as if I had been born to it, and when I'm participating in a 'no women or children around' conversation, you'd hardly even notice that I'm not a long-time fluent speaker. Because, he realized (and this is what made him laugh), when guys are talking that sort of a way to each other, they really don't use a very wide vocabulary. And in that particular vocab, I'm as good as 100% fluent. All that's left is to work on the poetry of it, and that is the work of an entire lifetime even for the best native speakers. Heh heh.
Tomorrow is an early morning, and I really should have been to sleep already, but I just had to finish the one I left hanging.
Where did I leave off?...
Oh yeah, ...and I know that I do a better job representing the interests of the guys here than they are able to do for themselves -- even though И speaks okay english, there's quite a bit to be gained from being able to use nuance and idiom.
And then (we're talking about Wednesday, remember...) at the end of the day came the not-unexpected invitation to lunch. К offered to pick up and keep an eye on the boys for me, so off we went to И's favorite place for a relatively long evening. So long, in fact, that I got to learn a new grammar usage; К sent И a text message that meant, "did you forget about us" at about 9:30. And I realized that I didn't know how to say 'about' in the sense other than 'the subject of...' The process never ends.
And when I got to И and К's place to pick up the boys, they had been superb. Of course, no sooner had I walked through the door then they started speaking english. К asked me why I don't speak to them in Russian, since they speak excellently. But not to me, they don't. Grrr. Even G has a good accent, particularly when you consider that lots of kids his age (including him) don't have the cleanest pronunciation of their native tongues even. And as fortune had it -- since the kids didn't get to sleep until almost 11 -- we got to make a late start of it this morning; the guys from Africa didn't want to be picked up until ten. So, all good.
And today we had a nice leisurely wake-and-ready. The boys to their school, then I got to spend pretty much the entire day doing translation-and-negotiation. By the end of it (and the guys left to go meet with the criminal boss I mentioned earlier at 3:30), I had the whole 'which language am I going to' question fairly well in hand. And as a final happiness before leaving the office, over coffee with И and А Ш I was in the middle of making some point when the company's lawyer walked in to the room. And after maybe thirty seconds started laughing. As he explained after calming down, my vocabulary might not be perfect, but I swear as naturally as if I had been born to it, and when I'm participating in a 'no women or children around' conversation, you'd hardly even notice that I'm not a long-time fluent speaker. Because, he realized (and this is what made him laugh), when guys are talking that sort of a way to each other, they really don't use a very wide vocabulary. And in that particular vocab, I'm as good as 100% fluent. All that's left is to work on the poetry of it, and that is the work of an entire lifetime even for the best native speakers. Heh heh.
Tomorrow is an early morning, and I really should have been to sleep already, but I just had to finish the one I left hanging.
Today's Lesson
1/25 16:23, Pushkin time
So I learned this morning that the freezing point of snot-in-the-nose is minus fifteen degrees. When the boys and I left home, it was minus seventeen. It's a funny, crackling sensation that's not particularly unpleasant.
What over the last couple days...
Tuesday was a basically normal day, up, work/school, home, sleep. Wednesday, I was elected to swing by the airport to pick up some guests from South Africa (where the temperatures are a good forty-five degrees C warmer than here now, in the middle of their summer). And got to spend my first extended session as translator. Which, given the phenomenon I was describing before about not necessarily being able to keep straight all the time in which language I am speaking, I easily earn my net cost of 'zero dollars' (which is equal, at today's rate, to 'not a single kopek'). But it is entertaining; that's for sure. And I know that I
...
I got called away to work and now it is time to go home. I'll finish later.
So I learned this morning that the freezing point of snot-in-the-nose is minus fifteen degrees. When the boys and I left home, it was minus seventeen. It's a funny, crackling sensation that's not particularly unpleasant.
What over the last couple days...
Tuesday was a basically normal day, up, work/school, home, sleep. Wednesday, I was elected to swing by the airport to pick up some guests from South Africa (where the temperatures are a good forty-five degrees C warmer than here now, in the middle of their summer). And got to spend my first extended session as translator. Which, given the phenomenon I was describing before about not necessarily being able to keep straight all the time in which language I am speaking, I easily earn my net cost of 'zero dollars' (which is equal, at today's rate, to 'not a single kopek'). But it is entertaining; that's for sure. And I know that I
...
I got called away to work and now it is time to go home. I'll finish later.
января 22, 2007
Chilly Out
1/23 09:55, Pushkin time
A tiny sprinkling of snow this morning. The boys are devastated; they were hoping for a blizzard. On a plus note, we got the ticket last night that the other of the two packages my dad sent us almost two months ago (the one that the USPS tried to deliver in the Netherlands) finally showed up.
Practice with the boys these past couple days is already starting to show results; Z is making good use of a number of the grammatical constructs we've gone over, and even G is starting to try to get noun-adjective and subject-verb agreement. As for me, while it has been a long time since I would translate everything in my head, I think that I recently came to occupy yet another level of capability. At times, in the middle of talking to someone, I will be consciously struck by the fact that we are not using english. It doesn't throw me off or anything; just more like a momentary, 'whoa' -- more from the sake that it seems to make no difference to me which way I am talking. A funny side-affect of that (to which A as well as probably everyone else who spends time around me can attest) is that when I am, for example, speaking in english, and in the middle have to use a Russian name or read a sign or spell something in cyrillic, I continue where I left off in Russian (for a word or two, until I realize I've shifted and switch back). The same in the other direction. It's actually not a bad thing that I can swear in Russian, since to have to drop out of it to curse would be a real hardship, conversationally.
At work, the first flatbed carrying my dump truck bodies arrived last week, and is expected to be delivered here between tomorrow and Friday. So I can get that project moving again and start making extra money. Which is another big part of the reason for coming here, after all...
A tiny sprinkling of snow this morning. The boys are devastated; they were hoping for a blizzard. On a plus note, we got the ticket last night that the other of the two packages my dad sent us almost two months ago (the one that the USPS tried to deliver in the Netherlands) finally showed up.
Practice with the boys these past couple days is already starting to show results; Z is making good use of a number of the grammatical constructs we've gone over, and even G is starting to try to get noun-adjective and subject-verb agreement. As for me, while it has been a long time since I would translate everything in my head, I think that I recently came to occupy yet another level of capability. At times, in the middle of talking to someone, I will be consciously struck by the fact that we are not using english. It doesn't throw me off or anything; just more like a momentary, 'whoa' -- more from the sake that it seems to make no difference to me which way I am talking. A funny side-affect of that (to which A as well as probably everyone else who spends time around me can attest) is that when I am, for example, speaking in english, and in the middle have to use a Russian name or read a sign or spell something in cyrillic, I continue where I left off in Russian (for a word or two, until I realize I've shifted and switch back). The same in the other direction. It's actually not a bad thing that I can swear in Russian, since to have to drop out of it to curse would be a real hardship, conversationally.
At work, the first flatbed carrying my dump truck bodies arrived last week, and is expected to be delivered here between tomorrow and Friday. So I can get that project moving again and start making extra money. Which is another big part of the reason for coming here, after all...
Solo
1/22 14:15, Pushkin time
Good thing we went out yesterday and got pairs of gloves for me and Z. It's at about -7 right now, and with the wind, cold. Enough so that your face hurts after only a couple minutes in it. Enough so that even some of the holdouts at work came in today with hats and winter coats (I may be the only one in my regular coat today - tomorrow, if the trend continues, I'll cave, too).
The boys tolerated adequately well the waking up before 5AM to take A to the airport on Saturday. And over the weekend, they were sufficiently well-behaved to cause me no worries about the next fifteen days. Yesterday И and К invited us over for dinner -- I joked that it was a good thing, since after almost two full days since mom left, the boys were bound to be getting hungry. It was commented how quickly Z is progressing (again, the fact that he has no accent at all), and at the same time how little G seems to be picking up. Of course, G was also a really slow starter in English; we even had him communicating by sign language for several months before he elected to start talking out loud. Probably, whatever the reason was for that is also contributing to his slow acquisition of Russian. He understands perfectly well (when he elects to pay attention), and what he words and phrases he uses are correct. Different kids. I wonder if he would have grown up to be someone who believed themselves incapable of learning another language, under other circumstances. Developmentally, this may end up doing him more benefit than any of the rest of us. Good deal, I say.
One other thing we talked about over dinner is school. The public schools in Russia are all open to whoever wants to attend, which means on the flip side that the particularly good ones can be a bit more challenging to get into, given the facts of waiting lists and the extra layers of complication that Russians install to stave off boredom (I'm guessing). To sum up, we need to have decided pretty damn soon what school we want Z to go to (already done; the one right near here is a math/science one, which should be right up his alley), and get started jumping through hoops. One of the hoops for this school is in the form of a 'preparatory course' that is held on saturdays for two hours from December through April (oops). I'm going to get him started in that from the beginning of February -- a prospect Z himself took with some enthusiasm. Fortunately, Z already has the mathematical know-how to leave him not disadvantaged getting in a little late. Then, as it gets on towards May, A and I will have to figure out to what extent encouragement will be needed to secure Z a favorable spot in the line. More on that as it is clarified.
We're still planning on taking a walk on the river this weekend. Of course, pictures will be taken.
Good thing we went out yesterday and got pairs of gloves for me and Z. It's at about -7 right now, and with the wind, cold. Enough so that your face hurts after only a couple minutes in it. Enough so that even some of the holdouts at work came in today with hats and winter coats (I may be the only one in my regular coat today - tomorrow, if the trend continues, I'll cave, too).
The boys tolerated adequately well the waking up before 5AM to take A to the airport on Saturday. And over the weekend, they were sufficiently well-behaved to cause me no worries about the next fifteen days. Yesterday И and К invited us over for dinner -- I joked that it was a good thing, since after almost two full days since mom left, the boys were bound to be getting hungry. It was commented how quickly Z is progressing (again, the fact that he has no accent at all), and at the same time how little G seems to be picking up. Of course, G was also a really slow starter in English; we even had him communicating by sign language for several months before he elected to start talking out loud. Probably, whatever the reason was for that is also contributing to his slow acquisition of Russian. He understands perfectly well (when he elects to pay attention), and what he words and phrases he uses are correct. Different kids. I wonder if he would have grown up to be someone who believed themselves incapable of learning another language, under other circumstances. Developmentally, this may end up doing him more benefit than any of the rest of us. Good deal, I say.
One other thing we talked about over dinner is school. The public schools in Russia are all open to whoever wants to attend, which means on the flip side that the particularly good ones can be a bit more challenging to get into, given the facts of waiting lists and the extra layers of complication that Russians install to stave off boredom (I'm guessing). To sum up, we need to have decided pretty damn soon what school we want Z to go to (already done; the one right near here is a math/science one, which should be right up his alley), and get started jumping through hoops. One of the hoops for this school is in the form of a 'preparatory course' that is held on saturdays for two hours from December through April (oops). I'm going to get him started in that from the beginning of February -- a prospect Z himself took with some enthusiasm. Fortunately, Z already has the mathematical know-how to leave him not disadvantaged getting in a little late. Then, as it gets on towards May, A and I will have to figure out to what extent encouragement will be needed to secure Z a favorable spot in the line. More on that as it is clarified.
We're still planning on taking a walk on the river this weekend. Of course, pictures will be taken.
января 18, 2007
Teevee
1/18 13:33, Pushkin time
Since last night's Spongebob-dubbed-into-Russian was one I had seen way too many times, I spent a chunk of the evening watching the news instead. Apparently, they claim, the FSB found some sort of big quantity of tritonal in a train station in Tyumen, and somehow, someone got word of some sort of impending terrorist action. So the news was making a big deal about that. Funny parts were about how the bureaucrats they interviewed from time to time would respond to objections over the new oppressive powers they were planning to grant themselves (like increasing phone taps, reading of private mail, restrictions of travel, etc) by pointing out that no less than the USA and UK had granted themselves police powers far in excess of the ones the RF is looking to pass.
And those are free countries, don't you see? So they set the bar for what must be acceptable and what goes too far.
A guy swung by our way from all the way over in Vladivostok, where they have certainly not lacked for cold. When he left, it was -47 at night, making up to -45 in the day. Right on the ocean, too. They say that over the next week, we'll be shedding about 20 celsius degrees, but still we won't ever get anywhere near that level.
And to wrap up this ever-so-eventful one: I've decided to finally quit stalling and get my car washed this evening. I made a big of a pun-joke at work, playing off our business of heavy trucks [грузовик] and the similarity between the words for 'load' [груз] and 'dirt' [гряз].
Wow. It's even less funny now that I've explained it than it was in its original pun-form. I wouldn't have believed it was possible.
Anyway, as I may have mentioned here, when it is wet, or when it snows, thanks to the salt (or the leather-and-glue-eating, but paint-job-safe chemical alternative they use in Moscow -- clear evidence where the priorities lie in a city where the politically-connected are all car-owners, but the supermajority of commuters go via bus, train, or subway, bookended with on-foot commuting...) and the miracle of sublimation, cars get filthy here in Planck time. And if you want to have metal panels, rather than rusty colanders, for the sides of your car when summer rolls around, you get it washed pretty frequently. So there are a lot of car washes around. And even then, when you go to get a wash -- which are all hand-and-pressure-washer, none of that fancy roller-brush gear here! -- there is always a line of some sorts. Even sometimes when you go at one in the morning (I'm 50/50 for waiting in line at that time of 'day'). So to get my car washed, I have to arrange for A to pick the kids up from their preschool, leave work fairly right at the close of business, drive like a madman to the wash down the way, and not expect to be home in time for dinner. I've never missed putting the kids to bed, but it has been a close thing on a couple occasions.
But it needs to be done, and soon, because on this saturday morning, we are taking A to the airport and she is heading off to visit back in Portland for a couple weeks. I've promised to make sure that the kids continue to eat at least reasonably well, and of all the difficulties the next two weeks will entail, this will be the hardest. Food not reliably keeping even in refrigerators here for a particularly satisfying interval in many cases (though on the other hand I continue to be impressed by the 'can be stored unrefrigerated for up to six months' milk), some groceries must be purchased on a demand-basis. We'll be seeing a fair bit of the market I suspect. Which isn't necessarily bad, since I haven't really gone very much since A and the kids got here.
Since last night's Spongebob-dubbed-into-Russian was one I had seen way too many times, I spent a chunk of the evening watching the news instead. Apparently, they claim, the FSB found some sort of big quantity of tritonal in a train station in Tyumen, and somehow, someone got word of some sort of impending terrorist action. So the news was making a big deal about that. Funny parts were about how the bureaucrats they interviewed from time to time would respond to objections over the new oppressive powers they were planning to grant themselves (like increasing phone taps, reading of private mail, restrictions of travel, etc) by pointing out that no less than the USA and UK had granted themselves police powers far in excess of the ones the RF is looking to pass.
And those are free countries, don't you see? So they set the bar for what must be acceptable and what goes too far.
A guy swung by our way from all the way over in Vladivostok, where they have certainly not lacked for cold. When he left, it was -47 at night, making up to -45 in the day. Right on the ocean, too. They say that over the next week, we'll be shedding about 20 celsius degrees, but still we won't ever get anywhere near that level.
And to wrap up this ever-so-eventful one: I've decided to finally quit stalling and get my car washed this evening. I made a big of a pun-joke at work, playing off our business of heavy trucks [грузовик] and the similarity between the words for 'load' [груз] and 'dirt' [гряз].
Wow. It's even less funny now that I've explained it than it was in its original pun-form. I wouldn't have believed it was possible.
Anyway, as I may have mentioned here, when it is wet, or when it snows, thanks to the salt (or the leather-and-glue-eating, but paint-job-safe chemical alternative they use in Moscow -- clear evidence where the priorities lie in a city where the politically-connected are all car-owners, but the supermajority of commuters go via bus, train, or subway, bookended with on-foot commuting...) and the miracle of sublimation, cars get filthy here in Planck time. And if you want to have metal panels, rather than rusty colanders, for the sides of your car when summer rolls around, you get it washed pretty frequently. So there are a lot of car washes around. And even then, when you go to get a wash -- which are all hand-and-pressure-washer, none of that fancy roller-brush gear here! -- there is always a line of some sorts. Even sometimes when you go at one in the morning (I'm 50/50 for waiting in line at that time of 'day'). So to get my car washed, I have to arrange for A to pick the kids up from their preschool, leave work fairly right at the close of business, drive like a madman to the wash down the way, and not expect to be home in time for dinner. I've never missed putting the kids to bed, but it has been a close thing on a couple occasions.
But it needs to be done, and soon, because on this saturday morning, we are taking A to the airport and she is heading off to visit back in Portland for a couple weeks. I've promised to make sure that the kids continue to eat at least reasonably well, and of all the difficulties the next two weeks will entail, this will be the hardest. Food not reliably keeping even in refrigerators here for a particularly satisfying interval in many cases (though on the other hand I continue to be impressed by the 'can be stored unrefrigerated for up to six months' milk), some groceries must be purchased on a demand-basis. We'll be seeing a fair bit of the market I suspect. Which isn't necessarily bad, since I haven't really gone very much since A and the kids got here.
января 16, 2007
Swing again
1/17 10:59, Pushkin time
Z is at the point in his learning the language that he should start working on grammar a bit more rigorously -- his vocabulary is fairly decent, if a little oddly-composed from the view of one who only studied languages formally. He already mostly does subject-adjective agreement, but subject-verb and the whole wealth of declensions are completely new to him (except for the I/me and he/him and we/us that directly map from english). For now, I've been just repeating, in a grammatically correct manner the things he says in an incorrect manner; it is the way he learned to speak english properly, after all.
But I am a bit dissatisfied by this approach in two regards. First, he may be old enough to understand an actual explanation of why things are done a certain way, but not another. This has worked on at least a superficial level with the specific construction of "with" + instrumental case. He can do that one without effort, and he understands the way the words change when they are mated with that particular preposition. But, even if he is able to meaningfully process grammatical explanations, the fact is that the cases in Russian don't actually map directly onto any analogous english usages; close, but not all the way. And so I may be teaching him in a way that will end up reinforcing garbage along with the good parts. Plus, it is not the way that the most fluent russian-speakers learned it; for them the explanations of grammar came after they already had developed an instinct for the mechanics of it. Second, and the thing that keeps me from giving up on the explanation-method, is that from my point of view, the grammar is complicated, and really needs explanation to make good sense. Of course, this is almost certainly just my bias, but it is a strong one, and I'm not sure to what extent Z (a native english-speaker and relative latecomer to the russian language compared to his peers just like me) would share that bias.
He certainly hasn't complained about it being difficult since after he first became able to construct short sentences. And the writing and math assignments he has shown me seem to indicate that he understands what is said to him and is making clear progress.
Dilemma dilemma.
Around town, they're just now starting to break down the New Year decorations. I've almost forgotten what the streets look like around here without thousands of blinky lights.
Z is at the point in his learning the language that he should start working on grammar a bit more rigorously -- his vocabulary is fairly decent, if a little oddly-composed from the view of one who only studied languages formally. He already mostly does subject-adjective agreement, but subject-verb and the whole wealth of declensions are completely new to him (except for the I/me and he/him and we/us that directly map from english). For now, I've been just repeating, in a grammatically correct manner the things he says in an incorrect manner; it is the way he learned to speak english properly, after all.
But I am a bit dissatisfied by this approach in two regards. First, he may be old enough to understand an actual explanation of why things are done a certain way, but not another. This has worked on at least a superficial level with the specific construction of "with" + instrumental case. He can do that one without effort, and he understands the way the words change when they are mated with that particular preposition. But, even if he is able to meaningfully process grammatical explanations, the fact is that the cases in Russian don't actually map directly onto any analogous english usages; close, but not all the way. And so I may be teaching him in a way that will end up reinforcing garbage along with the good parts. Plus, it is not the way that the most fluent russian-speakers learned it; for them the explanations of grammar came after they already had developed an instinct for the mechanics of it. Second, and the thing that keeps me from giving up on the explanation-method, is that from my point of view, the grammar is complicated, and really needs explanation to make good sense. Of course, this is almost certainly just my bias, but it is a strong one, and I'm not sure to what extent Z (a native english-speaker and relative latecomer to the russian language compared to his peers just like me) would share that bias.
He certainly hasn't complained about it being difficult since after he first became able to construct short sentences. And the writing and math assignments he has shown me seem to indicate that he understands what is said to him and is making clear progress.
Dilemma dilemma.
Around town, they're just now starting to break down the New Year decorations. I've almost forgotten what the streets look like around here without thousands of blinky lights.
Nyah nyah
1/16 22:37, Pushkin time
So I guess I didn't get to it the next day. I'd say that not much has happened, but that wouldn't be, strictly speaking, true. Actually, I've just been mad-busy, and haven't had much time for anything.
But this evening came something, and I cannot let it slip past.
It has been unseasonably warm for pretty much the whole of winter; temperatures from November have hovered right around zero - minus one degrees. So as soon as snow falls, it warms right back up and starts to melt. Of course, when I ask people now, "so, when exactly does winter start in Petersburg?", the still tell me that it is coming, but they sound less and less smug. It's apparently been warm through most of the country and Europe; even the guys from Novosibirk say that the temperatures are swinging around only minus seven or so; warm enough that the snow accumulates (up to ten feet there by now), but hardly even long-sleeve weather by local standards. It's not terrible, but the kids are starting to wonder what the hell all the sleds and skates are for...
And then tonight, watching the news during their weather segment, the anchor said something along the lines of "it's been so warm this winter that people in the European parts of the country are starting to have trouble remembering what snow looks like" then, with a grin, he says, "to help, here are some pictures from the USA". And it changed to pictures of ice-covered grapefruits in California, and some very cold and hungry cows in Nevada. Heh heh.
So I guess I didn't get to it the next day. I'd say that not much has happened, but that wouldn't be, strictly speaking, true. Actually, I've just been mad-busy, and haven't had much time for anything.
But this evening came something, and I cannot let it slip past.
It has been unseasonably warm for pretty much the whole of winter; temperatures from November have hovered right around zero - minus one degrees. So as soon as snow falls, it warms right back up and starts to melt. Of course, when I ask people now, "so, when exactly does winter start in Petersburg?", the still tell me that it is coming, but they sound less and less smug. It's apparently been warm through most of the country and Europe; even the guys from Novosibirk say that the temperatures are swinging around only minus seven or so; warm enough that the snow accumulates (up to ten feet there by now), but hardly even long-sleeve weather by local standards. It's not terrible, but the kids are starting to wonder what the hell all the sleds and skates are for...
And then tonight, watching the news during their weather segment, the anchor said something along the lines of "it's been so warm this winter that people in the European parts of the country are starting to have trouble remembering what snow looks like" then, with a grin, he says, "to help, here are some pictures from the USA". And it changed to pictures of ice-covered grapefruits in California, and some very cold and hungry cows in Nevada. Heh heh.
января 11, 2007
Squish
1/11 13:22, Pushkin time
And the day after we got back home, our Internet service dropped off (we had paid ahead, but figured wrong, and were fifty cents short for the month of January). That was taken care of on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning -- for a surprise -- we were back up and running. But it put me out of posting, so again I find myself looking back over a blur of days, trying to figure out what to say.
I think this time I might not be able to come up with much.
It is bizarrely warm still; even the ground has thawed, and everything squelches everywhere you step. They persist in calling for cold right around the corner, but nothing so far. It also is starting to feel -- not brighter, but at least 'less dark'. I was outside at 4PM yesterday and caught myself thinking how neat it was that even bright enough to read.
Crud. I'm afraid that's it. My writing muscle has withered over these last Access-free days. Maybe tomorrow...
And the day after we got back home, our Internet service dropped off (we had paid ahead, but figured wrong, and were fifty cents short for the month of January). That was taken care of on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning -- for a surprise -- we were back up and running. But it put me out of posting, so again I find myself looking back over a blur of days, trying to figure out what to say.
I think this time I might not be able to come up with much.
It is bizarrely warm still; even the ground has thawed, and everything squelches everywhere you step. They persist in calling for cold right around the corner, but nothing so far. It also is starting to feel -- not brighter, but at least 'less dark'. I was outside at 4PM yesterday and caught myself thinking how neat it was that even bright enough to read.
Crud. I'm afraid that's it. My writing muscle has withered over these last Access-free days. Maybe tomorrow...
января 05, 2007
Back home
1/5 12:16, Pushkin time
and so, we decided in the end to do nothing at all Monday afternoon.
Tuesday, we got up good and early to start the touristing portion of our trip. First, we drove out to the Victory Park (throughout our trip, the utter lack of traffic was in fact a bit distressing to me, though it kept A's spirits high), and spent the morning walking and taking pictures. We even managed to find the part of the park where the monuments to the individual commanders-on-fronts were located; found the names both of the guy who was responsible for pushing the Germans out of where the boys are living now, and the guy who was responsible -- on a less positive note -- for chasing one wing of the boys' family out of their homes in Lithuania (the 'Baltic States Front', that is called). So, light lessons about good guys and bad guys, depending on the context. Z is big enough, though G not quite, that even he was impressed by the sheer scope of the structures. And this is post-soviet, so I may amend my 'the soviets took their monument-building seriously' to encompass more generally russians overall.
Then we drove to the Kremlin; and then around and around and around the Kremlin looking for parking. The funny part is not that there was not a free spot of curb space for several blocks' radius, but that all the curbs in that area were well-saturated with "No Parking" signs. And parked full anyway. They say that towing cars (which is done here) cannot be done in adequate scale to have any kind of impact; shortly after a car or five are towed, the 'newly-vacated' spaces are filled right back up. We saw fleets of dozens of towers roaming around, and yet they made no noticeable dents in the situation anywhere. Finally finding parking across the river from the Kremlin (in a pay-parking lot, just to be safe), we walked across, past the big cathedral and through the crush on Red Square to meet J V and his wife for lunch -- which was, fortunately, right next to where we met them. A nice Russian food, buffet-style. The boys (as usual these days) started out shy and standoffish, but by the end were drawing comments-of-approval from J V and Е. A got the chance to talk to another person who moved here with no real language or experience background; J V said it was about a year before he started to like it here, and that he found russian to be a very difficult language. It's hard to discount his opinion on that the way I usually would, since he speaks one more language than I do, and the quality of most of his are 'fluent' rather than 'acceptable', like me. But still, all of his are European; he's never gone into Japanese... If you want difficult, in my opinion, that's where to look.
But nonetheless, A left the lunch obviously comforted. Which is very good. And once we had gotten pictures and a bit more of a look around before getting back to the car, we figured to call off the planned dinner visit on the other side of town until Wednesday and to just head back to the apartment to get a bit more rest.
That evening, В Е called to find out if we had any plans for the next morning; at that point our first planned stop was with a breeder of Great Danes on the south side of town at two. Since В Е lives on the exact opposite side of the city, and since we were going to that part of the city after the breeder's to have dinner with another buddy of mine (whom you might remember from my last time in Moscow, А Б), our initial reaction was thanks but probably we won't be able to make it. В Е sighs and says that's too bad, the kids might really like to go to the zoo. Hearing that, A's eyes light up (she is a big fan of zoo-going), and we reversed course and agreed to meet him first thing [russian calibration] in the morning at the gates of the Moscow zoo.
And so we did. We spent almost three hours walking the grounds of the zoo. Since it was winter, a number of the warmer-climate critters (like kangaroos and dolphins, for example) were tucked away, but for the most part it was great. A commented that, unlike the zoos in the US which make such a big effort to provide 'habitat' for their animals, the Moscow zoo was a bit sparse, but on the other hand, you could actually see the animals here. It must come down to the question of the purpose of the zoo. So many in the US seem to be built for the sole purpose of accommodating the various animals, whereas the Moscow zoo is clearly designed to keep the animals comfortable, but primarily to interest and educate (and motivate, if the signs accompanying the exhibits are read in their entirety) the people who come to visit. Different takes on conservationism, I suppose. We did a fair bit of English-talking for the benefit of В Е (who doesn't get much practice these days) as well as A. He said he should collect a book of the things the kids and we said to each other for "the serious students of the english language". Comments like, "His tongue is long enough to eat his own boogers with it" and "The bear has a really itchy butt" and the like. And the boys learned a whole lot of slightly-more-exotic animal names -- and got to show off their own animal name vocabulary.
Then when we left, down to the Marino metro station area (a newer part of Moscow in the south-west) to meet a breeder of the type of dog that we are interested in getting while we're here -- blue Great Danes. We met with Е Т and her friend А (Their Website) outside her apartment with four of their dogs, played a bit, then headed indoors for a tea-type socialization. Upstairs with the dogs, Z absolutely fell in love. They had one of the tall metal bunkbeds that are well-used around here with the bottom half a desk that had been lowered to become a dog couch, and Z plopped down in the middle of three of the 100-pound-plus beasties and contentedly scratched ears while we talked. The ladies have been maintaining a bloodline for six generations ; since just after the soviet union fell, and before the default. In fact, the default made for an interesting story. In the time after it, they said, a lot of breeders did most of their business with China. A asked, tongue-in-cheek, 'to eat?', and they said probably yes; the dogs were bought in bulk (by the traincarload). Fortunately, they didn't have any litters during that time, so the question never arose for them, but as they said, no matter how much you love your dogs, if there are ten new mouths to feed, and you can hardly feed the ones you had, and no one else has the money to be able to take them off your hands... A lot of dealers had to hold their noses and do what was necessary. Very sad, but fortunately all in the past. We've agreed to keep in touch and are figuring on starting to look seriously at the litter they will be having following the completion of our house in Pokrovskaya.
Then leaving there, out to the MKAD, and halfway around its 100-km circumference (through Лосный Остров, which all the maps and dictionaries incorrectly translate as "Elk Island". I've seen the head of a Лось. It's a moose, not an elk) to the vicinity of my old hotel-haunts by Sokol and the apartment of А Б. He had invited his parents over to dinner with us as well, which A and I took originally somewhat with concern, as the boys had behaved well for the majority of the day already, and we worried that some serious difficulty might lie ahead if they were pushed much further. As it turned out, the concerns were groundless. The boys took to А Б's dad immediately, and dinner was great. A even did a fair bit of talking (all in russian), and the boys were completely in the linguistic zone. And of course, to talk with a pair of lifelong Muscovites was itself a new experience. А Б's dad, hearing that we were living in a two-room apartment with the two kids and a third on the way spoke up that yes, that was far too much space. And if we had a 15-sotok plot of land on which to build, we were certainly going to be having a garden and orchard and cow and a couple of pigs, right? For context, a good-sized country-home plot in Russia has always been 6 sotok, so from that perspective, we do have a pretty good spread. A even got the experience of talking world politics with a whole new perspective in the mix -- unfortunately, while I was out of the room helping with a chore, so details will have to come from her.
And after dinner, we headed back to С П's place, packed up the car, put the kids and ourselves to bed.
Thursday morning we left the apartment at 6AM, made it off the MKAD onto the Petersburg shosse at 7, and were home by 2:30 -- an hour better time than we made coming down! Using the tactic that I both invented and perfected on my lightning-speed drive from Toronto to Montreal a couple years ago, I successfully followed a long stream of decoys and made great time. At one point, on a particularly good stretch of road, behind a particularly good decoy, I looked down and saw that we were doing 160kph (that is, 100mph). I had just seen a sign indicating traffic should slow to 70, and released the accelerator, when my decoy -- who had not slowed down -- paid off. A ДПС waiting right behind a corner nabbed him for what will presumably be a very tasty payday. Passing him at a still-illegal-though-less-so speed, the cop made eye contact with me and clearly communicated to me how very lucky I was that there weren't two of him (there never are here). Heh heh.
And now were back at home; on holidays still until Tuesday (Christmas falls on the weekend, so the following Monday is taken off in its stead). What a trip.
and so, we decided in the end to do nothing at all Monday afternoon.
Tuesday, we got up good and early to start the touristing portion of our trip. First, we drove out to the Victory Park (throughout our trip, the utter lack of traffic was in fact a bit distressing to me, though it kept A's spirits high), and spent the morning walking and taking pictures. We even managed to find the part of the park where the monuments to the individual commanders-on-fronts were located; found the names both of the guy who was responsible for pushing the Germans out of where the boys are living now, and the guy who was responsible -- on a less positive note -- for chasing one wing of the boys' family out of their homes in Lithuania (the 'Baltic States Front', that is called). So, light lessons about good guys and bad guys, depending on the context. Z is big enough, though G not quite, that even he was impressed by the sheer scope of the structures. And this is post-soviet, so I may amend my 'the soviets took their monument-building seriously' to encompass more generally russians overall.
Then we drove to the Kremlin; and then around and around and around the Kremlin looking for parking. The funny part is not that there was not a free spot of curb space for several blocks' radius, but that all the curbs in that area were well-saturated with "No Parking" signs. And parked full anyway. They say that towing cars (which is done here) cannot be done in adequate scale to have any kind of impact; shortly after a car or five are towed, the 'newly-vacated' spaces are filled right back up. We saw fleets of dozens of towers roaming around, and yet they made no noticeable dents in the situation anywhere. Finally finding parking across the river from the Kremlin (in a pay-parking lot, just to be safe), we walked across, past the big cathedral and through the crush on Red Square to meet J V and his wife for lunch -- which was, fortunately, right next to where we met them. A nice Russian food, buffet-style. The boys (as usual these days) started out shy and standoffish, but by the end were drawing comments-of-approval from J V and Е. A got the chance to talk to another person who moved here with no real language or experience background; J V said it was about a year before he started to like it here, and that he found russian to be a very difficult language. It's hard to discount his opinion on that the way I usually would, since he speaks one more language than I do, and the quality of most of his are 'fluent' rather than 'acceptable', like me. But still, all of his are European; he's never gone into Japanese... If you want difficult, in my opinion, that's where to look.
But nonetheless, A left the lunch obviously comforted. Which is very good. And once we had gotten pictures and a bit more of a look around before getting back to the car, we figured to call off the planned dinner visit on the other side of town until Wednesday and to just head back to the apartment to get a bit more rest.
That evening, В Е called to find out if we had any plans for the next morning; at that point our first planned stop was with a breeder of Great Danes on the south side of town at two. Since В Е lives on the exact opposite side of the city, and since we were going to that part of the city after the breeder's to have dinner with another buddy of mine (whom you might remember from my last time in Moscow, А Б), our initial reaction was thanks but probably we won't be able to make it. В Е sighs and says that's too bad, the kids might really like to go to the zoo. Hearing that, A's eyes light up (she is a big fan of zoo-going), and we reversed course and agreed to meet him first thing [russian calibration] in the morning at the gates of the Moscow zoo.
And so we did. We spent almost three hours walking the grounds of the zoo. Since it was winter, a number of the warmer-climate critters (like kangaroos and dolphins, for example) were tucked away, but for the most part it was great. A commented that, unlike the zoos in the US which make such a big effort to provide 'habitat' for their animals, the Moscow zoo was a bit sparse, but on the other hand, you could actually see the animals here. It must come down to the question of the purpose of the zoo. So many in the US seem to be built for the sole purpose of accommodating the various animals, whereas the Moscow zoo is clearly designed to keep the animals comfortable, but primarily to interest and educate (and motivate, if the signs accompanying the exhibits are read in their entirety) the people who come to visit. Different takes on conservationism, I suppose. We did a fair bit of English-talking for the benefit of В Е (who doesn't get much practice these days) as well as A. He said he should collect a book of the things the kids and we said to each other for "the serious students of the english language". Comments like, "His tongue is long enough to eat his own boogers with it" and "The bear has a really itchy butt" and the like. And the boys learned a whole lot of slightly-more-exotic animal names -- and got to show off their own animal name vocabulary.
Then when we left, down to the Marino metro station area (a newer part of Moscow in the south-west) to meet a breeder of the type of dog that we are interested in getting while we're here -- blue Great Danes. We met with Е Т and her friend А (Their Website) outside her apartment with four of their dogs, played a bit, then headed indoors for a tea-type socialization. Upstairs with the dogs, Z absolutely fell in love. They had one of the tall metal bunkbeds that are well-used around here with the bottom half a desk that had been lowered to become a dog couch, and Z plopped down in the middle of three of the 100-pound-plus beasties and contentedly scratched ears while we talked. The ladies have been maintaining a bloodline for six generations ; since just after the soviet union fell, and before the default. In fact, the default made for an interesting story. In the time after it, they said, a lot of breeders did most of their business with China. A asked, tongue-in-cheek, 'to eat?', and they said probably yes; the dogs were bought in bulk (by the traincarload). Fortunately, they didn't have any litters during that time, so the question never arose for them, but as they said, no matter how much you love your dogs, if there are ten new mouths to feed, and you can hardly feed the ones you had, and no one else has the money to be able to take them off your hands... A lot of dealers had to hold their noses and do what was necessary. Very sad, but fortunately all in the past. We've agreed to keep in touch and are figuring on starting to look seriously at the litter they will be having following the completion of our house in Pokrovskaya.
Then leaving there, out to the MKAD, and halfway around its 100-km circumference (through Лосный Остров, which all the maps and dictionaries incorrectly translate as "Elk Island". I've seen the head of a Лось. It's a moose, not an elk) to the vicinity of my old hotel-haunts by Sokol and the apartment of А Б. He had invited his parents over to dinner with us as well, which A and I took originally somewhat with concern, as the boys had behaved well for the majority of the day already, and we worried that some serious difficulty might lie ahead if they were pushed much further. As it turned out, the concerns were groundless. The boys took to А Б's dad immediately, and dinner was great. A even did a fair bit of talking (all in russian), and the boys were completely in the linguistic zone. And of course, to talk with a pair of lifelong Muscovites was itself a new experience. А Б's dad, hearing that we were living in a two-room apartment with the two kids and a third on the way spoke up that yes, that was far too much space. And if we had a 15-sotok plot of land on which to build, we were certainly going to be having a garden and orchard and cow and a couple of pigs, right? For context, a good-sized country-home plot in Russia has always been 6 sotok, so from that perspective, we do have a pretty good spread. A even got the experience of talking world politics with a whole new perspective in the mix -- unfortunately, while I was out of the room helping with a chore, so details will have to come from her.
And after dinner, we headed back to С П's place, packed up the car, put the kids and ourselves to bed.
Thursday morning we left the apartment at 6AM, made it off the MKAD onto the Petersburg shosse at 7, and were home by 2:30 -- an hour better time than we made coming down! Using the tactic that I both invented and perfected on my lightning-speed drive from Toronto to Montreal a couple years ago, I successfully followed a long stream of decoys and made great time. At one point, on a particularly good stretch of road, behind a particularly good decoy, I looked down and saw that we were doing 160kph (that is, 100mph). I had just seen a sign indicating traffic should slow to 70, and released the accelerator, when my decoy -- who had not slowed down -- paid off. A ДПС waiting right behind a corner nabbed him for what will presumably be a very tasty payday. Passing him at a still-illegal-though-less-so speed, the cop made eye contact with me and clearly communicated to me how very lucky I was that there weren't two of him (there never are here). Heh heh.
And now were back at home; on holidays still until Tuesday (Christmas falls on the weekend, so the following Monday is taken off in its stead). What a trip.
Back home
1/5 12:16, Pushkin time
and so, we decided in the end to do nothing at all Monday afternoon.
Tuesday, we got up good and early to start the touristing portion of our trip. First, we drove out to the Victory Park (throughout our trip, the utter lack of traffic was in fact a bit distressing to me, though it kept A's spirits high), and spent the morning walking and taking pictures. We even managed to find the part of the park where the monuments to the individual commanders-on-fronts were located; found the names both of the guy who was responsible for pushing the Germans out of where the boys are living now, and the guy who was responsible -- on a less positive note -- for chasing one wing of the boys' family out of their homes in Lithuania (the 'Baltic States Front', that is called). So, light lessons about good guys and bad guys, depending on the context. Z is big enough, though G not quite, that even he was impressed by the sheer scope of the structures. And this is post-soviet, so I may amend my 'the soviets took their monument-building seriously' to encompass more generally russians overall.
Then we drove to the Kremlin; and then around and around and around the Kremlin looking for parking. The funny part is not that there was not a free spot of curb space for several blocks' radius, but that all the curbs in that area were well-saturated with "No Parking" signs. And parked full anyway. They say that towing cars (which is done here) cannot be done in adequate scale to have any kind of impact; shortly after a car or five are towed, the 'newly-vacated' spaces are filled right back up. We saw fleets of dozens of towers roaming around, and yet they made no noticeable dents in the situation anywhere. Finally finding parking across the river from the Kremlin (in a pay-parking lot, just to be safe), we walked across, past the big cathedral and through the crush on Red Square to meet J V and his wife for lunch -- which was, fortunately, right next to where we met them. A nice Russian food, buffet-style. The boys (as usual these days) started out shy and standoffish, but by the end were drawing comments-of-approval from J V and Е. A got the chance to talk to another person who moved here with no real language or experience background; J V said it was about a year before he started to like it here, and that he found russian to be a very difficult language. It's hard to discount his opinion on that the way I usually would, since he speaks one more language than I do, and the quality of most of his are 'fluent' rather than 'acceptable', like me. But still, all of his are European; he's never gone into Japanese... If you want difficult, in my opinion, that's where to look.
But nonetheless, A left the lunch obviously comforted. Which is very good. And once we had gotten pictures and a bit more of a look around before getting back to the car, we figured to call off the planned dinner visit on the other side of town until Wednesday and to just head back to the apartment to get a bit more rest.
That evening, В Е called to find out if we had any plans for the next morning; at that point our first planned stop was with a breeder of Great Danes on the south side of town at two. Since В Е lives on the exact opposite side of the city, and since we were going to that part of the city after the breeder's to have dinner with another buddy of mine (whom you might remember from my last time in Moscow, А Б), our initial reaction was thanks but probably we won't be able to make it. В Е sighs and says that's too bad, the kids might really like to go to the zoo. Hearing that, A's eyes light up (she is a big fan of zoo-going), and we reversed course and agreed to meet him first thing [russian calibration] in the morning at the gates of the Moscow zoo.
And so we did. We spent almost three hours walking the grounds of the zoo. Since it was winter, a number of the warmer-climate critters (like kangaroos and dolphins, for example) were tucked away, but for the most part it was great. A commented that, unlike the zoos in the US which make such a big effort to provide 'habitat' for their animals, the Moscow zoo was a bit sparse, but on the other hand, you could actually see the animals here. It must come down to the question of the purpose of the zoo. So many in the US seem to be built for the sole purpose of accommodating the various animals, whereas the Moscow zoo is clearly designed to keep the animals comfortable, but primarily to interest and educate (and motivate, if the signs accompanying the exhibits are read in their entirety) the people who come to visit. Different takes on conservationism, I suppose. We did a fair bit of English-talking for the benefit of В Е (who doesn't get much practice these days) as well as A. He said he should collect a book of the things the kids and we said to each other for "the serious students of the english language". Comments like, "His tongue is long enough to eat his own boogers with it" and "The bear has a really itchy butt" and the like. And the boys learned a whole lot of slightly-more-exotic animal names -- and got to show off their own animal name vocabulary.
Then when we left, down to the Marino metro station area (a newer part of Moscow in the south-west) to meet a breeder of the type of dog that we are interested in getting while we're here -- blue Great Danes. We met with Е Т and her friend А (Their Website) outside her apartment with four of their dogs, played a bit, then headed indoors for a tea-type socialization. Upstairs with the dogs, Z absolutely fell in love. They had one of the tall metal bunkbeds that are well-used around here with the bottom half a desk that had been lowered to become a dog couch, and Z plopped down in the middle of three of the 100-pound-plus beasties and contentedly scratched ears while we talked. The ladies have been maintaining a bloodline for six generations ; since just after the soviet union fell, and before the default. In fact, the default made for an interesting story. In the time after it, they said, a lot of breeders did most of their business with China. A asked, tongue-in-cheek, 'to eat?', and they said probably yes; the dogs were bought in bulk (by the traincarload). Fortunately, they didn't have any litters during that time, so the question never arose for them, but as they said, no matter how much you love your dogs, if there are ten new mouths to feed, and you can hardly feed the ones you had, and no one else has the money to be able to take them off your hands... A lot of dealers had to hold their noses and do what was necessary. Very sad, but fortunately all in the past. We've agreed to keep in touch and are figuring on starting to look seriously at the litter they will be having following the completion of our house in Pokrovskaya.
Then leaving there, out to the MKAD, and halfway around its 100-km circumference (through Лосный Остров, which all the maps and dictionaries incorrectly translate as "Elk Island". I've seen the head of a Лось. It's a moose, not an elk) to the vicinity of my old hotel-haunts by Sokol and the apartment of А Б. He had invited his parents over to dinner with us as well, which A and I took originally somewhat with concern, as the boys had behaved well for the majority of the day already, and we worried that some serious difficulty might lie ahead if they were pushed much further. As it turned out, the concerns were groundless. The boys took to А Б's dad immediately, and dinner was great. A even did a fair bit of talking (all in russian), and the boys were completely in the linguistic zone. And of course, to talk with a pair of lifelong Muscovites was itself a new experience. А Б's dad, hearing that we were living in a two-room apartment with the two kids and a third on the way spoke up that yes, that was far too much space. And if we had a 15-sotok plot of land on which to build, we were certainly going to be having a garden and orchard and cow and a couple of pigs, right? For context, a good-sized country-home plot in Russia has always been 6 sotok, so from that perspective, we do have a pretty good spread. A even got the experience of talking world politics with a whole new perspective in the mix -- unfortunately, while I was out of the room helping with a chore, so details will have to come from her.
And after dinner, we headed back to С П's place, packed up the car, put the kids and ourselves to bed.
Thursday morning we left the apartment at 6AM, made it off the MKAD onto the Petersburg shosse at 7, and were home by 2:30 -- an hour better time than we made coming down! Using the tactic that I both invented and perfected on my lightning-speed drive from Toronto to Montreal a couple years ago, I successfully followed a long stream of decoys and made great time. At one point, on a particularly good stretch of road, behind a particularly good decoy, I looked down and saw that we were doing 160kph (that is, 100mph). I had just seen a sign indicating traffic should slow to 70, and released the accelerator, when my decoy -- who had not slowed down -- paid off. A ДПС waiting right behind a corner nabbed him for what will presumably be a very tasty payday. Passing him at a still-illegal-though-less-so speed, the cop made eye contact with me and clearly communicated to me how very lucky I was that there weren't two of him (there never are here). Heh heh.
And now were back at home; on holidays still until Tuesday (Christmas falls on the weekend, so the following Monday is taken off in its stead). What a trip.
and so, we decided in the end to do nothing at all Monday afternoon.
Tuesday, we got up good and early to start the touristing portion of our trip. First, we drove out to the Victory Park (throughout our trip, the utter lack of traffic was in fact a bit distressing to me, though it kept A's spirits high), and spent the morning walking and taking pictures. We even managed to find the part of the park where the monuments to the individual commanders-on-fronts were located; found the names both of the guy who was responsible for pushing the Germans out of where the boys are living now, and the guy who was responsible -- on a less positive note -- for chasing one wing of the boys' family out of their homes in Lithuania (the 'Baltic States Front', that is called). So, light lessons about good guys and bad guys, depending on the context. Z is big enough, though G not quite, that even he was impressed by the sheer scope of the structures. And this is post-soviet, so I may amend my 'the soviets took their monument-building seriously' to encompass more generally russians overall.
Then we drove to the Kremlin; and then around and around and around the Kremlin looking for parking. The funny part is not that there was not a free spot of curb space for several blocks' radius, but that all the curbs in that area were well-saturated with "No Parking" signs. And parked full anyway. They say that towing cars (which is done here) cannot be done in adequate scale to have any kind of impact; shortly after a car or five are towed, the 'newly-vacated' spaces are filled right back up. We saw fleets of dozens of towers roaming around, and yet they made no noticeable dents in the situation anywhere. Finally finding parking across the river from the Kremlin (in a pay-parking lot, just to be safe), we walked across, past the big cathedral and through the crush on Red Square to meet J V and his wife for lunch -- which was, fortunately, right next to where we met them. A nice Russian food, buffet-style. The boys (as usual these days) started out shy and standoffish, but by the end were drawing comments-of-approval from J V and Е. A got the chance to talk to another person who moved here with no real language or experience background; J V said it was about a year before he started to like it here, and that he found russian to be a very difficult language. It's hard to discount his opinion on that the way I usually would, since he speaks one more language than I do, and the quality of most of his are 'fluent' rather than 'acceptable', like me. But still, all of his are European; he's never gone into Japanese... If you want difficult, in my opinion, that's where to look.
But nonetheless, A left the lunch obviously comforted. Which is very good. And once we had gotten pictures and a bit more of a look around before getting back to the car, we figured to call off the planned dinner visit on the other side of town until Wednesday and to just head back to the apartment to get a bit more rest.
That evening, В Е called to find out if we had any plans for the next morning; at that point our first planned stop was with a breeder of Great Danes on the south side of town at two. Since В Е lives on the exact opposite side of the city, and since we were going to that part of the city after the breeder's to have dinner with another buddy of mine (whom you might remember from my last time in Moscow, А Б), our initial reaction was thanks but probably we won't be able to make it. В Е sighs and says that's too bad, the kids might really like to go to the zoo. Hearing that, A's eyes light up (she is a big fan of zoo-going), and we reversed course and agreed to meet him first thing [russian calibration] in the morning at the gates of the Moscow zoo.
And so we did. We spent almost three hours walking the grounds of the zoo. Since it was winter, a number of the warmer-climate critters (like kangaroos and dolphins, for example) were tucked away, but for the most part it was great. A commented that, unlike the zoos in the US which make such a big effort to provide 'habitat' for their animals, the Moscow zoo was a bit sparse, but on the other hand, you could actually see the animals here. It must come down to the question of the purpose of the zoo. So many in the US seem to be built for the sole purpose of accommodating the various animals, whereas the Moscow zoo is clearly designed to keep the animals comfortable, but primarily to interest and educate (and motivate, if the signs accompanying the exhibits are read in their entirety) the people who come to visit. Different takes on conservationism, I suppose. We did a fair bit of English-talking for the benefit of В Е (who doesn't get much practice these days) as well as A. He said he should collect a book of the things the kids and we said to each other for "the serious students of the english language". Comments like, "His tongue is long enough to eat his own boogers with it" and "The bear has a really itchy butt" and the like. And the boys learned a whole lot of slightly-more-exotic animal names -- and got to show off their own animal name vocabulary.
Then when we left, down to the Marino metro station area (a newer part of Moscow in the south-west) to meet a breeder of the type of dog that we are interested in getting while we're here -- blue Great Danes. We met with Е Т and her friend А (Their Website) outside her apartment with four of their dogs, played a bit, then headed indoors for a tea-type socialization. Upstairs with the dogs, Z absolutely fell in love. They had one of the tall metal bunkbeds that are well-used around here with the bottom half a desk that had been lowered to become a dog couch, and Z plopped down in the middle of three of the 100-pound-plus beasties and contentedly scratched ears while we talked. The ladies have been maintaining a bloodline for six generations ; since just after the soviet union fell, and before the default. In fact, the default made for an interesting story. In the time after it, they said, a lot of breeders did most of their business with China. A asked, tongue-in-cheek, 'to eat?', and they said probably yes; the dogs were bought in bulk (by the traincarload). Fortunately, they didn't have any litters during that time, so the question never arose for them, but as they said, no matter how much you love your dogs, if there are ten new mouths to feed, and you can hardly feed the ones you had, and no one else has the money to be able to take them off your hands... A lot of dealers had to hold their noses and do what was necessary. Very sad, but fortunately all in the past. We've agreed to keep in touch and are figuring on starting to look seriously at the litter they will be having following the completion of our house in Pokrovskaya.
Then leaving there, out to the MKAD, and halfway around its 100-km circumference (through Лосный Остров, which all the maps and dictionaries incorrectly translate as "Elk Island". I've seen the head of a Лось. It's a moose, not an elk) to the vicinity of my old hotel-haunts by Sokol and the apartment of А Б. He had invited his parents over to dinner with us as well, which A and I took originally somewhat with concern, as the boys had behaved well for the majority of the day already, and we worried that some serious difficulty might lie ahead if they were pushed much further. As it turned out, the concerns were groundless. The boys took to А Б's dad immediately, and dinner was great. A even did a fair bit of talking (all in russian), and the boys were completely in the linguistic zone. And of course, to talk with a pair of lifelong Muscovites was itself a new experience. А Б's dad, hearing that we were living in a two-room apartment with the two kids and a third on the way spoke up that yes, that was far too much space. And if we had a 15-sotok plot of land on which to build, we were certainly going to be having a garden and orchard and cow and a couple of pigs, right? For context, a good-sized country-home plot in Russia has always been 6 sotok, so from that perspective, we do have a pretty good spread. A even got the experience of talking world politics with a whole new perspective in the mix -- unfortunately, while I was out of the room helping with a chore, so details will have to come from her.
And after dinner, we headed back to С П's place, packed up the car, put the kids and ourselves to bed.
Thursday morning we left the apartment at 6AM, made it off the MKAD onto the Petersburg shosse at 7, and were home by 2:30 -- an hour better time than we made coming down! Using the tactic that I both invented and perfected on my lightning-speed drive from Toronto to Montreal a couple years ago, I successfully followed a long stream of decoys and made great time. At one point, on a particularly good stretch of road, behind a particularly good decoy, I looked down and saw that we were doing 160kph (that is, 100mph). I had just seen a sign indicating traffic should slow to 70, and released the accelerator, when my decoy -- who had not slowed down -- paid off. A ДПС waiting right behind a corner nabbed him for what will presumably be a very tasty payday. Passing him at a still-illegal-though-less-so speed, the cop made eye contact with me and clearly communicated to me how very lucky I was that there weren't two of him (there never are here). Heh heh.
And now were back at home; on holidays still until Tuesday (Christmas falls on the weekend, so the following Monday is taken off in its stead). What a trip.
января 01, 2007
С Новым Годом!
1/1 13:32, Moscow time
In happiness, we discover that С П's apartment comes equipped with DSL. Oh Access, sweet Access...
We got up at about 5AM on the morning of the 30th, and were on the road by 6 -- not bad time considering the additional child-wrangling that we get to go through before any kind of trip. I ended up driving the whole way down, mainly because I was more comfortable driving 'in the Russian manner' than A is, and the road is hardly Interstate-highway-quality. As far as Veliky Novgorod, the highway is pretty good, and traffic was almost nonexistent; I was able to maintain 120kph pretty much that whole leg of the trip, and when we finally got onto new (to us) asphalt, it was still full night, and we felt like we were making pretty decent time.
Amusingly, right after the fork in the road choosing to either go into Novgorod or to continue on to Tver, Moscow, and points south, the quality of the highway takes a severe hit. We were dodging -- not completely successfully -- potholes and axle-eaters in what seemed to be much heavier traffic for the better part of an hour and a half. By then there was a bit of light, and I was starting to wonder if this was what we had to look forward to for the next ~500km. When, all of a sudden, the quality of the road picked back up, and speeds got back to the 100-110 range. We took a pee-break in Vannay (just still on the Novogorod Oblast side of the Novgorod/Tver border), then refilled the top half of out gas tank in somewhere-I-can't-remember in Tver Oblast and also refilled our washer fluid bottle. By the time we pulled through Tver itself, around 100km from Moscow, at 1:30, we were feeling pretty confident that we had made good time. Traffic in Moscow itself allowing, of course.
And Moscow itself had traffic that was barely noticeable [by local standards]. We got to the MKAD [Московская Кольцовая Автомобильная Дорога -- that is, the big Moscow ring highway) and on and off in fast enough time to make С П run to catch us and to actually beat him to the meeting place. In all, nine hours almost exactly from doorstep to doorstep, just about 450 miles. It took just a hair over a full tank of gas, and two bottles of wiper fluid.
We went out with С П to orient ourselves to the city features around ourselves that evening, got a couple grocery-items, and crashed in preparation for the holiday ahead. In the middle of the night, we had the unpleasant surprise of Z puking his guts out all over С П's floor. We got to learn how to use his 'semi-automatic' washing machine (the height of 1986 Soviet Union technology -- you have to manually add water and manually start every cycle, including refilling for all of the four rinses), but got everything taken care of and calmed down and back to sleep before too much time had passed.
Yesterday we started off late (intentionally), Metroing out to meet В Е at the bulgarian restaurant he so loves, as it also offers a wide variety of soups, which is all Z was up for at that time. We're two transfers away from most everything out here, which is pretty good, given the size of the city. Unlike Petersburg, whose trains can be ridden from end-to-end in twenty-plus minutes, the Moscow metro can easily offer more than hour-long rides. Not that our rides are going to be that long, but still, it's not like the trains move any slower here. And given the traffic (except over holidays, it seems) here, we're planning to metro for most of our trips. The restaurant staff was giving balloons and presents to all the kids stopping in on the holiday, so the boys were adequately entertained and we got to have a nice long lunch. Then back to the apartment to get some more sleep to charge up for the party. Z woke up at about 8:30 fully recovered and ready to go. G was also in pretty good shape, so we bundled up again and made it out to С П's friend's place out near the MKAD by ten. And had a nice dinner-type thing; another attending guest is a Chinese guy from Malaysia who is studying medicine in Moscow -- where, it seems, they have elected not to suspend English-language studies. Crap. On the other hand, the poor guy has been in Russia for two years, and has never been outside the Moscow city limits, and speaks less Russian than does A, thanks to her five-days-a-week studying.
Before we could blink, it seemed, the president's New Years message came on, timed to end just as the clocks were striking twelve. And the fireworks..
All day, it seemed, people were blowing stuff up everywhere you went. Needless to say, there's no concept here of 'illegal' fireworks, and it seemed like on the corner of every block was a kiosk selling enough fireworks to put the Indian tribes' firework stands to shame. And all day long, people were lighting them off, but once midnight passed, then things really started happening. From the windows of the 17th-floor apartment we were in, you could see a virtual saturation-bombardment of the city. There wasn't a single block for as far as you could see that didn't flash up as bright as day at least a couple times. And Moscow is a big city. С П had picked up a bag of boom-sticks, and took Z as his assistant to add our light-and-noise to the festivities. So at maybe 1AM in a big playground area just inside the MKAD, in a horizontal-driving snow, Z got to fire off a couple of artillery barrages of bottle rockets, and at least one multi-mortar brick. The grin still hasn't left his face. We also had the exciting experience of getting to see one of the mortar go off up-close. Some idiots, shortly after we got the the courtyard, didn't prop up their tube properly, and it fell over, facing right towards us right after the fuse was lit. So BANG, and a little flaming, sparkling ball flies right into the middle of the group of us (Z and G were to the outside of the ring) and lands right nex to the shoe of one of our group, for a split-second still sparkling and flaming ominously. We all turn to scatter, but no time; BLAMMO!! The girl had managed to get her feet away, and no one was hurt. So we were all able to agree with Z's assessment, 'that was cool!'. And the idiots who had inadequate concern for safety around kids were forcibly hustled out of the courtyard by several of the onlookers.
By the time the night finally wrapped up at 4:30AM, fireworks were still going off thick everywhere you looked. Russians take their holidays seriously.
We're going to debate going to Red Square today; maybe we'll just follow the national example, and spend the whole day accomplishing absolutely nothing and just recovering.
Maybe.
In happiness, we discover that С П's apartment comes equipped with DSL. Oh Access, sweet Access...
We got up at about 5AM on the morning of the 30th, and were on the road by 6 -- not bad time considering the additional child-wrangling that we get to go through before any kind of trip. I ended up driving the whole way down, mainly because I was more comfortable driving 'in the Russian manner' than A is, and the road is hardly Interstate-highway-quality. As far as Veliky Novgorod, the highway is pretty good, and traffic was almost nonexistent; I was able to maintain 120kph pretty much that whole leg of the trip, and when we finally got onto new (to us) asphalt, it was still full night, and we felt like we were making pretty decent time.
Amusingly, right after the fork in the road choosing to either go into Novgorod or to continue on to Tver, Moscow, and points south, the quality of the highway takes a severe hit. We were dodging -- not completely successfully -- potholes and axle-eaters in what seemed to be much heavier traffic for the better part of an hour and a half. By then there was a bit of light, and I was starting to wonder if this was what we had to look forward to for the next ~500km. When, all of a sudden, the quality of the road picked back up, and speeds got back to the 100-110 range. We took a pee-break in Vannay (just still on the Novogorod Oblast side of the Novgorod/Tver border), then refilled the top half of out gas tank in somewhere-I-can't-remember in Tver Oblast and also refilled our washer fluid bottle. By the time we pulled through Tver itself, around 100km from Moscow, at 1:30, we were feeling pretty confident that we had made good time. Traffic in Moscow itself allowing, of course.
And Moscow itself had traffic that was barely noticeable [by local standards]. We got to the MKAD [Московская Кольцовая Автомобильная Дорога -- that is, the big Moscow ring highway) and on and off in fast enough time to make С П run to catch us and to actually beat him to the meeting place. In all, nine hours almost exactly from doorstep to doorstep, just about 450 miles. It took just a hair over a full tank of gas, and two bottles of wiper fluid.
We went out with С П to orient ourselves to the city features around ourselves that evening, got a couple grocery-items, and crashed in preparation for the holiday ahead. In the middle of the night, we had the unpleasant surprise of Z puking his guts out all over С П's floor. We got to learn how to use his 'semi-automatic' washing machine (the height of 1986 Soviet Union technology -- you have to manually add water and manually start every cycle, including refilling for all of the four rinses), but got everything taken care of and calmed down and back to sleep before too much time had passed.
Yesterday we started off late (intentionally), Metroing out to meet В Е at the bulgarian restaurant he so loves, as it also offers a wide variety of soups, which is all Z was up for at that time. We're two transfers away from most everything out here, which is pretty good, given the size of the city. Unlike Petersburg, whose trains can be ridden from end-to-end in twenty-plus minutes, the Moscow metro can easily offer more than hour-long rides. Not that our rides are going to be that long, but still, it's not like the trains move any slower here. And given the traffic (except over holidays, it seems) here, we're planning to metro for most of our trips. The restaurant staff was giving balloons and presents to all the kids stopping in on the holiday, so the boys were adequately entertained and we got to have a nice long lunch. Then back to the apartment to get some more sleep to charge up for the party. Z woke up at about 8:30 fully recovered and ready to go. G was also in pretty good shape, so we bundled up again and made it out to С П's friend's place out near the MKAD by ten. And had a nice dinner-type thing; another attending guest is a Chinese guy from Malaysia who is studying medicine in Moscow -- where, it seems, they have elected not to suspend English-language studies. Crap. On the other hand, the poor guy has been in Russia for two years, and has never been outside the Moscow city limits, and speaks less Russian than does A, thanks to her five-days-a-week studying.
Before we could blink, it seemed, the president's New Years message came on, timed to end just as the clocks were striking twelve. And the fireworks..
All day, it seemed, people were blowing stuff up everywhere you went. Needless to say, there's no concept here of 'illegal' fireworks, and it seemed like on the corner of every block was a kiosk selling enough fireworks to put the Indian tribes' firework stands to shame. And all day long, people were lighting them off, but once midnight passed, then things really started happening. From the windows of the 17th-floor apartment we were in, you could see a virtual saturation-bombardment of the city. There wasn't a single block for as far as you could see that didn't flash up as bright as day at least a couple times. And Moscow is a big city. С П had picked up a bag of boom-sticks, and took Z as his assistant to add our light-and-noise to the festivities. So at maybe 1AM in a big playground area just inside the MKAD, in a horizontal-driving snow, Z got to fire off a couple of artillery barrages of bottle rockets, and at least one multi-mortar brick. The grin still hasn't left his face. We also had the exciting experience of getting to see one of the mortar go off up-close. Some idiots, shortly after we got the the courtyard, didn't prop up their tube properly, and it fell over, facing right towards us right after the fuse was lit. So BANG, and a little flaming, sparkling ball flies right into the middle of the group of us (Z and G were to the outside of the ring) and lands right nex to the shoe of one of our group, for a split-second still sparkling and flaming ominously. We all turn to scatter, but no time; BLAMMO!! The girl had managed to get her feet away, and no one was hurt. So we were all able to agree with Z's assessment, 'that was cool!'. And the idiots who had inadequate concern for safety around kids were forcibly hustled out of the courtyard by several of the onlookers.
By the time the night finally wrapped up at 4:30AM, fireworks were still going off thick everywhere you looked. Russians take their holidays seriously.
We're going to debate going to Red Square today; maybe we'll just follow the national example, and spend the whole day accomplishing absolutely nothing and just recovering.
Maybe.
