A bright and beautiful day in Moscow with the temperatures hurling up to 3°, yet it was lovely to get out and walk as far as I could before the pain in my face was too much to handle. I managed to get in a solid hour of walking, although not all in one shot, but it got me out of the apartment. I stopped for a few things at the grocery store on the way back, just enough stuff to get us through until Friday night. The joint was jumping and for the first time ever, there were no shopping carts or baskets available, and the folks waiting for them were none too happy. I carry my own bags so I just wandered around placing this and that in the bag, until I was informed that perhaps it would be better to use a cart that had suddenly appeared. In all the other places we have lived, you could always use your own bag and then empty it at the cashier, but I think they are a bit afraid of shoplifting so I was duly chastened, but in a very nice way.
The vegetable section is really looking tired. There don’t seem to be any deliveries of anything that I really want. For three days now I’ve been looking for eggplant and broccoli, but can’t find them anywhere. We get so used to having everything available all the time in the States that it seems strange not to be able to get ‘summer’ vegetables in the dead of winter. I did find some lovely carrots, first time they have looked good in weeks. Don’t know where they come from but they are perfect. Because there were so many people shopping, I had to queue up and wait my turn to have the one person at the scales weigh and tag the carrots and onions I purchased. This gave me a chance to watch the dynamic of the babushka ballet.
There is a definite pecking order involved with this and it seems to have a lot to do with age and infirmary. One babushka, who was very old and very frail, had already pushed my cart and therefore me out of her way as she took ten minutes to select three carrots. Having made her selection she did an end round and hobbled up to the back of the kid weighting the vegetables and placed hers right in front of everyone else. No one said a word. Emboldened by this move, another babushka, not as old and certainly not as hobbled, tried to do the same thing with her basket of vegetables and was soundly shouted down by the assembled multitudes and banished to the back of the well established line.
I came home and had just taken off all my snow/cold weather gear when the bell rang and four count them, four Green Guys were there with one technician dressed in black. He had to have been from the gas company and for the next twenty minutes they came in and out, chatted, opened the range, used tools and gauges, closed the range and cleaned things up before proudly asking me to come into the kitchen. The technician slowly explained to me in Russian what he had done while the Green Guys all nodded, and then he lit up the range. Imagine my surprise when the flame was still orange. I said, the flame is still orange, and they all agreed, but, said the technician, it is ok. I just don’t get it!
We went out for dinner last night with two of Cindy’s colleagues and a visiting artist who has been at AAS for about a week. We went to the Munich beer hall and had a lovely time. The walk home was really cold since the temperature had dropped to -14°, but I had a lovely lamb stew keeping me warm and Cindy’s mushroom soup had done the trick for her.
As you might expect, Cindy and I have been following the events in Bahrain quite carefully. We could not for the life of us figure out where Pearl Square was, the epicenter of the protests. We knew exactly where the Pearl Roundabout was - it is a focal point for traffic in Bahrain - but it certainly isn’t a square. Well it turns out that the media wanted to have another SQUARE just like Tahrir Square in Egypt, even though this is a circle – a traffic circle with a huge statue in the middle, not a square in the sense of a public plaza. Oh, the way the news is manipulated for the sake of sensation. Those of you who read our missives when we were in Bahrain know that this protest was something we anticipated, more than the US Government did, that’s for sure.
We live in exciting times! Ciao, Cindy and Wm.
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