Victory Park Excursion

Slept for about ten hours thanks to being exhausted and the wonders of pharmacology.  Feel wonderfully refreshed, as does Cindy who always needs the weekend to catch up on her sleep.  We had a lazy morning after our exercising and then started to work on getting all of our ‘stuff’ sold before we leave.  This involves spreadsheets, pictures, computers and emails.  We have priced everything well and think we’ll get rid of most of it. What we don’t sell, we’ll give away. We are attached to nothing.

Mahi with Lemon/Balsamic Sauce

Potato Pancakes with Sour Cream and Salmon Roe

Last night I just barely had the energy to make a quick dinner of Mahi, carrots and rice.  The rice was cooked in the carrot water, the carrots were just boiled and then tossed with butter and nutmeg and the Mahi had a new sauce I created.  In the same pan that I used to sauté the fish, I added the juice and zest of half a lemon, three chopped cloves of garlic, a quarter cup of lemon marmalade and a quarter cup of balsamic vinegar. I reduced it all to about half, added a teaspoon of butter and stirred a bit more and then covered the fish, which was on a bed of raw spinach.  The heat from the fish and sauce helped to wilt the spinach and it was a darn good meal.

This afternoon we took the Metro to Victory Park because it is on the list of things to see before we depart.  What a treat for us. It is huge, lovely and as an unexpected bonus, there was the Russian Army Choir singing lots and lots of great Russian music. They must have played for at least an hour, accompanied by a very good military band and some costumed dancers for some of the numbers.  Our favorite, well everyone’s favorite, is Kalinka, and if you think you have never heard it, you would be wrong.

I could go on and on about the park but I’ll let this video and these photos tell you the story.  It was a lovely afternoon and there were thousands of folks enjoying the beautiful day, most of them DRUNK or in the process.  It seems like today was National Let’s All Drink Beer Day. In reality today is the National Day of Border Guards, and there were hundreds of them identified by their green dress hats.  That was the only professional thing about them since the rest of their outfits were mostly shorts, ill-fitting shirts and flags. They ranged in age from mid-twenties to late fifties and they seemed all drawn together in their love of beer.  Each of them had a plastic bag filled with bottles of beer and/or vodka as they processed to the concert area.  We did witness the marching of some hundred security guards and they took up positions for monitoring the events that are scheduled for later today.  I’m sure I’ll read something about it tomorrow and suspect it might involve unruly behavior.

Speaking of beer, the Russians are about to declare beer an alcohol starting next month. This supposedly means that it won’t be sold to minors, as it is now since it is classified as a food.  There have been several attempts to limit the sale and public drinking of beer - they even raised the tax on beer by 200% last year - but still drinking beer is endemic to the Russian psyche.  Here are two great articles on some of the issues related to beer in Russia.

Time to get working on finishing our ads for our For Sale posting at Cindy’s school.  Hope you have a lovely weekend, Cindy and Wm.

From CC:  Wm is right, today was delightful, and he gets all the credit for choosing to visit Victory Park today.  We were perusing a Website with lots of various walks described but they all seemed to be a bit much given that we were starting out past noon.  Victory Park got the nod and it was such a wonderful surprise to be treated to the military concert, in addition to the many stunning fountains, buildings, and monuments.  The weather was perfect to boot.