Happy Veteran’s Day to my veteran brother of both the Army and Marines, Kevin and to my retired Coast Guard Officer son, Colin. Here in Moscow, only the Embassy is observing this date so Cindy is at school. Bummer.
As I was planning dinner last night I remembered an old Julia Child show. She was getting on in years and she would have guest chefs come and cook and she would talk with them and stick her fingers in whatever they were making. This show had an Indian woman who was making spicy shrimp in coconut milk to be served with basmati rice. She talked very lovingly about the rice and said that ‘basmati rice should be like brothers, very close but not touching’. By that she meant that the rice shouldn’t be sticky, which is always a problem with some rice. Her trick was to rinse the uncooked rice six times in clean water to get rid of most of the outer starch, so that is what I did. It takes a little time but it is fun to do and you can see that the first rinse almost turns the water white from the starch. I set the rice aside to dry and then proceeded to make the dinner. I had macerated two fish fillets in teriyaki sauce that was spiked with lots of fresh lemon juice and pepper. I steamed a big bunch of fresh broccoli, a real treat for us since it isn’t always available. I then cooked the rice as usual. When the rice was almost finished I pan fried the fish and reduced the juices to place over the fillets on the plate, which now had the hot rice and hot broccoli. I thought the rice was sticky but Cindy commented on how different and tasty it was so perhaps there is something to the whole rising thing.
I spent far too much time this morning studying Russian. We are going to have a sit down with the tutor tonight since she is not teaching us what we need. She thinks we all want to read Pushkin in Russian when all we really want to do is read a menu. I don’t think that I’ll have occasion to use the nominative case and I have no idea what a Voiced or Voiceless Consonant is and I really don’t care. The tutor is a lovely older woman who I’m sure is used to teaching people who really want to learn academic Russian, but we just want to learn how to get around, order things, and understand numbers and directions and, of course, all the words I need to shop. I do not want to learn cursive letters, which incidentally can be very, very different than the same printed letter.
It was a dark and stormy morning today, but then again it is always a dark morning at 5 am. It was blowing and raining to beat the band and every fiber of our bodies wanted to just snuggle and stay right were we were. (We switched over to the flannel sheets and pillowcases and oh my goodness it is hard to get out of bed.) Reason prevailed and we were up at 0530 ready to face the day. Cindy was out of the house an hour later and I cleaned up a bit and started looking at my Russian text. I’m really getting to hate Masha and Alexi, my cartoon guides to the exciting world of complex Russian grammar and syntax.
The new Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, has introduced a new plan to fight Moscow’s traffic dilemma. It is a bold plan that will not work but it is certainly a great PR move on his part. An hour after he announced the plan, traffic in downtown Moscow Ring Road was blocked for four hours, as a result of the police blocking all traffic for the cortege of the visiting Finnish President, which was three and a half hours late leaving the Kremlin, but no one told the police so they just keep all the cars off the road for four hours! One of the suggestions is to enforce parking laws, which is causing everyone to laugh out loud.
For those of you who have had a lot of international travel experience I’m sure you wondered at some time or another as you were landing in a foreign country with a difficult language, “ How does our pilot communicate with Air Traffic Control?” Well, if you are like me, you just assumed that the standard communication for international air travel was English. It ain’t necessarily so!
If you have eight minutes, click on the link about two-thirds down the article for a thrilling and chilling interaction between pilot and ATC. It makes me shudder.
Best to all, Cindy and Wm
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